The attack of the 11th-graders!

This past week I had the pleasure of spending eight days with a gang of eleven 16-18 year olds, most of whom were coming to rural India (and for some, rural anywhere) for the first time.
And no, the word “pleasure” is not used sarcastically. Sure, I’d forgotten this particular age group’s ability to entertain themselves with fart noises and terrible renditions of Jay-Z hits, but overall I was impressed with their inquisitiveness, willingness to try new things, and the many small signs that they may one day becoming functional adults in the strange and high-pressure environment they’re growing up in.
The “kids” are students at Mahindra United World College of India, Mahindra being the name of the auto manufacturer that funded the school. There are United World Colleges in several nations, and their mission is to bring together small but diverse groups of students for 11th and 12th grades. Their standards tend to be high but they incorporate innovative teaching strategies and try to give students a sense of social responsibility with their educations. Every term, they go on a “project week”, visiting an NGO in another part of the country for a little outside-the-classroom learning (the only useful kind, in my opinion). The 200 students split up into groups based on which location they choose, and the NGO is given free reign over the program for the entire week.
This is the third project week that Vanastree has hosted. Still, Sunita and I were more than a bit nervous as we waited for the van full of expectant students and one teacher to arrive last Saturday. MUWCI (which they pronounce “mew-key”) is located near Pune, a big city with all the amenities. Here in Karkolli village, where Sunita’s farm and many of the Vanastree women live, there are no bags of Lay’s, no cold bottles of Coke, no showers, and, on that particular morning and for several hours at a time in the last few days, no electricity (although there are several hydroelectric dams in Karnataka, most of the power goes off to Bangalore and when there are shortages, the utilities know it’s the rural people they can cut off without fear of retribution). We weren’t sure what to expect and had no idea what they were expecting, either. Last year, the students had been confused as to the purpose of their visit and seemed in constant need of junk-food fixes. The week ahead was packed with activities and it seemed everyone would either have to sink or swim.
The van finally came, and 11 tired teens, fresh off the overnight train from school, trudged up the stairs to the terrace above the guest room. We served them fresh lemonade and snacks and made our introductions, then heard theirs: All first-years (11th grade) save one second-year. Two were from Malaysia, two from Germany, four from India, one each from Nepal, Mongolia and Hong Kong. If you boiled down the entire University of Oregon student body, it probably still wouldn’t be as diverse as this group. Suddenly, it became clear to me that while they might be here to learn from me (well, mostly from Sunita), I would probably learn more from them.
In the week that followed, we removed invasive weeds from a nearby temple, talked to Manorama and a couple other Vanastree women about their livelihoods, went on hikes and saw snakes, a scorpion and a million birds. Then we moved to Mathigatta, where I did my first homestay in September, on the way stopping at Yana, a beautiful natural rock formation. More treks and a little agroforestry lesson for the students. On the way, I got too many tick bites to count, gained an appreciation for wildlife watching, and had some good conversations with students.
Like most high-achieving 11th graders, many of the MUWCI students were preoccupied with college and getting the right education to “succeed” in the world. In anticipation of this, our program included a little talk by me about my internship, how I got it, what I’ve been doing for three months, etc. At the end, most of the questions focused on the facts that I am earning credit for this and that my degree actually requires me to get some hands-on experience outside the classroom. For some, it's a new concept.
Answering the questions, I started to get some sort of grasp on the background most of these students have. In most countries in the East (India, China, Malaysia, etc.), learning is extremely textbook-based and competitive. While I hesitate to praise the United States’ education system in any way, I now can appreciate that we do give some priority to critical thinking, discussion, and learning by doing. I never thought I’d see the benefit in writing all those boring essays in English or dissecting formaldehyde-soaked frogs in biology, but when compared with memorizing facts out of a book to regurgitate them on a test later on, it almost sounds like fun. The level of competition these students have to face is also unimaginable to me. Because there are so many students, most vying for coveted scholarships to schools in the West, a difference of one percentage point could leave you “stuck” in your home country, facing the same painful type of education if you think you can stomach going on for a Bachelor’s. At least at the higher levels, one can assume that the rules will be relaxed a bit - many of the students gave battle stories of being hit with rulers or sticks and even kicked for misbehaving. My worst memory of punishment is being made to sit "on the wall" during recess for singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall" on the bus and being the only one brave enough to admit it.
While watching birds one early evening toward the end of the week, I found myself talking to the “Malaysians” (perhaps on diversity overload, the students have a perhaps insensitive but cute way of referring to each other by nationality), Daniel and Roshan. They described a problem that, in my mind, the final nail in the coffin of formalized education: standardized tests in Malaysia. According to my sources, who should know, the government contorts the test results to hide schools that are underperforming. If you do well on a test in a school that is already doing well, you might actually end up with a score lower than that of a student who didn’t to so well but happened to attend a school that needed a “boost”. According to the Malaysians, this is not a problem unique to their country, as many developing nations are vying to make themselves look better. Luckily, MUWCI ignores standardized test results, probably for this very reason, and instead interviews applicants personally and asks them to debate each other on various subjects.
But coming to a school like MUWCI doesn’t end the treadmill of competition for motivated students like Daniel and Roshan. The light at the end of the tunnel is just becoming visible: a western university, preferably Oxford or Ivy League. While countries at the forefront of the industrialization race, like India, tend to have fairly good schools, there’s an extra bit of incentive for students to head to the US or Europe: liberal arts. I have to admit that I suddenly understand their drive. In comparison to the Eastern system, schools like mine offer unlimited sets of opportunities, socially and academically. Students are given the opportunity not just to gain an education but also to discover new things about themselves. And in their own quests for diversity, the west’s universities offer thousands of scholarships, many full-ride, to students from far-flung places. Their countries of origin, then, lose all their smartest students, leaving them with a massive brain drain that is expected to soon have real economic impacts. Think of all the engineers and doctors you know that are Indian, and imagine if the top 5% of students in every high school in the US left the country, never to return (or even send remittances), and you’ll get some idea of the problem.

Faced with all this information, I had no basis upon which to either encourage the students to seek a higher education (not that they needed encouragement) or convince them to try to give their home countries a second chance by studying or working there. The global system requires a degree, earning a degree worth anything requires heading west.
However, I don’t think there's much to justify paying top dollar for reputedly "good" schools, so I explained the state university system to them as an alternative. I think that fact that I don’t come from Harvard and yet seem fairly intelligent helped my argument – most seemed to assume that state universities are only for those who don’t know or can’t afford better. It seems that Princeton, Oxford, Cornell and the rest have a death grip on the world’s degree market, one built entirely on reputation and not much else. I don’t plan on letting a location on my diploma influence what I can and can’t do in the future, and I don’t see much reason for anyone else to, either. So perhaps through my conversations with eleven brave and open-minded students, I put one small hatchet-mark in the coffin of higher education.