The "Antimbala" Quest Continues

Read and Lead

Discuss the final chapters of Every Last Girl and its core message.

Key Takeaways

• The “Antimbala” Quest Continues: Despite enrolling over 2 million girls, Educate Girls’ mission is incomplete. The Right to Education (RTE) Act covers only elementary School (Grades 1-8), leaving girls vulnerable to high dropout rates (40% by Grade 10) and limited life opportunities.

• The Secondary School Gap: The primary barrier to secondary education is infrastructure, not mindset. India has only 20 secondary schools for every 100 primary schools, making access to secondary education impossible for many rural girls.

• Authentic Storytelling Drives Change: Educate Girls’ success stems from the use of local “Team Balika” volunteers to share personal stories of transformation. This approach builds emotional connection and trust, which is more effective than data or external messaging.

• Call to Action: The group’s key insight is that the mission is personal. The most direct way to “find Antimbala” is for each individual to support the education of one person.

Topics

The Unfinished Mission: The Secondary School Gap

• The RTE Act mandates elementary education (Grades 1-8), but this is insufficient for life-changing opportunities.

• Dropout Rates:

  • Primary School (<1%)

  • Middle School (~4%)

  • Secondary School (~40% by Grade 10)

• Pooja’s Story (Jodhpur, 2024):

  • Dropped out in 9th grade due to early marriage and an abusive home.

  • Works daily from 3 AM to unload trucks and clean markets.

  • Cannot afford distance education (NIOS) due to high costs and travel to urban centres.

• Impact of Not Finishing Grade 10:

  • Bars access to 60-70% of skill/vocational courses.

  • Prevents securing formal bank loans.

  • Contributes to 81% of Indian women being unskilled, and only 42% in the labour force.

Educate Girls’ Strategy & Impact

• Scale: Expanded to 4 states (plan: 7 more in 5 years), reaching 30,000 villages and enrolling 2M+ girls.

• Quality Control:

  • Developed “Gyaan Ka Pitara” (repository of learning) with government teachers.

  • Uses “gold standard external audits” and Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) to measure impact.

• Proven Results:

  • Children in Grades 3-5 gain an equivalent of one extra year of learning.

  • Boys also benefit from improved teaching tools and shifts in community mindset.

• Technology: Uses Machine Learning to predict out-of-school girl numbers and target interventions.

Group Reflection: Education as a Right vs. Privilege

• Maira: Realised education is a privilege while helping a cook’s daughter practice English for an air hostess role.

• Akanksha: Noted the secondary school gap in rural Dehradun, but also shared a positive example of her father supporting her mother’s post-marriage education and career.

• Pushpita: Emphasised that family mindset is the key determinant. Cited examples of talented girls whose families arranged marriage immediately after Grade 12.

• Brinda: Highlighted the risk of education being seen as a credential for marriage, not a path to personal autonomy.

Next Steps

• All Participants:

  • Reflect on personal takeaways from the book.

  • Prepare to discuss specific examples of Educate Girls’ struggles and successes.

  • Consider how to support one person’s education.

• Brinda:

  • Continue efforts to invite author Safeena Hussain to the next session.

  • Facilitate the collation of group reflections to send to the author.
    
    FATHOM AI-generated notes

Need of an hour - update the curriculum of Mathematics and club it with the Logical Reasoning according to the Grade

There seems to be general agreement that the number of students who fail to get a genuine grasp of Mathematics is much greater than it should be, there seems to be confusion about the sources of the difficulty. Some blame the situation primarily on the inadequacy of the teachers and the educators; others blame it on the inadequacy of the mathematics curriculum.

Consequently, no one is in a good position to tell those who teach mathematics what to teach or how to teach it. Most teachers appear to conduct their classes without benefit of any theory whatever their instructions is unimaginatively tied to the textbooks and their chief concern is to “cover the ground” regardless of how the students may respond to the material presented.

An encouraging aspect of the general picture recently came into existence were various groups of Educators and Teachers have become actually aware of the plight of Mathematics education and hence are taking positive actions and are looking towards a remedy. NCERT (National Council of Education Research and Training) has successfully announced that the revision of the entire curriculum along with the books will be done by 2023. This is needed so as to achieve a better understanding of how children acquire mathematical concepts. 

In spite of a large number of books and material published on mathematical education, little is provided and is implemented by the students and the teachers. It is important to shed light on the ways in which mathematics actually can be taught along with keeping in mind the discrimination between the fact and fancy ways.

Many students who are apparently capable of doing well in Mathematics course fail to do so. However, there is a paucity of the experimental evidence on the cause of the student dropout and on the origins within the learner of unnecessary failures or incompetence in Mathematics. 

Teachers particularly in the elementary school, have comparatively little training in Mathematics and many of them know very little about the subject which makes it very difficult to know till what extent this deficiency is reflected in the competence of the student and hence slowly starts losing the interest. 

There is a very big question mark on the reason for the dropout, unnecessary failure and incompetence in Mathematics of the student. To deal with this, the elementary and the secondary school curriculum along with the pedagogy necessarily needs to be updated which will later help us in dealing with the dropout and failures. 

The subject matter to be taught should be decided according to the grade placement of the topics and the readiness of the learner. It should be mandatory and hence should be in-built in the new curricula to have experimental classes as well, where the teacher should teach their students how to connect Mathematics with the Real-life problems/applications. 

Mathematics whether on the elementary or the secondary level should be taught in a way that instead of dropping out, our country aims at having as many Mathematicians as possible as no field is complete without Mathematics.

The new course of study for teachers, new teaching methods and new curricula should be such so as to cover the entire syllabus of the competitive exams (Logical Reasoning) along with the syllabus of each grade.  If this could successfully be implemented and executed, the decrease in dropouts can be achieved. 

The main reason for the dropout in the elementary and the secondary level is lack of interest in Mathematics as it was never made interesting by the teachers and educators for their students. Every teacher is always caught up in completing the syllabus and evaluating the answer sheets and every student is always busy in practising the same not by the choice but due to the pressure of scoring marks.

To conclude I would like to say

If our new curriculum is designed so as to club the competitive syllabus (Olympiads like IMO, RMO, NTSE, KVPY) in the form of Logical Reasoning along with the syllabus, it would not at all be difficult for the students to crack any exam whether it would be at the school level or any high-level competitive exam as students always lack in the reasoning section and if we prepare our students for the same right from the elementary level- it won’t be difficult neither for the student to CRACK IT nor for the teacher to TEACH IT!

- Divyanshi Mehrotra <mehrotra.divyanshi@icloud.com>