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Lessons in Love
At his City Montessori School in Lucknow, India, Jagdish Gandhi teaches kids how to change the world.
Eight-year-old Sajal, a Hindu, paints the Christian Saint Nicholas, and celebrates Christmas as well as Ramadan. In the classroom, pictures of Krishna, Jesus and Buddha hang on the walls. “You are wiser than many adults,” Gandhi reassures his little ones. They are to be faithful to their own religions, but citizens of the world who can tolerate the fact that others are different. Gandhi wants his school to be “a lighthouse of society.”
Gandhi started his school in 1959, when he and his wife Bharti began giving private lessons to five children. Their pedagogical mission: “to develop the wisdom and goodness of modern children.”
A well-known saying hangs in the foyer of one of the 20 branch schools: “If you plan for a year, plant a seed. If you plan for 10 years, plant a tree. If you plan for 100 years, teach a child.” One of the things Gandhi and his fellow instructors teach the children is to care for the poor and to ignore the caste system. As part of this practice, students help in homes for the elderly and in hospitals; they care for orphaned children, and clean parks and temples.
“Mr. Gandhi wants to pound his beliefs into us,” says Iyoti, who attends 12th grade. “By the time you’re in the last year, you’ve heard them so often that you can’t forget them.” No matter how difficult Gandhi can be with his preaching, none of the children allows him to be criticized. “He inspires us,” says Himank, 17, who wears Gap T-shirts and is known as a party animal. “He wants us to have the courage to open our mouths,” Iyoti says. “Even the girls.”
Aradhna, 17, adds, “The more education one has, the less of a role religious differences can play.” Like her friend Iyoti, she is a Hindu. Neither hesitated to collect money for the relief of earthquake victims in the neighbouring Muslim country of Pakistan, although they don’t have much themselves. Their mothers teach at the school, and compared to most pupils, Iyoti and Aradhna are poor. “Some of us are really wealthy, but because of our school uniforms, it’s not a big deal,” says Aradhna.
These two girls are part of Gandhi’s dream, which he calls “the unity of the world.” He spoke at the UN Millennium Summit in New York, but sees the UN as a paper tiger, since it has allowed hunger, genocide and ecological disasters for more than 60 years. On the other hand, he believes the European Union is setting a good example, with a united economy, one currency, laws applicable to all and the security that no nation will attack another. A world government could resemble this, he believes. Conflicts between nations should be handled at a roundtable, with neutral judges to hand down decisions when the parties can’t agree.
His pupils play this out. In their World Parliament, China, in the costume of Genghis Khan, debates the United States, who is dressed as a flower girl. Iraq is a girl dressed in black who demands the right to education. And Saudi Arabia, wearing a habib, demands “global solutions for global problems.” During all of this, a small angel of peace in white satin lifts his arms and lets them fall, as if he wants to fly away.
It’s a beautiful sight, but Gandhi knows conflicts between adults are tougher to resolve. In 1992, when fanatical Hindus destroyed a mosque and massacred thousands of Muslims in the city of Ayodha, 35 miles (55 kilometres) away, the conflict threatened to overflow into Lucknow. Gandhi asked the religious leaders of both sides to the school. Afterward, the leaders went through the streets with loudspeakers, calling their adherents to moderation. Thousands of students and parents walked through the streets carrying banners with the slogan “God is One.” The teachers went into the neighbourhoods and explained to the families “that no religion calls for this violence,” Gandhi says. They were successful. Escalation of the violence was prevented in Lucknow.
On one recent Sunday, 2,000 students from 17 countries were guests in Lucknow. Children from India worked side by side with children from Sri Lanka, Nigeria, England and Bosnia. They had discussions, or made collages from newspaper headlines, bird feathers and used computer parts. The Earth was in the intensive care unit of a hospital, wearing a bleeding bandage and getting an IV. “Get well soon” was written on a bouquet.
“They’re so friendly,” Amina, 17, from Bosnia, says about the Lucknow pupils. Her mother, a secretary in Sarajevo, raised Amina on her own, after Amina’s father was shot and killed when she was 3 years old. No one has to explain to Amina what war is all about. Even Max from Kathmandu, Nepal, a big fan of the Backstreet Boys, knows what war is about—fear for his grandmother, who still lives in the village from which he fled; fear that the Maoists will take her hostage.
All the while, Gandhi works away in his tiny office. He sits cross-legged, his back ramrod straight. A clutch of assistants stand around him, handing him notes and files. A quotation from Martin Luther King adorns a cupboard door: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” The glow from Gandhi’s Lucknow lighthouse can be seen from very far away.
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This is a school all schools could learn from. family run it now has 31000 children; is a top 10 school in the whole of India though its resources per head must be a tenth or less than typical top schools
A most notable aspect of the curriculum is that children's degree of cross-cultural confidence and love happens before they are become teenagers. CMS has developed a currilum to opptimise this which it penly aims to shre withj schools anywhere.
websites
cmseducation.org jagdishgandhi.org ciseducation.org
posted by entrepreneur76 on 3/ 4/2008 6:48 pm