The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Four topics

Italy, 2002. Treviso, Trieste, Ferrara, Padua and Milan
Page 7

Some places may provide conventional lessons, but avoid punishment. One of these was The Barns Hostel, in Scotland , for boys with social problems evacuated from their homes during the last world war. David Wills, the warden of the hostel, gave these reasons:

1. It provides a base motive for conduct.
2. It has been tried, and has failed; or alternatively, it has been so misused in the past as to destroy its usefulness now.
3. It militates against the establishment of the relationship which we consider necessary between staff and children - a relationship in which the child must feel himself to be loved.
4. Many delinquent childen (and adults) are seeking punishment as a means of assuaging their guilt-feelings.
5. When the offender has "paid for" his crime, he can "buy" another with an easy conscience.
6. Punishment shifts the responsibility for behaviour onto the adult, instead of leaving it with the child.

Tokyo Shure was founded to cope with the serious problem of school refusal in Japan. This was not just a question of children occasionally slipping out of school for a day, it was a question of serious illness and all too frequently suicide. Because it is a school for school refusers, a child who is enrolled there does not have to attend. The school is simply open from ten o'clock in the morning until seven o'clock at night, and offers a programme of courses that the children have asked for, and may take up if they wish. Some come as seldom as once a month, many others come every day.

Perhaps the most remarkable organisation I have visited is Butterflies, in Delhi. It has been set up to support street and working children, and offers a powerful example of children's will to learn. Their circumstances discourage them strongly from attending instruction. If they are working children, their employers resent them spending time away from work, they earn less money and their parents may beat them. If they are street children they have to give up earning time, even though a full day's work will only bring in about 30 rupees, or 50 pence. In spite of this loss of income and the risk of beatings, they come to spend perhaps three hours a day with the street educators.

Butterflies has no classrooms or school buildings. The street educators have trunks containing learning materials, including posters, slates and chalk, a few books and various games and toys. They go to agreed contact points at certain times, open the trunks and allow the children who come to choose whatever they like to do. About eight hundred children attend occasionally, and four hundred regularly. It is estimated that 60% of the children who attend for six months will have learnt to read in that time.