Trains as learning platforms
Train of Thought
This article
was published in The
EDGE (The Hindu) on 14th October, 2019.
Thanks are
due to the team at THE EDGE.
We stood,
all excited, in front of the school gate. We were to depart for the annual trek
with class IX students. Plan was to take a train from Varanasi to Dehradun and
then travel by road till the base-camp. Our feet would take us further - up and
down the Himalayan paths.
One of
the parents who had come to see his son off suddenly asked, “Why are you all
travelling by rail? Why does the school not arrange for air travel?”Surprised,
and not keen to argue moments before we left for an event many of us had long
since awaited, I smiled and responded meekly.
The
questions, however, kept visiting and re-visiting me once the train began to
move and students were enjoying at their assigned berths.
Learning opportunities
Train
travel holds the potential to educate us, about our country, in a manner that
few other avenues can boast of. They teach us about the world beyond our
protected campuses (and homes) and
sanitized text books. They enable us to converse, share food, newspapers and
more with people – unknown and also different from us in multiple ways.
It is especially
crucial, in today’s time, as we increasingly interact within our small worlds
and get paranoid about a lot beyond the world we are familiar with. The train
lover in me has, since long, believed that trains best represent the mind
boggling diversity of our country. All this, of course, is besides showing us
our country. Writers have, since years, waxed eloquent about train travel. From
Dom Moraes’ awe at how vast the country appeared during night journeys to Douglas
Dewar’s description of bird watching from the windows.
Then,
of course, there is the entire ecology debate. That of flights’ contribution to
global warming. As Roger Tyers writes in ‘It’s time
to wake up to the devastating impact flying has on the environment’,“
Although no other human activity pushes individual emission levels as fast and
as high as air travel, most of us don’t stop to think about its carbon impact”.
Environment is not an issue discussed at too many Indian homes either. But what
of the schools which teach environment conservation in classrooms. Do they
engage in the flight and train travel debate from this lens, or take the easier
way out?
We also
need to ponder whether, in today’s time, when ‘pedestrian’ stands for ‘mediocre’
or ‘mundane’, we take up flights to reflect our status in our society, or on
account of peer pressure. In other words, if one is well endowed financially,
trains are passe.
The clichéd
line that we save time if we take flights as opposed to trains, makes little
sense in most cases, like clichés do. The questions we could ask are - What do
we then do with the time we save? How do we put to use the time we get in
trains? In this case time together as a group outside our ‘regular’ space.
Trains
present challenges as well – these include dirty toilets and rowdy
co-passengers. However, like our society, a lot has changed with trains too, during
recent times, and for the better.
Coming
back to the parent’s suggestion I still wonder on the point of students’ taking
multiple flights, each way, to reach Dehradun and then moving by road, to trek
in the hills.
Previous
pieces on school trips with The EDGE
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