The Two Million Minutes Blog

Visit To Indian Government School - Bangalore

As part of my New Year's trip to India, I spent a day at a Government K-12 school in Bangalore. Half of India's urban children are educated in Government schools, which are remarkably similar to US urban public schools - strong teacher's union, lower teacher qualifications, worn out facilities, lighter curriculum, lower academic attainment and little parental involvement.  Indian private schools are substantially better in every respect. 

The key difference between India's urban schools and America's would be the children - these Indian children come from the slums of Bangalore yet all are in clean simple uniforms. Most work 2-3 hours (as laborers) before school and 2-3 hours after school. The school is a good bit rowdier than a private school but when I walked in the classroom every child jumped to attention and said "good day, sir." 

Their English is dramatically worse than the English of private school students of the same age because all classes except English are taught in the local language.

Oh, and when asked what they want to be when they grow up - fully one-half want to be doctors - "to help the sick people where I live" and one-third want to be software engineers. Of course, given a choice, all the boys wanted to be professional cricket players!

If I had to decide between sending my child to an urban US school or an urban Indian school - I'd have to pick India. It is decidedly not a very good education, but the US alternative is a clear second.

Let's Test The American's Cultural Adaptability

To film 2MM Chapter 2 - A Deeper Look at Indian Education and 2MM Chapter 3 - A Deeper Look at Chinese Education, we flew both the Indian and Chinese students to the United States for two weeks. Indianapolis, Chicago and Washington DC all tested their ability to acculturate to America. Both the Chinese and Indians easily blended into the comfortable U.S. lifestyle.

I wasn't so sure that two teenagers from Carmel, Indiana would find the reverse trip as easy. So we decided to test Neil and Brittany's acculturative abilities by taking them for 10 days to India  -- Bangalore, Jaipur, Agra and Delhi. For adult supervision, 2MM publicist extraordinaire, Liza Dittoe, accompanied them on the trip, as did I.

See the Acculturation Album to decide for yourself how they did. I must confess they were more adventurous and acculturative than I anticipated, as a few examples below illustrate:

India Embraces Two Million Minutes

In a country that reveres education I guess we shouldn't have been surprised by the large and warm welcome 2MM received. With the two U.S. students along, we screened the film at both IIT-Chennai and IIM-Bangalore to full houses of interested students and faculty. 

A press conference was held in Bangalore and more than 30 media outlets - TV, radio and newspapers - attended. The coverage 2MM garnered in one day in India (a country of 1.1 billion people) exceeded by far the coverage received in our best month in America all of last year.

Indians are deeply interested in education and they are particularly focused on China's K-12 education system, seeing the Chinese as their foremost competitors in the 21st century.