by Kumar Tiwari

It all began in 2013 when I was pursuing CA at Thakur College of Commerce and Arts. One fine August evening, when I was returning home, I came across a bunch of kids frolicking happily in the rain. I fondly went on to interact with them and found out that they were actually out there during school time. I learnt that these kids were only enrolled to school to avail the mid-day meal. They were also put into classes as per their age, not their aptitude. Thus, many of them were studying in higher classes without the knowledge of basic alphabets.

This enraged me. I took the decision to spend at least 5 hours every day towards educating these kids. I started visiting them every morning and observed that all the kids left at 9 AM sharp every day; only to go to a temple and beg for alms.

Disheartened, I went up to the kids and bought them food while promising them that they never have to beg for food as long as he is there to educate them. The next day, I set up a little class of my own under the bridge with a whiteboard and a few notebooks. I asked my friend Payal to help me with these kids to which she happily agreed. Eventually, I started spending more time with the kids. I spent Diwali with them. On many days, they shared their food with me. Soon, I grew a strong emotional bond with the children and earned their trust.

When my friends and neighbours saw the incredible progress in these kids, they started helping me in a lot of ways. Despite all the troubles I went through to help these kids, I found the experience extremely rewarding.

After I finished my undergraduate, I wanted to enrol these kids into credible schools to secure their future. But with kids between the ages of 2.5 to 14 years, it was a hard task to cover their tuition fees and other school needs.

Eventually, I contributed some of my savings and also received some financial help from animal activist Christian Lobo, I finally managed to enrol these kids into good private schools.

My work got some limelight after a national news platform interviewed me under the flyover and wrote about my accomplishments with the kids. Thereafter, I was on the radar of several big-scale media houses who supported me to include more kids in my school under the flyover. My work soon gained more validation as my past students were doing brilliantly at their new schools. I went on to recruit 50 more kids in the second year!

I remember my student Akash, whom I met when he was in 8th Standard. I helped to enrol him in a good school and he expressed his wish to prepare for IIT-entrance. Then I admitted him to IIT-entrance coaching in 9th Standard. Today, he is in 12th Standard and will appear for his dream exam soon.

With some of my students now winning awards in different fields, I started taking them to Essel World, Wat media and other places for them to gain more exposure while having some fun. I was invited by a radio channel and was awarded the title of ‘Mumbai Ka Asli Hero.’

Problems arose when I had to use the funds to provide the kids with private hospital treatment when they fell sick. I was being praised and applauded but when I needed help with the funds, no one took a step forward. Now that the future of these kids was at stake, I decided to revive hope. With the help of tuitions and by selling handmade artworks I managed to pay their fees.

As metro construction work began in the city, I and my students were suddenly left without a roof over their head. After so many failed attempts to get enough funding, I came up with a plan of ‘Gurukul’ (self-sustainable community living). My plan could foster 400 more street kids along with the current ones and their parents, who agreed to support their kids’ education by sustainable methods such as organic farming, pottery, and other agro-based cottage industries. After structuring the whole model and finding a good plot of land, I now had to bring in the capital. I tweeted directly to the PM of India and other government authorities but most of my appeals went overlooked.

I have now decided to rent a school building and make the community project prototype work with around 60% underprivileged students and the rest with children from a well-to-do background in order to help sustain the underprivileged. Though I have convinced a landlord to rent a school building for 5 years, I currently need help to raise money to pay a deposit of 10 lakhs after which I can generate income to pay the rent.

Kumar Tiwari is a 24-year-old volunteer for Jagriti Yatra.

Article first appeared on Efforts for Good.

by Kerry McDonald

As schooling becomes more rigid and consumes more of childhood, it is causing increasing harm to children. Many of them are unable to meet unrealistic academic and behavioral expectations at such a young age.

Every parent knows the difference a year makes in the development and maturity of a young child. A one-year-old is barely walking while a two-year-old gleefully sprints away from you. A four-year-old is always moving, always imagining, always asking why, while a five-year-old may start to sit and listen for longer stretches.

Growing Expectations vs. Human Behavior

Children haven’t changed, but our expectations of their behavior have. In just one generation, children are going to school at younger and younger ages, and are spending more time in school than ever before. They are increasingly required to learn academic content at an early age that may be well above their developmental capability.

In 1998, 31 percent of teachers expected children to learn to read in kindergarten. In 2010, 80 percent of teachers expected this. Now, children are expected to read in kindergarten and to become proficient readers soon after, despite research showing that pushing early literacy can do more harm than good.

In their report Reading in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose education professor Nancy Carlsson-Paige and her colleagues warn about the hazards of early reading instruction. They write,

When children have educational experiences that are not geared to their developmental level or in tune with their learning needs and cultures, it can cause them great harm, including feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and confusion.

Hate The Player, Love the Game

Instead of recognizing that schooling is the problem, we blame the kids. Today, children who are not reading by a contrived endpoint are regularly labeled with a reading delay and prescribed various interventions to help them catch up to the pack. In school, all must be the same. If they are not listening to the teacher, and are spending too much time daydreaming or squirming in their seats, young children often earn an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) label and, with striking frequency, are administered potent psychotropic medications.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that approximately 11 percent of children ages four to seventeen have been diagnosed with ADHD, and that number increased 42 percent from 2003-2004 to 2011-2012, with a majority of those diagnosed placed on medication. Perhaps more troubling, one-third of these diagnoses occur in children under age six.

It should be no surprise that as we place young children in artificial learning environments, separated from their family for long lengths of time, and expect them to comply with a standardized, test-driven curriculum, it will be too much for many of them.

New findings by Harvard Medical School researchers confirm that it’s not the children who are failing, it’s the schools we place them in too early. These researchers discovered that children who start school as among the youngest in their grade have a much greater likelihood of getting an ADHD diagnosis than older children in their grade. In fact, for the U.S. states studied with a September 1st enrollment cut-off date, children born in August were 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than their older peers.

The study’s lead researcher at Harvard, Timothy Layton, concludes: “Our findings suggest the possibility that large numbers of kids are being overdiagnosed and overtreated for ADHD because they happen to be relatively immature compared to their older classmates in the early years of elementary school.”

This Should Come as No Surprise

Parents don’t need Harvard researchers to tell them that a child who just turned five is quite different developmentally from a child who is about to turn six. Instead, parents need to be empowered to challenge government schooling motives and mandates, and to opt-out.

As universal government preschool programs gain traction, delaying schooling or opting out entirely can be increasingly difficult for parents. Iowa, for example, recently lowered its compulsory schooling age to four-year-olds enrolled in a government preschool program.

As New York City expands its universal pre-K program to all of the city’s three-year-olds, will compulsory schooling laws for preschoolers follow? On Monday, the New York City Department of Education issued a white paper detailing a “birth-to-five system of early care and education,” granting more power to government officials to direct early childhood learning and development.

As schooling becomes more rigid and consumes more of childhood, it is causing increasing harm to children. Many of them are unable to meet unrealistic academic and behavioral expectations at such a young age, and they are being labeled with and medicated for delays and disorders that often only exist within a schooled context. Parents should push back against this alarming trend by holding onto their kids longer or opting out of forced schooling altogether.

Kerry McDonald is the author of Liberty to Learn: Why Children Need Self-Directed Education, a free eBook published by FEE.

Article first published on Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).