A school counsellor asks children of two different classes at Rajghat Besant School to describe in one word their emotions upon returning from a field trip. At the end of the monsoon, Class 9 had gone to Uttarakhand, enjoying the natural beauty, hiking, and physical challenges. They respond with words like ‘happy’, ‘satisfied’, and ‘amazing.’ When it is their turn, a Class 11 boy looks down, then raises his head and answers, ‘enriched.’ A girl follows and answers ‘transformed’, another girl says ‘alive’, and a boy says ‘privileged.’ Class 11 had gone to learn about life in rural Rajasthan and the work of NGOs.
Over the years, Rajghat Besant School (RBS) and other KFI schools have taken students to the villages of Bhim and Tilonia outside Ajmer, Rajasthan. They are hosted by the School for Democracy and Barefoot College. What is the meaning and impact of such a trip for Class 11 students who are typically 16 years of age? What do they begin to see, and feel, and reflect on, that has the potential to ‘transform’ or ‘enrich’ them? In this article I explore this question through the words of a few of the RBS students who went on the Rajasthan excursion from 5–14 October in 2022.
Preparation for the trip
To answer these questions, it is worth knowing what preparation the students received in advance as well as their basic itinerary. RBS Director, Siddhartha Menon, introduced the trip to Class 11 in the form of a talk and slides from a past trip. The following week, class teachers, Ruchi Singh and Sanjay Mathur, asked students to respond in writing to two questions: What would make this trip meaningful to you? And: What experience of rural life have you had?
In answer to the question, what would make the trip meaningful, one student summarized what she took away from the Director’s introductory presentation. She wrote: “This trip indeed matters to me and I look forward to it because this will be like a pathway to rural India… I would like to interact with various people and knowing their perspectives, understanding how people live in different circumstances… I don’t want it to be educational (like bookish) but rather grounded… Some things I would like to discover/unearth during this trip are: rural to urban migration… women empowerment… understanding role of NGOs… why people like Aruna Roy end up working in a village… knowing a bit about labour and their rights.”
In contrast, a boy who said he had no prior experience of village life, put it this way: “I probably would go with the flow; well, I am not interested in the trip. I just want to sleep and eat local delicacies. Well, I just want to go home and listen to music and make music. Hopefully, I’ll get some non-veg!”
Another boy wrote: “I don’t know. I’m not clear about my expectations from this trip to rural India, probably because I’m not sure what exactly does the trip hope to achieve…The pictures in the presentation didn’t exactly show happy students having fun and the presentation did not advertise ‘fun’ elements of the trip. Sure, the social services and the insightful experiences might be one of the purposes of the trip, but honestly that’s not VERY exciting.”
An outline of the trip
For reasons of NGO staff availability, the School for Democracy in Bhim was visited first, unlike in previous years. Children had the advantage of hearing from seasoned staff, including Lal Singh regarding the Constitution, Shankarji regarding Mazduri Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), and Nikhil Dey regarding the Mahatma Gandhi National Right to Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). By the time the excursion shifted to Barefoot College in Tilonia, it was already the fourth day of the trip. There, they learned about the array of comprehensive services this community-based organization provides.
Finally, it was time to visit the field. Students and teachers divided into groups of 5–6 and travelled by tractor trolley to one of four different ‘Social Work Research Centres’ (SWRC) in the rural hinterlands. They brought only a day pack and spent the night in simple accommodations. The students were escorted by SWRC field staff on visits to women’s groups, night schools, day schools, a madarsa, health centres, grain distribution centres, loan programs, and a panchayat. They were encouraged to interact with community members, ask questions, and take notes.
Learnings from the field
It was observed that the students left on these visits in high spirits, waving from the back of the tractor trolleys. What they saw and learned was sometimes like a gut punch, on the level of raw feeling and emotion. Starting with the two boys quoted above:
Boy 1: “I learned that how privileged I am, like it’s mind-boggling how people die for basic necessities. We all sit in our air-conditioned room and watch the news with our phones, we will always point out everything by just watching some biased news channels, but witnessing it in real life is heart-shattering, but this is how the world works, world is weird place after all and I hope that people whose eyes opened will not close them. ‘Troubled’ huh… it makes me feel confused and questioning regarding the system. It makes me feel dirty to trust this system, makes me feel empty, distrust, hopeless, agitated.”
Boy 2: “I learned that this system we’re all a part of is flawed. It’s so flawed that the flaws have become a part of the system’s working. People have accepted the wrong. But they haven’t accepted that it’s wrong. I learned that just putting in efforts without procuring any significant change is not enough. The place was infested with poverty, corruption, dishonesty, and lack of education. What has troubled me has also inspired me to change what’s wrong. The fact that there are places like Barefoot College and SfD trying to bring a change has inspired me.”
A girl who was already intent on social work, found validation for her vocation: “I learnt that I have everything, and I have done nothing to deserve it. It has been given to me because of the accident of my birth. I learnt that if I feel something needs to be done for someone, I need to do it by myself. I need to put in effort. I need to raise my voice, let the problem hear it. What inspired me was the sight of the village kids studying under a solar lamp at 7 pm while it was pitch dark. How could I have spent all those nights in my room, keeping the light on, the fan on, the air conditioner and what not? I knew I was going to come back to that village to do SOMETHING, anything.”
On returning to school
On their return to RBS, every single student said they would be interested in doing a one-month internship with either of the NGOs and a significant number also said they would be interested in doing a one-year fellowship. Clearly, the staff they interacted with impressed them.
One boy who is in the science stream wrote: “One of staff members of SfD, Nawaz, had inspired me. He had completed his degree in engineering from Hyderabad and could’ve easily worked in that field and earned good money. He could’ve had a satisfactory life. Instead, he chose to work for the people, helping them to get their rights, being a part of an important movement, while earning minimum wages. And he still seemed satisfied with that.”
Pushing against the often-negative tag on ‘activists’ and ‘socialists’, another boy wrote: “Nawaz and Saba inspired me to take risks in life, to help the one in need. They left their well-paying jobs and work in a simple paying job just to help people. They are not activist or socialist but human.”
Discussion
A trip can only be measured against its own objectives. How much really can a one-week trip, and only 24 hours of real interaction in villages, achieve? It turns out, quite a bit. Based on students’ writings, all were impacted by the trip in unexpected ways. What strikes one is the depth of feeling with which students responded to the realities they had only read about such as child marriage, unequal schooling conditions, discrimination, and injustice. Further, they express indignation at what they perceive as dishonesty, such as the sarpanch’s husband blithely telling them there is no child marriage, gender inequity, or caste discrimination in his village.
Numerous students seemed to put their own problems, such as lack of air conditioning, into a different category now, seeing them as petty compared to the injustice and harsh realities they saw people experience – people they now knew had a name and a face.
Could this be the awakening of a moral intelligence, a social conscience? To many adults, the moral clarity of children comes off as refreshing and an instructive reminder that we perhaps have made too many compromises with the world around us, and we have become at least partially immune to suffering and injustice that both we and the children know is not acceptable. Whether or not the seeds of an awakened moral intelligence and social conscience will last, remains to be seen.
The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbour. —Mother Teresa