Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Green schools in a greying world

Krishna Kumar

The Centre for Science and Environment's green schools audit their consumption of water, land, air, and energy. This promises to instil mindfulness in human relations with nature.

SELF-ANALYSIS is a great way to learn. The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has applied this idea to environment education. It organised a contest in which schools were asked to audit their use of water, energy, and waste control. Sharply different from the usual song and dance one sees in the name of environment in many schools, this contest impelled children and their teachers to analyse the school's own track record and to improve it. Children were expected to maintain meticulous records of electricity and water consumption. They were supposed to become conscious of the daily production of waste, to weigh it, and to bring it down. Under its Gobar Times Green Schools programme, the CSE gave each school a manual, which explains how it can audit the consumption of natural resources such as water, land, air, and energy within its premises. Some 1,400 schools participated in the contest, out of which 20 were shortlisted as the greenest schools on the basis of their meticulous record-keeping for self-audit. They were rank ordered with the help of scores derived by rigorous monitoring of data.

Last month, when the results were declared, I felt supremely fortunate to witness the ceremony, which was like no other I have ever seen. Records of the top 20 schools were presented, and the excitement grew as many of the big and famous names got cleared well before the three finalists were left. The biggest surprise came when it was announced that the first position was attained by a government school in Boormajara village of Ropar district in Punjab. Its children and teachers could hardly believe that they had outdone so many English-medium public schools of Delhi and other cities. This school was able to attain the highest rank mainly on account of its excellent record of water recycling: it reuses 55 per cent of the water it consumes. The children collect spillage from taps and any water left undrunk in glasses to use it for washing and gardening. Second came Sholai School of Kodaikanal, which has the distinction of fulfilling its electricity requirement with the help of a micro-hydroplant, solar cells, and wind power. Inspired by J. Krishnamurti's ideals, the school participates in the National Open School examination.

In sharp contrast to these green schools, which exemplify conscious parsimony in the use of natural resources, we now notice a growing number of wasteful schools, which flaunt air-conditioned classrooms and other symbols of an extravagant lifestyle. These schools are now coming up in all parts of the country, in metropolitan as well as provincial cities, and we can hardly deny that they are setting a trend. Reflecting the lifestyle of their upwardly mobile clientele, they treat the physical infrastructure of the school as a symbol of status. Costly furniture, lush lawns, lunch packets ordered from expensive hotels, and luxury buses are used to convey the school's exclusive character. Like an expensive car or hotel, the school's name becomes an icon of privilege. It is not as if such schools deny the importance of environmental awareness. On the contrary, they flaunt special programmes and activities like bird watching and nature walks while the everyday life and the curriculum unfold in an ethos reflecting indifference to the natural and the social milieu.

Teaching in such an ethos becomes a fractured activity, sustained by the drive to compete in national or international markets where success is measured by individual grit to pursue a narrow goal. Who can deny that this kind of goal setting and the single-minded pursuit of wealth is an aspect of our current national ethos, not an aberration? The pursuit of wealth for its own sake had become a metaphor of national progress in the U.S. a century ago; in India, this is happening now. How the nation gets rich is no more relevant. For instance, India has now entered the global arms market as a seller and will soon have clients like Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa for its cruise missiles. The monetary gains and national pride associated with such advancements in India's industrial capacity are far too dazzling to permit us even a modicum of self-awareness. Even as we proceed towards augmenting our access to nuclear energy in collaboration with the U.S., we are fast developing the mindset required to ignore environmental issues associated with nuclear energy.

On the water front, we are hastening towards privatisation, which essentially means condemning the majority of our rural population to face a catastrophic crisis. The mobile, powerful strata have already seceded from rural India and the urban poor as far as drinking water is concerned, by accepting purified bottled water as an option to systemic availability of safe drinking water. Who bothers about the environmental effects of the millions of plastic bottles disposed off daily? Living under the delusion of `shining India' that has now quietly reincarnated, we cannot judge how close we might be to a terrible situation even as we rush towards completing controversial projects and signing deals with predator agri-business firms.

Few though they are, CSE's green schools offer a modicum of hope in a schizophrenic landscape. The idea of self-audit has the potential to make environment-related learning a means of gluing back together the fragmented school curriculum. It also promises to instil mindfulness in human relations with nature and thereby materialise a dynamic kind of value-education. The National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 lists several school-based reforms for which the principal and teachers are required to take the lead. The fact that in CSE's contest a government school achieved the first rank proves that it is possible to find a creative space within the state system despite its bureaucratic routines. In the prize distribution ceremony I met children and teachers of several other government schools that could not do their best because they did not get the necessary permission and cooperation from officials. The challenge of softening the rigid administrative procedures of state directorates of education is not an easy one, and CSE will have to devise an intervention strategy. NCF 2005 suggests a number of reforms that will make government schools more flexible and capable of pursuing quality.

In private schools, the main problem is the fixation over marks. Both government and private schools have a lot to learn from institutions like the Krishnamurti Foundation, Digantar, Vikramsila, and Eklavya, which have set examples of reflective pedagogy. Eklavya recently published a Hindi translation of Anne Sayre Wiseman's classic, Making Things. This little book has made a great impact on early education in several parts of the world. The advice it gives is quite similar to Mahatma Gandhi's, but most of our teacher training institutions have closed their hearts, minds, and doors against all sources of inspiration, not just Gandhi's. If you want to find the cave where India's creative energies are locked up in abundance, all you need to do is to go to the nearest teacher training institute or college.

The Green Schools contest was based on the idea that ingenuity and activity are the heart of learning. Doing something that does not require the textbook was the main concern of CSE. An additional parameter it should add for next year's audit is reduction in the number of the copies of the prescribed textbooks. In our system, the textbook has been used since colonial times as an axis of classroom pedagogy. It thwarts the possibility of any real linkages being formed with the world around the school. In the countries we call `developed,' teachers are trained to work with children with the help of a wide range of resources and activities. While our new textbooks go through significant reforms in approach and design, parsimony in the use of textbooks is a valid goal. For CSE to use it as one of the parameters of school audit makes good sense because textbook production on a mass scale by itself drains our forest resources. For an activity-centred classroom, one textbook should suffice for a group of four or five children, at least during the elementary school years. In higher classes too, our system can do with fewer copies of textbooks if the examining process is reformed in the direction of making it a part and parcel of life at school, rather than a confidential annual ritual, which itself wastes a colossal amount of paper.

(The author is Director, National Council of Educational Research and Training, New Delhi.)

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