Lausanne World Pulse – Dalit Education Centers: Delivering Emancipation and Building Leaders
By Joseph D’Souza
The strategy to deny Dalit rights has gone so far that the upper castes have even convinced some international and domestic non-profit aid agencies offering education to poor Indian children that the state/village/tribal language is the only and best (contextualized) option for the Dalit children of India’s villages. They claim that children who know English will be alienated from their families and will eventually become a new class of children no longer accepted by their own heritage. We know this is not true. English education combined with a learning of the local vernacular language or mother tongue is the way forward. Bi-lingual Indians throughout the world are involved with commerce, technology and politics. And none of them claim to have lost their cultural heritage because of it.
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Empowering Children through Dalit Education Centers
Thankfully, Dalit leaders have seen through this upper caste deception and are seeking to empower their children through Dalit Education Centers (DECs).
Global partners of the Dalit movement like the Dalit Freedom Network offer equal-opportunity education to Dalit and low-caste children across India. It is not a compassion-based movement/program; it is a justice-based movement. The Dalit movement follows closely the old adage, “You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish you can feed him for a lifetime.” The Dalit movement seeks to empower Dalits to provide for themselves now and in the future.
Only justice for the Dalits will bring about true change and life transformation. This justice must be evident in every part of Dalit life. They must obtain full human rights and be considered equal to their upper caste peers. Dalits want full participation in the control of power in India.
Dalits are not asking for compassion. They are asking for justice. To get justice, Dalits across India must eliminate or break free from the caste system and loosen the stranglehold caste has on India’s education system nationwide. They want to claim their right to a world class, English-based education.
Casting Off Caste
The statistics are staggering:
– Less than twenty-five percent of Dalit men are literate, while only ten percent of Dalit women are literate. Of those who are literate, less than eight percent are educated and even fewer are English-educated. Computer literacy is but a dream.
– Nearly half of all Dalit children drop out of school at the primary level, while two-thirds drop out in junior high school and more than three-fourths of all Dalit children never make it past high school.
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