A Deccan Herald write-up by K Jayalakshmi talks of an NGO initiative that helps government school kids discover the joy of learning English. They call it Project Pygmalion. It seeks to impart learning skills that make classroom a fun place. It is being tried out in 20 schools in and around Mysore. Kudremala Government Primary School is a single-classroom outfit with 50 students in the 6-12 age group. Project leader Mr N S Soundara Rajan has helped the school get a computer.

Unlike in well-to-do schools where computers are located at principal’s office or kept in a locked room, the primary school kids at Kudremala are encouraged to touch and feel the keyboard, to learn how to master the ‘mouse’, and generally have fun with images on the monitor screen. The Institute of Leadership and Institutional Development (ILID) that imparts professional help to the social sector has enabled Pygmalion to develop multimedia software to make classroom teaching lively and interactive.

Before the school kids got a PC the project leader worked with them using newspapers. The three-step learning through newspaper involved:

Step 1: Each student circles the words he/she knows from a newspaper column.

Step 2: Writes down their meaning in a class book.

Step 3: Compares notes, and they learn from one another.

Now that they have a PC, images associated with specific words the children learn show up on the screen.

The idea is to equip school kids with a working knowledge of English, from which there is no escaping in today’s globalised world, as ILID founder director Dr G K Jayaram put it. It is all about helping the underprivileged to get that much-needed edge to face the world.

The project volunteers focus on teachers in schools to adopt the Pygmalion method that can be used by teachers to engage primary school kids in subjects such as maths, geography, social science, wildlife etc. It would be nice if ILID could think of enabling schools to get Internet connectivity as well, through NGO initiative. BSNL could be tapped. 

The volunteer corps engaged in the Mysore project includes Mr Babu Mathew, Mr Ramanarasimhan, a retired govt. school head, Mr Suryarao Dumpala, a Bangalore-based multimedia professional and a band of IT professionals contributing free time to evolve content related software.

Contact mail: ilid_pygmalion@yahoo.com

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