The Beautiful Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

was now doing a study, so they weren’t a universal phenomenon. In front of the group, she launched into a tirade against such schools: they were ripping off the poor, she said, run by unscrupulous businesspeople who didn’t care a fig for anything other than profits. This didn’t gel at all with what I’d seen in Hyderabad—how could such people devote their weekends to science competitions and cyber-olympics if money was their sole motivation? I was not at all convinced and hesitantly related some details of what I’d found. No one considered my information very significant. Those who hadn’t heard of these schools simply shrugged, and the meeting soon dissolved.
    Afterward, Sajitha took me downstairs for coffee, clearly trying to be helpful in letting me see the errors of my ways. So the private schools might be there, some might even be better than the public schools, but that’s only because they are selective . “They take the cream of the cream,” she said (and I had to force myself to remember that we were talking about parents earning a dollar or two a day), leaving the public schools much worse off. Anyway, continuing the theme that only a few were any good, she continued, “Most of the schools are shocking, there is a shocking turnover of teachers, they’re not trained, they’re not committed, and the proprietors know that they can simply get others because there is a long list of people waiting to come in.” She paused to take a sip of her coffee: “All educators, 100 percent, believe that what the private schools for the poor are doing is untenable in modern educational theory. The rote learning, the cramming, they’re just crammers ripping off the poor.”
    But her main problem, clearly based on well-intentioned personal convictions, was the question of equality. Because some children, the poorest of the poor, are left behind in the “sink” public schools, the private schools were exacerbating inequality, not improving the situation at all, she said. For that reason, we must devote all our efforts toward improving the public schools, not get carried away by what was happening in a few private schools. For Sajitha it was clear: if many—or even a few—parents had higher aspirations for their children and wanted to send them to private schools, then “they should not be allowed to do so, because this is unfair.” It’s unfair because it makes it even worse for those left behind. This puzzled me. Why should we treat the poor in this homogenous way? Would we—Sajitha and I—be happy if we were poor, living in those slums, and unable to do the best for our children, whatever our meager funds allowed? But I said nothing. As we parted, amicably enough, she told me that there was quite a bit of development literature about private schools for the poor in any case, and so I shouldn’t go on too much about my “discovery,” as I had done today, as people would only laugh. She gave me a couple of references to look up.
    And she was right. I wondered at my own poor detective work in not having located these references before. Perhaps my own lack of recognition for what was taking place was excusable: For in the writings she pointed me to, and subsequent ones that I found, discussion of private schools for the poor was somehow veiled, or referred to tangentially, and ignored in subsequent writings. It was certainly not headlined in any conclusions or policy implications—to which many of us lazily turn when we digest development writings. It was almost as if the writers concerned were embarrassed or bewildered by private schools for the poor. They could write about these schools in passing, but instead of their leaping out at them as something of great significance—as they had to me when I first “discovered” them in Hyderabad—they didn’t seem to impinge in any significant way on the writers’ policy proposals or future discussions. Even for those who didn’t deny the existence of