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NOV 20 - On Jan. 26, 1999, a team headed by Dr. Sugat Mishra carried out an experiment from their NIIT computer training academy premises. They cut out a hole in the wall that separated the NIIT premises from the adjoining slum. A computer was placed in this hole, and made freely accessible to the slum-dwellers. Amazingly, the adults in the slum didn’t come near the computer. Only the children did, and without any formal training, learnt how to operate the machine. What Mishra and his team concluded was that the adults were too “shy”, while children were naturally “curious”, and therefore, learnt how to use the computer with no training at all.
This is where the concept of Minimally Invasive Education (MIE)—a technique that aims to educate children in unsupervised learning environments—came from. And leading this movement in Nepal is a 19-year-old, who has taken the campaign forward to redefine youth empowerment.
Nimesh Ghimire may look 19, but hear him speak of the MIE project that he founded two years ago with a few friends, and the 19-year-old boy becomes a confident young man who knows exactly what he is doing.
Ghimire’s project has its roots in the failure to bring the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project to his school—Budhanilkantha. Although the attempt didn’t work out, the friends focussed on a government school that was near their own school instead, and decided to put in 45 minutes after school to go and mentor the kids there. Ghimire slowly realised the applicability of the MIE technique in the government school, and an application for a grant to the INGO Save The Children worked out. Thus, the project began. “I still don’t know how it all happened though,” he says.
Today, the project has about 200 high-school volunteers across the Capital, visiting the nearby government schools, inspiring more youngsters to become volunteers and ‘empower’ students to teach their peers. How different is that from volunteering to teach students? What MIE proposes is that senior students teach their juniors, so that the ‘teachers’ never run out, or get bored. It’s a cycle, a system where students themselves learn from their older mates.
“You see, the Nepali education system is oriented towards rote-learning. This means the level of understanding and skill development is low,” Ghimire emphasises. It also means that the desire to learn is forced. MIE seeks to enhance this desire and bring out childrens’ inherent curiosity, especially for those studying in low-facility government schools. “We present gifts for the students who attend classes, and make the classroom more interactive by handing out chart-papers for them to get creative with. We also take them for tours where they observe and learn from things that they might have otherwise only read about. For example, for a chapter Rajdhani ma char din (Four days in the Capital) from the grade-five Nepali textbook, we took the children to several places of Kathmandu.”
It’s obviously good work on the part of the project. But like with any other venture, it has its own share of problems. “The biggest problem is motivation. At times, the volunteers lack the motivation to continue. It especially happens when they get lower grades than usual. I blame our society for this. The whole system is grade-oriented and gives very little value to social service. But we are still finding more and more high-school students signing up work with us on this project, so that’s good news,” Ghimire says.
It seems like inspiration lies at the core of this concept. The programme itself seeks to inspire children to learn, but by guiding by their own enthusiasm to do so, as opposed to forcing it on them. The volunteers working on it are also involved because of sheer inspiration to do something for the society and to change the way they themselves might have gotten their education.
“For me, I could have gotten straight A’s, gone to a good university and earned some good money, perhaps. But the inspiration part kept nagging me.” He continues, “When a few friends and I were just starting out at the government school, there were days when we were late. But the students, though their classes were over, used to wait for us. That kind of a thing is really fulfilling.”
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