PLAYHOUSE School is a Delhi-specific phenomenon. It was started in 1955 by Padma Nanda, Julie Haddow and a parent, Helen Gordon, who wanted a ‘different’ school for her children. This novel school began as an experiment in innovative, unrestricted, proactive, learning. It flourished and grew under shady trees, in thatched sheds, open to the elements and to the winds of fresh thinking. It served as a catalyst and a torch bearer in the realm of early education. In 1958 Bimla Bissell returned from the US and took over the school.

Playhouse roamed all over Lutyens New Delhi, but through all its wanderings, never lost sight of its philosophy – the child is the centre of the classroom, not the teacher. The aim of the school was to create a warm, caring environment in which the child felt that school was a fun place to be. The close links between family/home/school were nurtured by having an atmosphere of ‘openness’, ideally suited to an outdoor environment. Parents were free to visit, stay, help, observe and give ideas. The strengths and talents of each child were explored, recognized and allowed to grow. There were no rigid routines or set patterns. Flexibility and an inherent respect for the child’s own drives to learn is what the school believed in. Weaknesses were never highlighted. Special programmes were created to help individual children overcome problem areas. One reason why the school was different and creative is that we had children from around the world, and programmes and stories were evolved to include different ways of thinking.

So what was special about Playhouse? Visualize this – brightly coloured chairs and tables scattered under trees, an ability to move from area to area in the garden seeking the sun or shade, the swings or sand. Motor, sensory and perceptive skills were developed through unstructured, informal but creatively thought out programmes. Workbooks using the child’s own experience and vocabulary were developed by the teachers and are still in use. Two special programmes were – a writing programme for children with difficulties and a reading programme that enabled children to ‘read’ even before they knew the alphabet. The child was exposed to a variety of experiences. Learning was through exciting discovery. Special care was taken to encourage self-reliance, develop language and articulation skills, and building self-confidence by always listening to the child. Physical coordination activities, creative programmes, storytelling, rhymes and ‘acting out’ were all used as learning tools. A variety of field trips were organized for hands on learning experiences.

Indian festivals are family events. Playhouse used all major festivals as learning grounds – involving children, parents and teachers. It was the first to stage an hour-long Ramlila with an entire cast of under five year olds. Santa Claus invariably visited the school at Christmas – sometimes riding a camel and sometimes in a horse-drawn buggy. Every spring there was a sports meet and family picnic – a participatory event for children, parents, grandparents, siblings and ayahs! A graduation ceremony replete with tasselled graduation caps and report cards as diplomas rounded off the academic year. ‘Graduates’ from Playhouse went forth into the world of ‘Big School’ with confidence.

The Playhouse School child is the core and ‘reason’ for the school’s existence. The strong bonds established have stayed with children through their growing years. This experience of a painless adjustment, bonding and memory of fun times made many come back to the school. We have a story that illustrates this: One afternoon a late duty teacher was waiting to close up for the day. In walked a blonde, blue eyed six footer – ‘I am looking for Playhouse School,’ he said. ‘Your found it,’ said the teacher. The young man looked around and said, ‘I remember it bigger, or perhaps I was smaller.’ He said he had landed in Delhi the night before and was visiting India after 20 years. The teacher asked, ‘How did you find us, how did you remember?’ And Thomas sang, ‘Oh do you go to Playhouse School, to Playhouse School, to Playhouse School on 21 Tughlak Lane…’

A special school needs special teachers. The Playhouse School teacher is young – not necessarily in years, but at heart. She knows how to laugh and smiles easily. She does not impose herself but gives the child space and freedom. She keeps the school’s philosophy in mind but lets her class day revolve around the child. She is the biggest resource of the school – creative, confident, committed and above all, warm and caring. She also thinks the school is a fun place to be.

The Playhouse School child is between two and five. Has just started to make the transition from the protected environment of the home to the wider vistas of play school. He learns to interact and bond with his peers and teachers and develops an awareness of the world around him. Most of all, the Playhouse School child is confident and happy and feels that school is a good place to be. He can face all school situations with equanimity and so takes the change to ‘Big School’ in his stride. Alumni from Playhouse School are contributing in all walks of life. They are economists and bankers, politicians and entrepreneurs, editors, journalists and TV anchors, film stars, film makers, script writers, directors and actors.

They teach and do research. They are development experts and World Bank executives. Chefs. Hair stylists. Photographers, tiger lovers and preservers, environmentalists. Lawyers, teachers and doctors. They are in government and fashion, in outsourcing and information technologies. Some are creative home builders. And some are still students.

We like to think that the school has played a part by laying the right foundation.

Shirley Prasad

tell me a story...

ALL we could see was tier upon tier of maroon-uniforms and the tops of a hundred small, black-haired heads. Bent over, with their eyes tight shut behind their hands, the children gazed upon a vast, alien plain covered in pink grass-like stuff that hummed softly, while a herd of strange tree-like creatures waved their tentacles from side to side, and warmed themselves by the light of twin suns that burned in the purple skies above while the gentle breeze brought the scent of… aloo tikki. The children had travelled at the speed of thought on a spacecraft powered by imagination and expertly steered by the voice of a wonderful new children’s writer called Vandana Singh.

Vandana had travelled, more prosaically, by Air India from Massachusetts where she lives, in order to conduct storytelling workshops with children from different schools in Delhi. She was also here to promote her book, Younguncle Comes to Town, published by Young Zubaan in March 2004, and to announce the sequel, Younguncle in the Himalayas (forthcoming April 2005). Her passion in life is for what she calls ‘imaginative fiction’ – stories that use the fantastic, that stimulate the imagination, which she believes to be one of the most powerful forces in the world – a force that is most abundantly present in young minds, and which needs to be nurtured, fed and cherished as they grow up.

She acted as hypnotist-cum-guide on this magical journey, far, far away from the sylvan setting of Sanskriti Anandgram where the children had assembled and off to a new planet where they could roam freely without ever taking a step. Bringing them back to earth, she asked, ‘How many of you really felt like you were somewhere else?’ A sea of raised hands was all the answer we needed to know that the imagination of these children was alive and kicking.

The sound of the human voice telling a story is a magical thing. There is something about the cadences, the nuances, the pace of storytelling that takes you out of yourself and into a new realm. It is a little like being hypnotised, I imagine, where you simultaneously exist in two places – the world around you doesn’t exactly disappear, but you experience it as though viewed through a different lens, as though the leaves and the houses and the roads are drenched in dreamlight. It severs and heightens the boundaries between the inner and the outer worlds. Our eyes, as Vandana reminded the children, are for seeing out with, but there’s another eye, ‘the eye of the imagination’ that also needs to be opened.

My friend, Shomubrata Choudhury, and I have been doing dramatized readings of one of Vandana’s stories at schools throughout the city, and it’s been an eye-opening experience for us too. A child’s attention is as slippery as mercury and about as hard to retain. For both of us, the challenge was to remain faithful to the ‘letter of the text’ whilst bringing alive the spirit behind it. Holding the interest of a hall full of jittery seven-year-olds is physically demanding: it requires a fair degree of jumping about, sudden shouts, urgent whispered asides, and such like. We stopped short of hand-springs and somersaults, but only just.

As the audiences became older, so the reception became… well… cooler. The enthusiastic glee of the under-tens, was replaced with the distant appraisal of teens. Walking the tightrope between childishness on the one hand and full-fledged, dull old adulthood on the other, Shomu and I often stumbled.

In the world of publishing, the term ‘teenager’ these days is definitely Out, whereas ‘young adult’ (or Y.A. for those in the know) is the In Thing. Also known as ‘crossover literature’, the marketing of authors like Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Mark Haddon and many others signals the publishing world waking up to the fact that adults read ‘children’s literature’ with as much – and sometimes more – glee than kids, and they have the purchasing power to go with it.

One group of young adults that we read out to were seriously underimpressed. The boys exchanged smirks, and the girls examined their fingernails. And yet, these were the same kids who lap up Terry Pratchett and his wild weird Discworld series, and love sci fi and fantasy novels like Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart and Dragon Rider. Perhaps it is just that having stories read out loud to you is such a quintessentially children’s thing – it sort of assumes that you can’t read yourself.

Maybe it’s only once one’s own childhood has receded sufficiently that one can indulge, unashamedly, in childish things. It’s taken me years and years to rediscover the joy of having someone read me a story. A little like really good theatre, listening to a story can be an intimate experience – unlike reading (to yourself) there’s always at least one other person involved, and it can become all the more powerful for having that sense of journeying together with a travelling companion to share the view. The bedtime story is a much undervalued art – for the closeness, the safety, the comfort, of sharing the twilight space between wakefulness and dreams is something too magical to lose in the long, eventful journey to adulthood. The challenge is to find another adult with the same convictions, with whom you don’t mind sharing your books, your thoughts and, more importantly, your pillow.

Anita Roy

A FEW crooked lines, dots and dashes, the child draws happily and with total concentration enjoying every moment of his or her creative effort. But after the work is finished he moves on to other things that catch his attention. But his parents are breathless with wonder and awe as they hold up their child’s creation. Every parent believes that his or her child is a budding genius, convinced that each crooked line their precious baby draws on the wall or on the floor is a masterpiece in the making.

‘Do you think you can arrange an exhibition of my son’s drawings, they are extraordinary.’ I often get such requests from young parents, their eyes gleaming with pride. ‘How old is this genius?’ I ask. ‘He is four, well almost four. Three years and four months,’ is the reply. Parents of this generation are so keen to push their children ahead that they forget that a child needs to be a child. He or she needs to play silly games, to ‘waste time’ watching an ant crawling home, the birds in the sky and scribbling rubbish on paper. But the minute a child shows any interest in art, his parents begin to see him as a future Husain. They file all his doodles, dating each one carefully so that when he has a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, they will be able to produce these works.

They cart the poor child to various art classes; he is taken to every painting competition and made to paint for a certain number of hours every day. The budding artist and every child is a gifted artist. But he soon begins to lose interest in painting since now it has become a thing he must do, like home work or brushing his teeth after eating sweets. The joy felt earlier when he just painted or drew for himself totally disappears and what was once a fun-filled activity, now becomes a dreaded chore. ‘Did you copy those old master paintings we got for you? You must do or else how will you improve? We have spent so much money on all these art materials – imported colours and pencils. You have not even touched them. Vivek next door is already finished a hundred paintings. Air India is sponsoring his exhibition in London. You are just useless.’ The child now hates the mention of art. He decides never to touch a paintbrush again.

In many ways privileged children suffer more from an overloaded childhood unlike children from less affluent families or from villages. There a child is left to amuse himself and often finds a broken pencil or a charcoal stick to play with. He draws happily all day long and his parents let him get on with it.

To ensure that the creative talent that lives within all children is not smothered at an early age, we must let the child carry on with what he is doing. When a child brings a paper with a few crooked lines drawn on it, he would like to tell you the story behind it. It is very important to listen to him. Then let the artist carry on working without any pressure. Though is it essential to encourage children when they paint, it should be done gently and with caution. Words of praise always improve a painting even for an adult artist. But praise should not be so extravagant that the child feels he has to perform brilliantly and win prizes for every painting he does. It may make him feel that this too is like schoolwork and not a joyous process. Every child enjoys the process of painting regardless of what the end result may be and they know, like very few adults do, how to really appreciate the creativity involved in the very act of putting paint on white paper. This childlike quality enables them to get the maximum benefit from any creative activity – be it drawing, painting or sculpture.

Only when a child works without pressure do the arts become a powerful learning tool, increasing his communication skills at various levels. They help build his concentration, encourage him to explore his surroundings and express feelings which may otherwise remain hidden deep within. Art activity is now considered a valuable part of a child’s education and to include an art room in a school is no longer just a luxury for privileged children.

Your son may grow up to be an artist or he may not. Your daughter might draw like Husain now, but she may want to become a doctor when she grows up. But if you allow your child total freedom to paint, throwing in just a little praise and no threats or bribes, s/he will always appreciate the innate joy of making art whether he or she becomes a painter, doctor, teacher or a scuba diver.

Bulbul Sharma