During a conversation I was having over my decision to Worldschool, I was told by a colleague that she had a friend who brought her children up in the slums of India. She told me that these children (who were Swiss or Italian) grew up like the other children of the slums... The reasoning, it seems, was that the parents wanted to help these communities and they felt it was beneficial for the children to grow up without feeling too entitled.
I may be missing some crucial information or my colleague was mistaken in her understanding of the situation, but that sounded like a very bad idea based on false logic. The false logic being that, just because children are deprived throughout their younger years, they will not feel entitled to things later on, and that being entitled is a far worse character trait than what they pick up living in a slum.
Entitled children or "spoiled brats" are indeed a scourge and I believe having children spend some time in a less affluent community is a very worthy experience for teaching children to be more grateful of what they have. However, bringing children up in the slums of India as foreigners would make them targets of the most depraved of society!
We all saw "Slumdog Millionaire", right? Those things such as maiming young children to get more money begging, human trafficking vulnerable women and children, and getting children in the streets addicted to drugs are REAL things. And if a child sticks out (like a foreigner in the slums?!), that is not a good thing!
Slums are very hot, dirty, cramped places, generally without electricity or toilets. Occupants live in whatever they can gather to make a hovel, such as corrugated steel boxes that are hot like an oven in the day and sound deafening when inside during the rain. People in slums don't live there in hovels because they want to. They are unimaginably poor, possibly spending hours picking through garbage to get money for any scrap of recyclables. And when someone is that poor, food is usually the most prominent thing on their mind. And when someone is THAT poor and hungry, s/he is usually pretty desperate to make money, making these places terribly dangerous for anyone, let alone children.
But for the sake of argument, though we have to suspend our understanding of what a slum is, let's suppose that this is a "safe" slum. These Western parents, who could live in a comfortable home, choose to live more simply, among the less fortunate. That is their choice. But when their children see what they COULD have, I'm inclined to believe that they will grow up feeling rather resentful of what they'd missed. Sure, they've gained an understanding and empathy for those less fortunate, but if they truly lived the same as those less fortunate, they suffered just as much. How is that a good teaching method?!
I'm drawing from experience here when I say I know what an Indian slum is like. I lived in Calcutta (now called Kolkata) for two years as a child, and, though I lived as well as one could, with servants and a huge home, I saw the slums on my way to school every day. Living in Calcutta has shaped me more than anywhere else because I was exposed to debilitating poverty.
In Calcutta, I lived well, but there were plenty of things I didn't have. There were no TVs in those days, little electricity due to the "loadshedding" that happened for hours each day, no malls, no supermarkets, (the market where my mom bought our food was a huge maze of tent stalls, full of half-carcassed animals hanging on hooks), no movie theaters playing Hollywood movies except for the American embassy where they played a family movie every Sunday night, no toy stores or amusement parks... Despite having a very good life, I had severe culture shock when I left, and, TO THIS DAY, I bare the effects of such an upbringing. American supermarkets full of shelves groaning with WAY too much unnecessary food, and places like Costco with their bulk crap give me mixed emotions. On one hand, I like to have all the choices, and on the other I feel guilty that we have so much - too much - that we waste it. I feel anger that it's so unfair. Sadness for all those who do without.
What I mean is that, despite having it all in Calcutta, I still felt the effects of not having what my fellow citizens took for granted. So when I returned to the US, it was very hard for me to put it behind me. Like survivors of concentration camps who hoard for the rest of their lives because they don't want to be in the situation of not being prepared again, how would these children growing up in a place of misery and lack of opportunity, be able to cope when their parents finally want to repatriate them?! (I'm assuming they don't want their children to live in the slums the rest of their lives). They would have such a hard time fitting in.
According to my colleague, the kids attended whatever school the other kids in the slum attended. How could THAT be a good education?! Sure, money doesn't always equate with good education, but surely kids in a slum in India are not getting better teachers than children who can afford uniforms and school costs. Most likely they're getting the teachers that couldn't get better jobs. And a school in a slum in India wouldn't be teaching in English, the language of the elite, so school would be in a local language totally unrelated to their home country language. When they return to their Western homes, how could they manage with an inferior education in any language?!
Having said ALL this against the idea that a family chooses to bring their children up in a slum, I'm an advocate of the experience (provided somehow this is a SAFE environment) for a short time - 6 months at the most. Giving children an insight into a life like this is an invaluable lesson, provided they are moving on from it and are able to use the lessons. So parents should mix it up and put their kids in different situations because variety is the spice of life and we learn from new experiences and we are stunted when we are in a static, unchanging environment.
January 2, 2017
It is one of my resolutions that I put more effort into this blog! I wrote this post a full 6 months ago before I started Worldschooling my daughter and in that time I have actually revisited Calcutta (a very good experience highlighted by an amazing tour
http://www.tourdesundarbans.com/ which I should blog about some day!). In any case, I decided I must finally post some of my blog articles that have sat fallow all these months (due to lack of good internet access and time).
