There's a Major Right-Wing Education Project in India Underway

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the famous professor from Columbia University, calls me from rural West Bengal. She is in Birbhum, where Professor Spivak has started seven elementary schools in the rural parts of the district of nearly four million people. Several years ago, Spivak began the Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty Memorial Literacy Project. The purpose of the exercise was to expand the horizons of young people who derived few benefits from the modern state. Each year, Spivak comes to the schools, interacts with the students and the teachers and ensures that her project maintains vitality. 

At the south of Birbhum is one of India’s most famous universities—Shantiniketan, founded by Rabrindranath Tagore on estates that he inherited from his opium-trading family. Tagore, who was a famous poet and intellectual, started Patha Bhavana (School of Ideals) in 1901 to ennoble the best of humanity through free discussion in the open air. Years later—in 1930 – when Tagore returned from the Soviet Union, he wrote to his friend the American heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney about Soviet education. The reforms Tagore saw in the Soviet Union did not come from the expenditure of ‘unlimited wealth,’ he wrote, but by ‘indomitable energy and resourceful intelligence.’ It was this that Tagore wanted to harness for the university that became Vishwa-Bharati, the world in India and India in the world.

Spivak’s project is more modest, but it is not less ambitious in what it wants for its students—not merely literacy, but the freedom to expand the imagination. She wants that indomitable energy and resourceful intelligence to govern her schools....
http://www.alternet.org/world/danger-right-wing-schools-india