Learning.. redefined!

 Two useless weeks at TCS……I needed a break! That was
when I decided to bunk work on Friday and visit the
Centre for Learning. I fixed up an appointment with Ms.
Gurveen Kaur for the day and left for the place without
any idea about the Centre. After a long journey ( and
getting lost in the deserted village that the place
was!) I was welcomed by a couple of cheerful old women.
As I entered the place a quote by Mark Twain hit me hard
“Don’t let the school interfere with your
learning!”…Over lunch we had our introduction session.
After the lunch, Gurveen aunty introduced me to the
senior bunch of kids (class six and seven… they have
classes only till seventh grade). This small group was
anything but the normal school kids you’d expect to
meet. With their impeccable language ( they learn a lot
of them out here- Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, Hindi,
English and know a bit of Tamil and Malayalam too!)
they initiated a conversation with me. I could see no
inhibitions in them despite the fact that I was a
stranger. And whats more, they asked their teachers to
leave them alone with me. So did the teacher without a
scowl… Each one narrated how they were labeled in the
previous institutions that they studied in as ‘FAILURES’
and how they’ve come to enjoy learning at CFL.  Here,
students are not put into the respective classes
according to their age; instead, their learning
abilities, the actual content that they’ve learnt are
assessed and are put in classes accordingly. A girl
jokingly asked her classmate if he was not ashamed of
being in class six at the age of fifteen. I thought it
was gonna be ugly. I expected the girl to be warned by
the teacher. But the teacher told her very patiently “
My dear child, look at it from this point of view… I do
not know German language. If I start learning it now,
I’d be in at the kindergarten level. But I don’t think
that is something that I should be ashamed of. The very
fact that I’ve realized that I don’t know something and
that I’ve set out to learn it is to be appreciated and
that is what matters!” I was stunned. Never in my school
life has a teacher dealt with a student at fault with
such patience and common sense. I don’t think that girl
would ever forget this reply in her life; nor do I think
that she’d make fun of people the way she just did…
Isn’t this education? Shouldn’t we be providing just
this to our kids? Well I strongly believe so! Even the
process of evaluation in this school involves the
participation of the students. The students are asked if
they’re happy with their progress, how better they think
they could have performed, what they think needs to be
done to do better and so on. Each child’s evaluation is
tailor made and is based on the joint analysis of
his/her progress by the child and the teacher. There are
no exams to rank them. When I asked the students how
they felt about not having exams, pat came a reply “Yeah
we can do without exams. But our friends in other
schools say that exams are a big tension. We’d like to
have exams once to see if they’re actually one!”.. We
then left the students to work on their own (it was a
craft class) to have a discussion. I could observe no
chaos in the absence of a teacher. Each one went about
doing his own job with of course some soft talking. In a
normal school, this never happens; even if it does,
there is an element of threat of punishment involved.
But here, the children needed no instructions, no
threats, no monitors. That in itself is a big
achievement for the school. I saw parents waiting after
the school hours to collect their wards. But the
students weren’t really too eager to leave school the
moment it was over. In fact , the teacher had to remind
them that it was time to go home. A juxtaposition of
this with a typical scenario in any other school made a
huge contrast. I remember reading once that the quality
of a school can be assessed from how eager the kids run
out as soon as the bell rings. That way, this was the
best school I’ve ever seen. Coming out of the school,
the guys of the higher classes escort the girls till
some point to avoid any potential problems from the
‘men’ in that locality. As I walked back to the nearest
bus stop with a teacher, she expressed how happy she is,
to work with these kids. She also says that there is no
‘Bell System’ in the school because that would restrict
both the teacher and the students in choosing to work
either more or less on a particular subject. This way
the students get to choose if and how long he wants to
work on a subject on a particular day. I can go on and

on about this school… But to sum it up all, I should say
am awe inspired.