Meet the real-life ‘Phunsukh Wangdu’

In 2010, the IIT-IIM pedigreed Arghya Banerjee was looking for a good school for his daughter’s admission and he was disappointed with what was offered in the name of education. “The brochures advertised huge campuses and state-of-art classrooms but none of them discussed how their academic courses are planned. So I decided to set up a school that will teach life-skills rather than just be based on theories,” he says.

The result was The Levelfield School, in Hosnabad, five km from Suri, the district headquarters of Birbhum. Started with the aim of providing better-quality education at an affordable price for small-town population where Banerjee comes from, Levelfield is a labour of love for husband-wife team Arghya and Asima Banerjee.  What makes this school standout are the multiple innovations which enable the school to charge an affordable fee, while retaining the highest level of quality. For example, better utilisation of assets through multiple timings, focus on ability rather than experience in recruitment, intensive teacher-training program to make fresh teachers classroom-ready, focussing exclusively on ‘learning infrastructure. “A key influence has been the teaching methodologies I experienced at IIM-Ahmedabad, my alma-mater. IIMA used stories, movies and real-life situations to teach concepts. I wanted to use such methods in order to make learning impactful and enjoyable,” he informs.

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Setting up the school, however was not an easy task. “To set up a school, you need more than fifty government permissions, including approvals from the land office, fire safety office, tax department, municipality, state education board, and the central education board. These rules stifle innovation and entrepreneurship in school education; they reflect our society’s curious obsession with input rather than output. In reality, excessive regulation and micromanagement do not result in quality, as evidenced by India’s performance in international-level tests,” he adds.

The school, currently, has 300 students from LKG to Class VI. While on the one hand, it will grow organically to Class X, it also plans to expand to other district towns and also to Kolkata in the next 2-3 years.  Wife Asima speaks of the pedagogy. “We have a policy of no private tuitions, no textbooks and no homework. Our teaching materials are developed in-house and we focus on skills rather than knowledge. The focus is more on reading skills and logic and we also encourage children to learn from unconventional sources like Japanese puzzles and movies. Our approach is about application-based education as opposed to rote learning.”

Another big trigger for this school was the talent crunch he faced while recruiting for an equity research outsourcing company he had co-founded after his IIM days. “The candidates are academically sound but they lacked basic skills like communication, ability to explain something logically or writing a simple email. We had to design an extensive training programme for them but I felt it was quite a late intervention. There had to be something wrong with the education system as these basic life-skills should have been taught at the school level,” says Banerjee.

Banerjee and his wife Asima have designed the material for the junior classes themselves. “Instead of standardised textbooks at the primary level we focus on development of skills — reading, writing, speaking,” he said, adding that reading skills cannot be developed if the children read just one textbook throughout the year. The school’s aim is that a student of Class I should read 20-25 storybooks in a year. Since so many age-appropriate storybooks weren’t available, the Banerjees started rewriting and simplifying old classics like Gulliver’s Travels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Prince and the Pauper. So, by the time they are in Class VI or VII, they are able to read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park or Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption as part of the curriculum.

Arghya is looking for business houses and real estate companies to come forward and invest into building more branches of Levelfield Schools, in and around Kolkata. “It’s an investment into nation-building”, he signs off.

Excerpts from the interview:

Every new idea in India is met with skepticism. When you started out, what was the general reaction, especially of parents?
 Initially, parents tend to feel worried about lack of conventional textbooks in our school as it is unusual for students to not have homework to do. And this is when we tell them to measure output rather than input. Spending more time with books doesn’t necessarily mean more assimilation. Despite a different set of approach towards curriculum, our kids perform extremely well in standardized tests like ASSET or McMillan and are in fact, among the top 15 percentile in the country according to standardized test scores, with many in the top 1%.

At Level field, we hold several group sessions with the parents explaining our teaching methodology and also explain our skill-based learning approach. Small-town parents mostly work in the government sector, and most government job exams still test rote-learning. However with a greater number of jobs being offered by the private sector it is necessary to inculcate real-life skills. We talk about how CBSE or ICSE boards have moved away from rote-learning and now ask questions that tests higher-order thinking skills. After many such sessions, and after seeing the results of the students, parents are now much more convinced that this is the right way to go.

Given the education system in India, do you think this is the right time to explore alternative methods like these?

I believe it is high time we move away from outdated syllabus, exam patterns and textbooks. We need methods that focus on skill-development and also be enjoyable for the kids. As a nation, we need to wage a battle against rote-learning in all forms.

I believe technology can play a big role in disseminating such methods. Over time, I also intend to look for technology partners to disseminate our teaching modules (e.g. reading skill development module), through Android or IOS applications.

What is wrong with the education system in India?

For decades, our education system has believed and followed the strategy of rote learning. The aim has always been better grades, not gaining knowledge. The conventional style of teaching in most schools today is a rigid 45-minute period with strict subject boundaries. There are fixed lesson plans, schedules to be adhered to, and syllabus to be finished before the end of the year. For an English teacher to trespass into the domain of the history faculty will be sacrilegious. To have a forty-five minute period without ‘a subject name’ is unconceivable. So, English class means teaching short stories and poems, while a history class is about battles and wars. They never blend in.

How is the assessment in Level field different at Level field?

Children love to learn. They do not have any preconceived notions about the importance of textbooks, exams and homework. They feel empowered when they can successfully do something. They enjoy challenging themselves to new tasks.

I always believed that most of our learning comes from discussions with interesting people, reading books, watching movies, travelling to places, using technologies. I only wanted to tap into all the sources of learning that we see all around us.

Another thing that helped is that I do not come from an education-industry background. I worked in leadership positions in the industry. So my mind was uncluttered when I started off designing methods and curriculum for Levelfield. I saw what is needed in work, what is needed in real life, and I set about creating it without any regard to what is already in existence.

At Levelfield, they read a 20-25 story-books in a year, rather than reading one single textbooks all through the year. We use classic stories like the Prince and the Pauper, A Little Princess or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But we simplify the language so that they can read. Children do not enjoy reading the same textbook throughout the year. They like to read new stories.

Similarly, in math too, instead of routine activities, we expose children to activities that make them think. That’s where the puzzles come in, and other thinking oriented activities come in. They like such activities much more than doing simple multiplication or memorizing tables.

How are you planning to expand to other town and cities?
I’m planning to expand to Calcutta by partnering with a corporate house or a real-estate company who may be willing to create the infrastructure while Levelfield manages the academic aspects of the school. In addition, we intend to spread our learning methodologies through technology enabled modules. Currently, an effort is underway where we are creating a web-based module for our graded-reading program.