Education · 12 April 2024 · by Hritan Foundation
Education is a powerful tool that has the potential to transform lives and shape futures. Beyond acquiring knowledge and skills, education empowers individuals, promotes economic growth, and fosters social development.
What education actually changes
It is easy to talk about education in the abstract. In a household it is far more specific. A literate person can read a rental agreement before signing it, check whether the moneylender’s arithmetic is honest, understand a prescription, and fill in a form without asking a stranger for help. Each of those is a small transfer of power, and together they change what a family can refuse.
The economic argument is well established — each additional year of schooling raises lifetime earnings, and the effect is largest at the bottom of the distribution, where we work. But earnings are only part of it. Education alters the age at which people marry, the number of children they have, the likelihood those children are immunised, and whether a daughter is withdrawn from school when money is short.
The barriers are rarely about wanting it
In our experience almost no family opposes education. What defeats them is arithmetic.
The cost of the free school. Government schooling is nominally free and practically expensive — uniform, books, shoes, examination fees, transport. For a household earning daily wages, that is a real sum arriving at an awkward time of year.
The opportunity cost. A thirteen-year-old at a tyre shop earns money today. A thirteen-year-old in class does not. Where the household budget is a daily calculation, the future discounts steeply.
Falling behind, and staying behind. A child who misses a year rarely catches up unaided. He sits in a class he cannot follow, is treated as slow, and eventually leaves — and everybody records it as a lack of interest.
Girls first. When something has to give, it is usually a daughter’s schooling. Not from malice, but because her labour at home releases an adult to earn.
What we do about it
Our Gurukul exists to remove the arithmetic entirely. Boarding, meals, books, uniform and medical care are provided at no cost, and we do not ask families for “voluntary” contributions afterwards. A family that must weigh school against food will always choose food, and they should not be asked to.
Admission is on need rather than on marks. A child who has never held a pencil is exactly the child the place exists for, and entrants who are behind receive bridge teaching until they can follow their year group. Nobody is made to feel slow for needing it.
The academic syllabus is not diluted. Students study languages, mathematics, science and social studies to a standard that lets them continue into mainstream secondary education. Sentiment about tradition is no substitute for literacy, and a child who leaves us must be able to compete for a place, a job and a fair wage.
What surrounds the syllabus
What is harder to timetable is the rest of it. Students take a daily turn in the gaushala, the kitchen and the medicinal garden. A child who has fed a cow every morning for six years has a different relationship with living things than one who has read about compassion. A child who sweeps the floor he eats off does not grow up assuming somebody else exists to clean up after him.
Morning yoga, temple observance and Sanskrit sit alongside the academic work — not as decoration, but because a child who leaves with qualifications and no idea where he comes from has been half-educated.
The part nobody funds
Donors give generously for books and uniforms, which are visible and photograph well. What is chronically underfunded is the recurring cost — teachers’ salaries, kitchen provisions, the electricity bill in May. These are what actually keep a school open, and they arrive every single month whether or not anybody is watching.
That is why we ask people to give monthly rather than once. A child’s schooling is a six-year commitment. We can only make it if the income behind it is predictable.
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