Rajalakshmi Parthasarathy, popularly known as Mrs. YGP, has always been a rebel. When, as a youngster, she came face-to-face with Mahatma Gandhi, she cross-questioned him. “I was introduced to him and he sarcastically asked me, ‘Do you know Hindi?’ and so I asked him back, ‘Do you know Tamil?’”Everybody was shocked. The Mahatma wasn’t. “He just laughed it off,” she recalls, “He didn’t get offended that I had defied him.”
It was this same rebellious streak that made her start a school — Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan, in Nungambakkam. “We were imitating the Anglo-Indian system of education blindly,” she says. “We were forbidden from asking ‘Why not?’ Also, from following the system of study from the British period, we had lost all respect for our culture. We spoke indifferently and very low about it. I was determined to do something about it.”
It was this determination that led her on to become one of the city’s leading educationists. A good teacher, she feels, is one who gives students a chance to come up with original ideas. “If you give them freedom, they are able to be very imaginative. Take history, for example, which is considered boring because of the way it is taught. What if a student was told to think about the day in the life of a soldier; if he was convinced about the cause of war. That would lead to a lot of healthy exchange of ideas. Teachers are, ultimately, learners.”
Mrs. YGP, who is set to turn 90 this year, is still sprightly and tuned in to the education needs of the time. The system should be improved in a way to make it more employment-friendly, she feels. “It should be application-oriented and not knowledge-oriented,” she says. “Fearing exams, children sometimes reproduce chunks of knowledge, without understanding how it can be applicable to everyday life. I remember a time when we were teaching geometry in a class and a boy questioned the teacher about the method of solving a problem. The whole class was shocked, but he went ahead to propose a whole new way to complete the same problem. That was original, and the teachers enjoyed it. That’s real joy for any teacher.”
Her latest methodology in teaching, something she’s quite kicked about, is to give students broad areas to study and make them set questions from them. “Once that’s done, they exchange it and answer them. Setting the paper and the nature of questions, something that gives the child a sense of pride, holds 50 per cent weightage. The rest is for answering them.”
Mrs. YGP is also often credited with having introduced women into the teaching profession in the city’s education system. “I once asked a student, ‘Why don’t you rebel against women teachers?’ and he said, ‘We feel sorry for you. You have improved your family life and are trying to come to school to improve ours.’ The kind of camaraderie between a teacher and student is very important; it should slowly build a foundation.”
It’s to improve this very camaraderie and reflect the Indian spirit that her students say, ‘Shri Gurubyo Namaha’, instead of the routine ‘good morning’ greeting. “Mornings and afternoons will be good, provided you make them so, right?”
