Μπάνκερ Ρόι: Μαθαίνοντας από το ξυπόλητο κίνημα Barefoot Professionals’
http://www.barefootcollege.org/barefoot_professional_approach.asp
Approach
‘Barefoot Professionals’ are none other than the rural women and men who work at the Barefoot College. Even though most of them have little or no educational qualifications, they are working and committed to improving the quality of life of underprivileged, neglected and exploited people. They work under no written contract which makes them all volunteers. They are free to stay for as long as they like, many have stayed for as long as 20 years! No one at the College earns more than $150 a month and the difference between the highest and lowest paid is in not more than 1:2. Everyone in the college receives a living wage, not a market wage. Living conditions are simple so that they feel comfortable. Everyone sits, eats and works on the floor. There is a spiritual dimension in the College because working relationships depend totally on mutual trust, tolerance, patience, compassion, equality and generosity. The College and its members are publicly accountable and all decisions are transparent and collectively taken. All people in the college are equal regardless of gender, caste, ethnicity, age, and schooling.
The criteria for selection are simple, only men and women, young or old who are illiterate, semiliterate, or barely literate and who have no hope of getting the lowest government job. They are trained as barefoot teachers, night school teachers, doctors, midwives, dentists, health workers, solar engineers, solar cooker engineers, water drillers, hand pump mechanics, architects, artisans, designers, masons, communicators, water testers, computer programmers and accountants. Thousands have passed through the college without a certificate in their hands and are productive responsible members of rural society.
It deliberately confers no degrees, with a view to reversing migration. The certification is provided by the community itself. If one can improve the quality of life in one’s community by providing a vital service, why would anyone want to live an unspeakably miserable existence in the urban slums? The employment generated by Barefoot College has checked and indeed reversed mass-scale migration to far off cities and nearby towns in search of wage labour.
The Barefoot College demystifies and decentralises sophisticated technology by handing its control to poor communities in rural India. It believes that even the poorest of poor cannot be denied the right to use, manage and own technology to improve their own lives. The aim has been to develop the capacity and competence of communities to take decisions and responsibilities and improve their management capabilities. The Barefoot College enhances their self-confidence by providing them access to learning to harness their ability to serve their own community, thus making them more confidently self-reliant.
The Barefoot College encourages a hands-on learning-by-doing process of gaining practical knowledge and skills rather than written tests and paper based qualifications. It promotes and strengthens the kind of education one absorbs from family, community, and personal experience. It applies the knowledge and skills that the poor already possess for their own development thus making them independent and letting them live with self respect and dignity. Very ordinary people written off by society are doing extraordinary things that defy description. Therefore, Barefoot College is a radical departure from the traditional concept of a “college”.
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