By Reghu Rama Das
The story of Beena Mol
In 2002, Beena Mol was accepted for a one-year course at Mitraniketan People’s College (MPC) – 300 km from her native village. She had heard about MPC through a former student at the school. He convinced Beena Mol that she should take that path, even though it was by no means an obvious choice.
At the time, Beena Mol was living alone with her mother. Her father had died, and her sister was married, while her brother had gone to a boarding school. In her village, it was normal for girls to get married after they had completed – or abandoned – their schooling and for some to find employment on local plantations. Beena Mol had no wish to be married off early and end as a plantation worker. She wanted to become qualified, so she could support herself and at the same time continue to develop personally.
At MPC, she took the agricultural course. What she valued most, however, was the way in which the teaching was organised – the facts that teachers lived with and for the students, were available 24 hours a day and took part in all activities instead of completing their classes and then leaving the school. What was also crucial for her was that the teaching at the folk high school involved practical activities and ‘learning by doing’ and allowed her to learn without having the pressure of exams and homework hanging over her. At agricultural college, she had felt homework put her under pressure and had a sense that the school’s only purpose lay in teaching and not in giving students skills they could use in their lives outside the school. It was quite the reverse at the folk high school.
MPC helped her to develop the viewpoints she had brought with her from her village, with the result that her ambitions to become financially independent and to get a good job grew. She became experienced and self-confident in speaking before large gatherings and so was no longer bound to stay at home with no contact to strangers. Not least, her world expanded thanks to the friendships she made at the high school, where she found herself alongside students from all over Kerala.
Beena Mol benefitted enormously from her stay, and even ended up subsequently getting a job in the agricultural sector, as she had hoped. After her one-year course at MPC, Beena Mol, along with 16 other participants in the course, got a job at AVT Bio Tech as a ‘Tissue Culture Lab Technician’, mediated by MPC. As part of their appointment, they qualified in ‘Tissue culture technology’ and gradually their salaries rose. In the beginning, Beena Mol found the job demanding. But the experience she brought with her from the practically oriented teaching at Mitraniketan helped her complete the course and stay in the job. Today she is so well-paid that she pays income tax, which is by no means normal for a woman coming from a poor village background.
There was something else Beena Mol took with her from MPC. This was her life partner, Mr. Vinod, who was her classmate and took the carpentry course. Now they live together with their two children in Cochin, 300 km from the villages in which they grew up. Her time at the folk high school has shaped Beena Mol’s life in ways she would never have imagined before she took the plunge as a 17-year-old and left her village. Today she expresses her joy and gratitude when she thinks of the folk high school and its teaching methods, which were designed for people from her background. The time she spent at the folk high school altered her life and her approach to life as a whole. Today she thinks about her one year at the folk high school more often than she does about the ten years at the ordinary school she attended as a child.
The People’s College
K. Viswanathan developed Mitraniketan in 1956 as a community-based education project with facilities for education, farming and rural industrial production. He was influenced by the functioning of the folk high schools and by its ideas on enlightenment for active citizenship for the local community. He envisaged the development of the rural community through individual enlightenment. In 1996, he established a folk high school in Mitraniketan to enlighten the village women and children. Named ‘People’s College’, the school is an adult learning centre, where people live and study. Mitraniketan People’s College, known locally as ‘The College’, has been developed with the cooperation of the Association of Danish Folk High Schools in Denmark.
The College is a small community within the larger community of Mitraniketan.
We developed the College as an alternative model of education. It focuses on live activities based on day-to-day needs to ensure living interaction and social learning in every activity, as envisaged by N.F.S. Grundtvig. Part of the process involves opportunities for students to reflect upon their life experiences. Students are also inculcated with the spirit of secularism and democracy – India being a subcontinent with many different cultures – and with understanding of language and religion, as people need to develop secular thinking and an interest in grassroots democracy. This training will also help to awaken national consciousness of the participants.
The People’s College attends to the educational and training needs of people, mainly women and young people, who are marginalized for various sociocultural reasons. Many of the young people at the College have either dropped out of school or were unable to continue higher education due to lack of resources. Most of the young people accommodated in the college are from socially and economically disadvantaged groups, which are poorly served by the existing competitive educational system. Their primary need is skill development leading to employment. Realizing that the local community needs active citizenship for sustainable development, Mitraniketan also provides these people with personal and leadership development.
‘Education for Life’ is the aim of the People’s College; to achieve that aim, we employ cooperative learning methods. This approach stands in contrast to the formal system of education. The trainer/facilitator motivates students in the learning process, involving them and ensuring their participation by adopting participatory teaching and learning methods. In such a living, activity-based institution, social learning always involves students and facilitators as well as members of the local community.
The college operates as a remedial education centre, filling gaps left by formal schooling and technical education. We impart technical education coupled with personality development sessions for ensuring employment and active citizenship. The mother tongue is used exclusively as the medium of communication in all activities.
Enlightenment programmes for village women are designed by the women themselves working in self-help groups and imparting their knowledge and skills through leadership and livelihood activities. They engage in micro-credit (savings and loan) activities in their groups, utilizing the savings to develop micro-enterprises and to care for disadvantaged people in their villages. The college facilitates women’s development by fostering their ability to access and use local resources and technologies and by helping them function collectively in both social and economic development of the local community. Along with these efforts, the college serves as a platform for women to share their concerns and problems.
The feedback received by the college tells us that educated students actively participate in local community politics and events. A good number of them serve as local Panchayath members, while others find various skilled or government jobs in and around their locations. It has been wonderful to witness how many of the students, who had formerly been sitting idle in their homes, after finishing studies at Mitraniketan People’s College either have jobs as skilled workers or pursue higher studies. A few of them are active in society, having taken up community activities by forming associations and village clubs in the community.
These results make us very proud. They demonstrate that to a large extent we have achieved the objective of the College by developing rural leadership for active citizenship.
The story of Beena Mol is narrated to Malene Fenger-Grøndahl. The rest of this article has previous been published in the article: “Voices from ‘Lands of the Living’: Summaries and Conclusions from the 2018 Symposium on the International Influence of N.F.S. Grundtvig”, Grundtvig Studies, 2018.