Lessons on Food and Hunger: In Search of Transformative Education
| Authors | Type | Stream | Full Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anita Rampal, Harsh Mandar | Commissioned | Quality | n/a |
Aim
The Right to Education Act in India introduced on April 1, 2010 is meant to enable the provision of elementary education of equitable quality to all children aged 6-14 years. Despite efforts at universalizing access through various programmes in the last decade, almost half the children do not complete this stage of schooling, and are victims of a highly stratified system of education of poor quality. A large majority of children, especially girls, are severely undernourished and the Right to Food campaign sought a Supreme Court ruling to make it mandatory for the government to provide a hot cooked Mid Day Meal to every child in primary school. This paper is a collaborative effort to look through the lens of academic, administrative and activist perspectives, at the theme of Food and Hunger, as it plays out in children’s lives and in school, through what they encounter in their curriculum or classroom.
Methods
The paper draws on methods of critical policy analysis and historical reflection on curriculum documents, including syllabi and textbooks, to locate recent efforts at curriculum restructuring within the present policy framework. It also uses narratives from recent qualitative research studies on Hunger, the Mid Day Meal programme and on social discrimination faced by scheduled castes, to bring together and examine the lived experiences of children and their mothers and assess the scope of the changes effected in policy thus far.
Findings
While schools routinely present the intricacies of the science of food, mothers of poor children struggle to teach them the most difficult lesson of learning to sleep with hunger. This paper acknowledges how in locating learning in a socio-cultural context, as proposed by the National Curriculum Framework 2005, the school is tremendously challenged to bring the lives and multiple realities of all children within its ambit, while neoliberal aspirations assertively obscure the uncomfortable pangs of ‘growth’.
An analysis of the present national school syllabus shows an engagement with critical pedagogy to sensitise young children (and their teachers) to issues normally considered ‘uncomfortable’, as is seen in the following section of the syllabus for Environmental Studies:
Do you know of times when many people do not get enough food to eat? Are people hungry because there isn’t enough food to feed them? Have you seen where extra grain is stored?
How do you know when you are hungry?
In line with this, the new textbooks counter pose food with hunger, often challenging those spoilt for ‘choice’ to reflect on related themes, such as, malnutrition of the underfed and the overfed, farmers’ dilemmas, changing crop patterns, and even gender relations in food production as well as in the kitchen. However, these curricular changes demand consonant programmes for professional development of teachers, as a community of learners, who can engage in reflective practice to move beyond their own limited educational frames. This is an area that needs urgent attention and, in the context of the recent Right to Education (RTE) Act, will be a challenge to the central and state governments.
The RTE ensures every child education which is free from fear, trauma, mental harassment or discrimination. However, food and caste taboos remain germane to the issue of exclusion and discrimination of dalits or scheduled castes. Using qualitative studies conducted in a few states it is noted that when vigilant civil society organisations have ensured accountability of the state government’s implementation of the Mid Day Meal scheme through local women’s groups (DWCRA groups), there seems to have been a better chance for children’s equal access to the right to food and the right to education, as well as of women’s own right to employment (as MDM cooks, organisers or school teachers). It has been suggested that the government can take steps to relocate MDM centres, public schools and ration shops in dalit colonies or other accessible caste-neutral localities, and must seek partnerships with dalit women’s groups for participatory implementation and monitoring of programmes.
The paper finds that though policies have attempted to address some crucial issues in terms of entitlements and curriculum change for equity, yet there is an even greater need for a sustained participative engagement with the system, from within and without, to press for critical education for all, that works for transformative justice.
