Mahatma Phule pioneered social and educational reforms to create equitable and inclusive society: A paper accepted for national seminar at Kurukshetra

The paper of this blogger "Towards Truth Seeking Society via Phules' Community Based Schooling: Equity and Inclusion Insured" was accepted for a two-day national seminar “Towards Satyadharma: Appraising Jyotirao Phule, His Reformation Movement and Legacies” held on 7-8 April, 2025 at Kurukshetra University (KU), Kurukshetra (Haryana) which was organised by the University's Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Chair at sponsored by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), New Delhi.

It may be mentioned that on April 11, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule's jayanti is being celebrated to highlight his social reform movement against caste discrimination, struggle for women’s empowerment and expanding education among women and marginalised sections of society. His vision and legacy of an egalitarian, equitable and inclusive society should become the guiding force for creating India as beacon of unity in diversity.

The abstract of Dr Kishore's paper goes as follows.

The education model developed by Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and his wife Savitri Phule combines two elements of education, namely, community based schooling aiming social transformation and feminist pedagogy stressing group learning. In a society full of diversity and varied learning styles of children, the model emphasizes learning with community inputs in a non-competitive learning environment emphasising group learning as a part of classroom processes. The model has been tried in small school settings with vertical grouping with community as the main stakeholder in organizing and monitoring the school. An adapted model has been tried for running bridge schools in project mode earlier on early 2000s in rural Jaipur and Tonk districts. However, the problem is the mainstreaming such a model though in project mode it seems to work well. The content analysis of the reports on the Phules' model indicates the success of the model in educational activism format. The implication is that unless the teacher education courses train the prospective teachers in the Phules' model, it could be mainstreamed and can work as a viable model in small school settings in remote and tribal areas. Since, the NEP-2020 promises universal school education through flexibility, innovation and creativity, there seems to be the need of institutionalizing Phules' education model among the children of marginalized and remotely located communities.

Keywords: Community based education; educational activism, feminist pedagogy, Phules’ educational model, small schools, social transformation