Children of Asia - Nayna Wood

We, in the UK , have our own fair share of debate over standards of education and provision for the future. Imagine then, that you multiply the population of the UK by 17, remove the welfare state and decrease spending on education from 5.5% of GDP to 3.5%. You are now faced with the reality of education in India , a country where one third of the population is illiterate; that's 360 million people, six times the population of the UK .

Smiles all round. An opportunity to fulfil potential.

Sharana, a small non-governmental organization in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, funded by partner organizations in France and the US, currently sponsors 170 children (from Year 1 through to university) to enable them to attend school. Sharana provides all books, uniforms, stationery and school admission fees, and runs an after school homework club, which provides the children with a clean space supplied with electricity to work in, as well as offering free milk and fruit. The club also serves to provide an alternative for the children being sent out to work. The sponsorship program has been a great success, yet Sharana has another 2000 children on the waiting list, with several new applications arriving each day. Demand is now so high that only one child per family can be accepted onto the program.

In the village of Angalakuppam , 10km from Pondicherry , where Sharana has funded a community centre, the village health worker, 23 year old Lakshmi, had to push and argue with her parents throughout her entire school life for them to pay for her to attend school.

Just ten years ago only the boys of Angalakuppam were sent to school; now parents are beginning to realize the benefits of educating their children and are sending their daughters to school as well. Gender discrimination in India is evident in the fact that whilst the country as a whole has a 65% literacy rate, amongst women the figure is as low as 53%. In Thailand , where the social status of women is far higher than that of India , both girls and boys enjoy the same opportunities to receive an education. Yet, in both countries, parents are still wary of the poor quality of state schools, shortage of teachers, and the provision of school meals; concerns which are more than familiar for parents in the UK . A UNESCO report stated that India was one of 23 nations who would fail to reach the goal of universal primary education by 2015, whilst the Bangkok Post recently ran an article which found that, on average, Thai's read only eight lines of text per year.

A ‘positive classroom’ in Thailand.

Economic factors, as in the UK , play a major role in standards of education. In both India and Thailand , parents must make a financial contribution for their children to attend government schools. The better government schools will charge greater fees, yet it is still common to have classes of forty children and over. It is claimed that nearly 97% of central Indian government expenditure on elementary education goes towards the payment of teachers salaries (wikipedia.org). Resources are often scarce and in some cases even paper and chairs are a luxury.

The ability to speak English is a pre-requisite to the better paid jobs and universities in both countries. So those who can afford to pay international/bi-lingual school or private tuition fees have a clear advantage in the labour market, particularly within the service industry.

The rich can be apt to turn a blind eye to those who are less fortunate then themselves. One Pondicherry businessman I spoke to voiced a latent attitude amongst the middle-classes of India that views the poor as inherently lazy, saying that for them the ‘here and now' takes priority over the future, and therefore providing the poor with education is a waste of time as they have no interest in it.

Clearly then, it is not only material wealth that is a barrier to education, but also social values. For instance, UNICEF estimates that 15% of girls in rural India are married before the age of 13. Indeed, for many women in India , an education is sometimes thought of as irrelevant as they are destined to be married at a young age, to take care of her husband's family and house, and to produce children. If a woman is not married by the age of 23 there is generally thought to be something wrong with her. In contrast, women in the UK on average receive 23 years of education, that's 3 more years than the average British man.

The table below compares the amount of time young people are expected to stay in formal education in the three countries discussed.

National Average Numbers of Years Expected in Formal Education www.unstats.un.org

Half of India 's children are clinically undernourished. With diseases such as polio, leprosy and malaria rife in many families, day-to-day survival takes precedence over education. UNICEF has reported that poverty, HIV and conflict are significant barriers to education in India . A huge number of children, with or without families, live on the streets begging or scavenging, and a great many more are sent to work from an early age. Girls, especially, are often expected to stay at home and care for their younger siblings whilst their parents work.

Although Thailand does not share such extreme poverty with India , it does share the equally horrifying problem of child prostitution, where children are sold into the sex industry by parents who no longer can or wish to support them.

Beyond extreme physical disabilities, the special educational needs (SEN) which we in the UK recognize and work with are still virtually unheard of amongst the general population of both India and Thailand . In the city of Indore , in central India , a primary school for the deaf, dumb and blind, Sewa Mandir, claims to be one of only three such institutes in the whole of the country. The majority religions in India (Hinduism) and Thailand (Buddhism) both believe in reincarnation, thus your imperfections and illnesses are caused by wrong-doings in your previous life and are essentially self-inflicted. Discrimination is found in other social values. For example, a UNESCO report found that ‘higher caste teachers often physically and verbally abused lower-caste students', and that ‘corporal punishment is excessive in South Asian schools'. Discrimination is inherent in religion in both Thailand and India , and India faces the additional inequalities of caste and language.

Whilst working for the education authority of my local government in 2005 I was struck by the number of people and organizations who are dedicated to caring for, and educating, children of all abilities equally in the UK . In India and abroad thousands of men and women also dedicate themselves to achieving the same goals for Indian children, despite the massive variations in culture, religion and language across regions and castes, and the problems of gender discrimination. For both India and Thailand , changes in the education system will stem from financial investment as well as from a change in social values and opportunities, something which will take considerable time. In the meantime, organizations such as Sharana and Sewa Mandir are working hard to make a difference in their localities to provide children with opportunities otherwise completely closed off to them.