Chapter 6: Stories from the Fields, the Bastis, and the Hills

Part 7 of 26 in What I Want to Tell My School Teacher: An Indian Adaptation of Letter to a Teacher← Part 6Part 8 →

This chapter shares stories of children whose schooling is shaped by illness, caste discrimination, language barriers, poverty, migration, and inadequate support. It helps readers see how individual cases of dropout or low achievement can reflect wider failures in the school system.

Statistics describe patterns. Stories show what the patterns feel like to the children who live inside them.

Lakshmi, Bihar

Lakshmi was in Class 6 when her mother became ill. She began missing school to look after her younger brother and to manage cooking and the animals. The teacher recorded the absences. When she returned, the mathematics lessons had moved on. No one sat with her to reconstruct what she had missed. By Class 8 she stopped attending. She now works in the fields during the agricultural season and does household labour the rest of the year. She can write her name. She cannot write a clear application that would help her family claim a benefit to which they are entitled.

Santosh, a Dalit basti in Maharashtra

Santosh sat in the last row. At the mid-day meal some children refused to sit near him. Comments were made. The teacher did not always intervene. Santosh learned that raising his hand brought a kind of attention he preferred to avoid. His marks stayed average. His questions stopped. He completed Class 10 with difficulty and did not continue. He now works in a small workshop where he is skilled with his hands. The school never discovered this.

Meena, an Adivasi village in Odisha

Meena’s home language is Kui. The early textbooks were in Odia; later ones introduced English. In Class 3 she could recite poems. She could not retell them in her own words. Teachers described her as slow. By Class 7 the accumulated gap was too large for her to cross without intensive help that the school did not provide. She left. Her younger sister is now in the same school. The same sequence is beginning again.

Imran, a Mumbai slum

Imran’s family migrated from Uttar Pradesh. He attends a municipal school where one classroom holds sixty children. The teacher works hard. After school Imran sells small items at a traffic junction to contribute to the household. He is often tired and sometimes falls asleep. He is not undisciplined. His life simply does not fit the school’s assumption that every child has evenings free for homework and mornings free from paid work.

Priya, a low-fee private school in a small town

Priya’s parents shifted her from the government school to a low-fee private school because they believed English-medium instruction would give her a better chance. The fees strain the family budget. The teachers are often less trained than those in the government system. Priya spends hours copying from the board. Her spoken English remains limited. Her parents cannot help with the English textbooks. She is caught between two inadequate systems, and the family is poorer for the experiment.

These stories are ordinary. Most teachers have taught children like them. Most parents in ordinary neighbourhoods know someone whose child followed a similar path. The system records them as individual cases of failure or dropout. They are, more accurately, the predictable outcome of a school that has not been built to serve the children who need it most.