Over the past few months, if you had peeped in to any of the 1400 or so government schools in Bangalore, at around two in the afternoon, you would have glimpsed a heartwarming sight. A group of children huddled together in a circle, holding colorful cards in their hands, reading or listening to another child read out stories. You would have noticed the teacher because she would be conspicuously not ‘teaching’ in the normal sense - she would perhaps be sitting with the children, telling a story herself, helping an eager young student to master the complexity of the conjoined alphabet [vattaksharas] in a story, or better yet, just allowing children to help other children, rather noisily at that, in their quest for learning to read.

This was all part of an effort called the Karnataka Learning Partnership [KLP], which is a platform envisaged by Akshara Foundation for a continuous engagement with the Karnataka Government’s Department of Primary and Secondary Education, to help school children empower themselves with better learning. By now, the results of the first effort of the KLP are out. Approximately 65 % of the nearly 70,000 city children who enrolled into the government’s accelerated reading programme, in partnership with Akshara Foundation, are able to read unfamiliar sentences and paragraphs, [mostly in Kannada] which they could not just a few months ago. That makes a population of 45,000 new ‘readers’, who have begun to ‘see’ themselves as such. Children who have internalized the locus of control when it comes to reading, who now can read anything around them in their world, from bus stop signs to simple news bulletins. Who knows, now that they are on the journey of discovery, it might eventually lead them past their textbooks to good literature as well, especially if it is made easily available to them. The programme involved more than 4000 government teachers, many of whom started out as weary sceptics but ended up as enthusiastic supporters. This change happened, as many teachers told us, as they saw how easy it was to get the attention of children through good, old-fashioned story telling. As many said, even children who had been struggling to learn just the alphabet itself, or who were too shy and insecure to reach out, were opening up to the teachers and to the story cards. We believe that one of the most important outcomes has been the enhanced self-esteem and renewed hope among children who were left behind due to their inability to grasp a skill most of us take for granted-reading.

The importance of ensuring, that every child can read as early as possible can hardly be overemphasized. Government school children often, though not always, come from a disadvantaged background. In addition, they may not be exposed early in their infancy and childhood to a large and complex vocabulary. Vocabulary and IQ are recognized to be closely linked and the more words a child is exposed to the more she is able to nuance her understanding of the world. So every time a child is allowed to remain functionally illiterate we are reinforcing a disadvantage that comes from a background of poverty. That’s why it is critically important that a programme such as the reading programme- and we do not ever say that it is the only workable method-must be adopted and embedded into the government’s curriculum and teacher training modules. We must aim to get children reading as early as the end of the first standard itself. Which probably means that we need to focus on early childhood development as well, though that may require a long term campaign. We must, every year, early in the year, identify children who are not yet reading and focus on getting them to read. This requires nothing short of an ‘all hands on deck’ approach by the school. The goal is to get every child in school reading well, with the belief that every child can and will learn, given the right encouragement. This is not necessarily something government can do on its own. It needs the help of civil society. There are plenty of organizations in Karnataka already working closely with government.

On its part, the Akshara Foundation is willing to commit both time and resources to realize this goal. The Bangalore programme that was just completed was not a pilot project but the real thing. It covered every single child in every school in Bangalore Urban District. The work is not finished yet, since those children who could not become ‘readers’ will need more help right away. We also need to sustain the reading habit of all the children by giving them the access to attractive reading material. Akshara plans to help government upgrade all the libraries in schools. There is a lot more work ahead. Yet, there is enough of a successful outcome to make the government confident to take this programme across every government school in the entire state in the next two years. That will mean reaching out more than 40,000 schools and millions of children. A daunting task but a necessary one. What better way to celebrate Suvarna Karnataka!