না-ইস্কুল বা/ ba nice School-er akkhan (A Narrative on Unschool or Nice School)
2011Tepantar. IX. (pp147-63)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/52865023/nice-school
Being unnecessarily disturbed by the schooling system of the West Bengal, India and consulting the statistical reports... more
Being unnecessarily disturbed by the schooling system of the West Bengal, India and consulting the statistical reports of National Crime Bureau on the bleak scenario of schooling, a father withdrew his son from the Ideological state Apparatus (a la Althusser) and followed the Illichian methods of deschooling.
Based on this particular narrative, the author of this paper mounted to the pros and cons of de-/un-/home-schooling society by taking cue from Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, Ivan Illich, Paolo Friere, Basil Bernstein et al. and the Eklavya experiment (Hosengabad, Madhya Pradesh, India) on deschooling society. According to the author, this type of poor’s education is now subsumed, appropriated, approximated and codified by the super-rich schools. This type of synthetic hegemonization has led to a packaging of de-/un-/home-schooling as a bureaucratic knowledge industry ( with ancillary industries of health drinks, school uniforms, bad text/reference books etc.) through the electronic capitalistic opportunity web. However, the author showed the way of retreat from such money-sign based knowledge industry by discussing the positive sides of UNICEF’s educational guidelines along with Yashpal Committee reports and National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)’s curriculum framework, Though the implementation of all these child-centric self-motivated education as suggested by these agencies is far from the “real”-ity. Therefore, the author insisted on the Tagore’s atmasakti (self-empowerment) that does not alienate pupils from the necessary labor as the corporatization of mainstream educational industry ideologically leads to surplus labor extraction.
Thus the non-school (in Bangla, /na-iskul/ ) has become nice school with a sweet punning.
Keywords: de-/un-/home-schooling, Ideological state Apparatus, bureaucratic knowledge industry,electronic capitalism, (in)visible pedagogy, opportunity web, biological mother,nice school
Accepted Paper Series
“bEkaron mani na” [ I do not obey Grammar]
1999.Ganguly, D ed. manobmon. (pp.3-7) Kolkata.
Reprinted in “Bidhan Chandra College Patrika ( 40th anniversary celebration issue, 2001.(pp.73-77), Rishra, Hoogly.
“ew HOY—aMkte aMkte akkhOr” (Writing by means of Drawing)
2007.Ed. Basu, P. manus Hoye oTha (understanding Children’s World). Kolkata: Shrayan. (pp. 487-519)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/57028318/Writing-By-Means-Of-Drawing
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220032176_Writing_By_Means_Of_
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/papers/browse-papers-action.cfm?PaperID=2
As the present author is now deeply interested in primary education without institutionalized schooling and... more
As the present author is now deeply interested in primary education without institutionalized schooling and money-sign, his concern for children leads to a pedagogical project. A primer was developed and it is meant for the primary Bengali school-teachers, who were introducing Bangla alphabets to the children below six years. The strategy adopted here for introducing target language graphemes to the Bengali children was altogether different from the usual cultural practice of introducing Bangla alphabet with sequential Sanskrit phonetic order of things that created ambiguities and confusion in the mind of learning-subjects as there was no strict one-to-one correspondences between Bangla speech sounds and traditional graphemes. There might be one-many or many-one or zero –one (or vice versa) correspondences. Therefore, altogether different approach was taken to teach language art by introducing art samples already available in the Bengali culture. The simple contours of Alpana (“ritual painting in the floor of the house” mainly practiced by Bengali women at the time of religious festival; the term denotes 'to coat with’. The idea of using Alpana in the context of learning was taken from the understanding of Satyajit Ray’s Bangla calligraphy. Graphemes were introduced to children after teaching straight lines, adjoining straight lines with dots, triangle, rectangle and circle respectively. All the shapes are formed either by the way of drawing or by using clay. These basic shapes were gradually metamorphosed into the graphemic shapes and that was a strange and a new experience to the child learner. Graphemes, on the basis of their homogeneity, e.g., sounds like b, r, k, dh, jh etc. with their atomic triangular shapes or o, t, ou, oi with the basic circular shapes were put together with the contours of “alpana” for executing learning process. Along with this artistic learning, songs containing the sounds related to graphemes were sung with few musical instruments. Later on stories are told and performed as a play (both teachers and students participate in the extempore dramas and relevant musicking) with a view to write stories in the latter stage of learning. Thus the whole process had become a joyful bi-way “learning” process rather than that of one way “teaching”.
In all the cases, the learning process, apart from its context-specific lingua-aesthetic content, depended on the prior knowledge of the linguistic features of Bangla language. By anticipating phonetic features, phonological rules and child language acquisition theory, the whole (open) text was built with the help of a Bengali child-learner. All the sketches of this open text were drawn by Master Akhar Bandyopadhyay (started drawing when he was 3 years old and he finished learning graphemes within one and a half years. In case of above six-year old illiterate learners, it took 20 to 25 days to learn almost all the Bangla graphemes along with few allographs, if s/he is taught in this way.) The redundant and opaque clustered graphemes are avoided in this phono-centric lingua-aesthetic direct learning process.