The beautiful tree
The author is a professor of education policy, and was given a contract to study private schools in India. He wasn't looking forward to studying what he thought would be expensive schools for the elite. However, while walking the back streets of an Indian city, he saw a cardboard sign advertising "St. Mary's School" with an arrow. He followed it and discovered a whole world of small homegrown schools for the poorest kids which were started by local people fed up with the poor quality of public schools. Apparently about a quarter of all Indian children go to these schools, while the government doesn't even acknowledge their existence. He later discovered the same phenomenon in poor countries around the world.
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- "The Beautiful Tree: a personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves" by James Tooley. It's a very interesting book about low-cost private education.
- If you want a good book on the subject, check out the Beautiful Tree - http://www.amazon.com/The-Beautiful-Tree-Educating-Themsleve...
- If you want to read more about this, please look at the 11th chapter of James Tooley's book https://www.amazon.in/Beautiful-Tree-James-Tooley/dp/0670083... on "the uprooting of the Beautiful Tree". Tooley was researching low cost private schools in different parts of Asia and Africa.
He follows up the references in Dharampal in British Home Office records, which catalog the reports sent on native education by collectors to the governor Thomas Munro (including 'caste' statistics).
Tooley also read the work of Andrew Bell, on how mass education in Britain and later Europe was strongly influenced by what Rev Andrew Bell(who had come to Madras to manage a school) learnt about the methods of peer learning in native schools in Madras.
Dharampal's book is available online for free, and Arvind Neelakantan has a review of Tooley's book.
Some other disagreements, its not just 'few kings' but majority. The 'priest' claim is also not true. Majority of the mathas in say Karnatak and TN are run by non-brahmins, and there are plenty of pujaris from other jatis, not that that is a position of social privilege given how poorly paid they are and difficulty in getting married.
