A School Visit

When we were at the Cantonment, we also visited a school. Luckily, they were very excited to have Western visitors, so they helped us inside and showed us everything they were interested in at the school. So here’s a list of some of the things that we saw, and what I thought of them…

Here's the inside of the secondary school building. Looks sort of like a prison with a courtyard. 

They tell you what time it is!

The teacher’s lounges: First, they were separated by gender, which seems sort of weird to me, but is probably pretty normal here.

The music class: They were very proud to have extracurricular programs, which included music. They were doing a dance and chant essentially, so here’s a picture. 

Physical Education: They were very proud to have many boxing champions, so we saw many pictures of boxing champions in their office, although they did not think that we would be interested in going to the gymnasium (wrong-o). Besides, boxing, most of the popular sports were pretty standard (cricket, football, badminton (girls), etc.).

Art: Temporarily missing because the teacher was on leave.

The upper classes (10-12): They were already organized by the education that they planned on pursuing (commerce, science, etc).

Computer lab: They were very excited to show us the computer lab (in fact, so excited that we got to view 2 computer labs). However, the students in class were not doing anything. Most people were just searching on the internet or playing games like pinball or solitaire. Clearly, productivity was not really a goal of their computer program, which is a real shame. Here’s a hilarious picture of some solitaire and space pinball though…

Library: A couple of weird things were going on in the library, all of which lead me to believe that they have no idea what’s going on. I guess a common thing is to keep books in glass boxes that no one can take them out of:

And then put millions of books on tables so that the children are drowning in magazines, and possibly cannot read all of the material and aren’t comfortable reading with a gazillion things going on. 

Lower Levels (primary school): This was a little disorgranized (actually very disorganized) and there were kids running all over the place. It was also interesting to see 50-60 7-year-olds in a classroom, if not sort of terrifying.

Overall, it was very different from NIRMAN, but I’m not sure if it’s 100% bad kind of different in the way that Nita ma’am believes the government school is.