by Jhinuk Mazumdar

A bunch of children, who have made Sealdah station their home, sit huddled on a dhurrie spread out on a platform as a young priest teaches them.

A train rolls in and passengers stop amid the rush at the strange sight. The teacher waits patiently for the train to leave and the noise to die down before carrying on.

That was nearly five decades ago, soon after Brother Brendan MacCarthaigh had arrived in Calcutta from Dublin.

Since then, the Irish priest, now 78, has touched the lives of thousands of students on railway platforms, at street corners and in high schools.

He has authored books on teenagers, method of teaching, value education and devised a methodology called SERVE (Students’ Empowerment, Rights & Vision through Education) to help students explore and learn without being stifled.

MacCarthaigh was inducted into The Telegraph Education Foundation Hall of Fame at The Telegraph School Awards for Excellence 2016, presented by IIHM, on Saturday. “This award is a vindication of all that SERVE is doing,” he said at the awards ceremony.

Calcutta has been “an enjoyable challenge” for MacCarthaigh, “never the same, one day after another”. And, today, when he gets off a plane in the city, a voice within whispers “home at last”.

MacCarthaigh first landed in the city from Dublin in 1960, sent by the Christian Brothers headquarters.

The first of his many projects in Calcutta was in association with CINI Asha, where he would teach children on the Sealdah platform.

“Passengers would tumble out of the carriages and gather around to see a strange sight of children spread out on a dhurrie. I waited for the train to go away and the noise to subside,” he remembered. “It has remained much the same, in many classrooms you still have to wait for the blaring of horns to stop.” The railways later gave MacCarthaigh and his students a place on their premises.

It was during his stint as a teacher at St. Joseph’s, Bowbazar, that someone drew MacCarthaigh’s attention to the children on the streets. “I would finish my work around 2.30pm and did not have much to do till 7.30 the next morning, when school would start again. There were a lot of kids around who needed education. I got together a few adults and high school kids and started teaching at street corners.”

The initiative, however, had to be abandoned midway as local residents started creating trouble. Shifting the class to the St. George’s School compound did not work because the little ones had to cross two busy thoroughfares.

MacCarthaigh soon graduated from teaching children to building concepts and ideas. The SERVE system of education was born in 1996 out of the ingenuity of a person who was “never practical but had good ideas”. Egging him on were past pupils Rajesh Arora and Abbas Bengali. “The fact that the three of us were from three different religions was a way of telling us to keep religion out of our work,” the brother said.

The three were, in fact, inspired by Alor Pathe, a Bengali dance drama on the life of Edmund Rice, the founder of Christian Brothers. Rice was beatified in 1995 and the Christian Brothers headquarters, which had by then moved to Rome, asked MacCarthaigh to do something special in Calcutta to mark the occasion. “I was living in Beniapukur then and teaching at CINI Asha. I made contact with Father Saju (then Brother) of St. Xavier’s College, who had an MSc degree in Bharatanatyam. I requested him to tell the story of Edmund Rice through dance.”

It is MacCarthaigh’s students who inspired him to devise SERVE. One evening, a bunch of them dropped in at his apartment in Bowbazar and one of them said, “When you were teaching us, you told us that the education system would change but it didn’t.” That was the “sweetest music” to MacCarthaigh’s ears. And soon he, along with Arora and Bengali, started SERVE.

“Unlike teacher-centric education, SERVE is child-centric, where students get into teams and teach one another. They understand a topic together and learn cooperation, something not common in Indian classrooms,” he said. “In SERVE, teachers don’t teach. They come in only when students are stumped. Students aren’t bored and teachers not exhausted.”

SERVE was adopted by the State Council of Education Research & Training in Delhi for six years but met with resistance in Bengal. MacCarthaigh had approached private schools but despite several heads of institutions being eager, teachers seemed loathe to change. His message: “Statistics show that education gives children only knowledge, not life. Teachers should help children arrive at life and not just compete and disappear into obscurity.”

Calcutta, with its quirks and drawbacks, continues to charm MacCarthaigh. “As a city, it is not highly organised and it cannot be with a population of 18 million on the floor size of almost my native Dublin (where he travels once in three years). There are too many cars on the streets and processions, too, but people still pull up to let an ambulance pass. That is because this is a gentle city.”

(Source: The Telegraph)