UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

Despite seeing and focusing on all the negatives that exist in the public school system in India when it comes to teachers, including teachers who didn’t understand the subject matter, and who were unenthusiastic and unsupportive of their students, there were many that I met who were extremely dedicated, and continue to be an inspiration to me as I work on this project. In the first school I visited on my first day in India this year, I met Savitha, a second-grade teacher who is incredibly dedicated to making sure her students have the opportunities that she herself did not have growing up. As a child, she went to a public Tamil-medium school and did not receive a comprehensive English education. Once she was ready to join the workforce, she found herself at a disadvantage for that reason. When she became a teacher, she learned English on her own time and developed a lot of her own English learning material, making sure every student understood each topic they covered before moving o...

When you look at big problems from a distance, it’s easy to think of a simple solution that should, in theory, work perfectly. However, it’s only when you actually talk to the people facing the problem, and put yourself in their place, that you realize how complicated it can really be. For instance, let’s take the issue of poverty in India. Through some research, I found that one of the many causes of poverty is the language divide that is created based on whether or not you know English. Around 60% of students who attend elementary school in Tamilnadu attend Tamil medium schools. Students attending public, government-run schools in rural areas have very little exposure to English, and often have teachers who themselves are not fluent. They do not have any extra reading material that are set in the context of their lives making it difficult for them to acquire even a basic proficiency in the language. This becomes a problem not just for pursuing higher education, but also severe...

When I was younger, my mom had the crazy idea to homeschool my brother and me for a year in India to experience the culture and to give us a chance to connect with our roots. As much as thirteen year old me was upset at the idea of missing out on the all-important social events of the eighth grade, it really was a life changing experience. During that year, I volunteered at Olcott Memorial High School , a school in Chennai that is funded by the Theosophical Society of India. To quote their website, the school’s goal is “social change through the education of the underprivileged.” I noticed while I was there how much the students were struggling to learn English because they did not have any exposure to the language outside of school, the teachers themselves were not very fluent, and on top of that, they didn’t have many resources, like books, that were actually relevant to their lives. Not learning English is a problem because while students can learn subjects in Tamil, an...