Your youth club has been promised the funds to start a training and education center for slum children
Write a report on how you will organize the training program. You may include such details as site selection — personnels to man the various aspects of your program — the time your centre will function — various aspects of your program — what will include, the education to be provided — materials to be used etc — any other relevant details.
Our Millennium Youth Club began as a recreation club to while away our leisure hours. It is functioning in a ramshackle (=in ruins) abandoned small house which we hired on lease from its generous owner. It is situated in a small and a bit remote place in the Budge Budge line. It was born in the nineties and was simply ‘Youth Club’. The new title was a second thought as we neared the millennium.
With the assumption of the new name we promoted our activities and decided to impart something to the new upcoming generation. We set up a committee, contributed from our coffers -purse) and decided to give some elementary education and training to the children of the low-born and economically backward class of the locality.
The fund came like a windfall, we thought. But the NGO unit “Unmochan” which collaborates with a foreign unit appreciated our intention to change the character of our club. They joined forces but gave us autonomy.
We made the venue of our club the site for the project. It was in the vicinity (= neighborhood) of the slum-dwelling of the aluminum factory.
We chalked out an action program: (i) to prepare a list of the slum-dwelling children up to the age of fourteen; (ii) to contact their parents to impress upon them the significance of our project; (iii) to start a small office for maintaining records.
But before embarking on the above plan we prepared a tentative (= likely to change) draft of the various aspects: (i) to promote children from the pre-literacy stage to the literacy stage; (ii) to create in them an enquiring spirit, a curiosity about things. It includes nature, natural objects like birds, animals, and plants and it has to be mostly oral. The writing exercise shall follow, but it shall not be compulsory. Options to write their impression shall remain open and only those who show some promise in this venture shall be promoted to the next stage; (iii) to diversify the learning in the age group of ten to fourteen; (iv) not to insist on grading and distinction-marks as our purpose is not ‘competition’ but ‘learning and training in its most general sense. It emulates partly the ‘ideal’ of proper education propounded by Rabindranath Tagore; (v) to get for the project a computer set and a computer teacher of some propose; (vi) to construct a temporary make-shift gymnasium and to borrow the services of a trained PTI (Physical Training Instructor) for the purpose.
The education that we proposed to give would be both ‘formal’ and ‘non-formal’. The stress shall be, initially, on Bengali, which shall be the first language of the boys. Hindi and English shall fall subsequently on the priority list. There shall be an elementary training class in ‘Spoken English’ as it is now a world language, but the children have to use their mother tongue in their normal conversation.
Among the materials, the following inventory (= list of articles) is proposed: (i) Blackboards and class-teaching accessories. (ii) Atlases and pointers; (iii) Elementary science equipment including computer sets; (iv) Books for a small ‘functional’ library to be housed in the Principal’s chamber.
Personnel: Apart from some of us who hail from engineering and other services, we decided to recruit personnel from outside. The main streams are: (i) General education; (ii) Science; (iii) Computer Science; (iv) co-curricular activities like sports, debate, or elocution.
The fund allotted is, however, not enough to meet all these requirements. But we proposed to approach some doner and the first charity has already come forth from Shree Bijan Behari Mukherjee, the owner of our club building.
We hope once it gets going (= progress), finance shall not stand in the way. The Bengalees are, essentially, lovers of culture and enlightenment.
