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Citizenship: An Essential Skill

Schools today often have a very academically focused curriculum, with the only exception being extracurriculars. The school I have been going to for the last eight years has consciously chosen to break that stereotype by integrating citizenship, or as it’s called in the older grades, “persistence,” into our syllabus, treating it with equal importance as other schools may treat lessons or academic education. The course is designed in such a way that for the first five years (grades three to seven) each grade follows a given idea for its citizenship program, such as fundraising for Akshaya Patra, going through an “Agarbatti Experience” to empathize with and help child laborers, partnering with a center for specially abled children, and even more.

Having had this requirement of citizenship, or, as some call it, “social work,” ingrained in me at such a young age has prominently altered the way I look at the world. I feel as though introducing something so important to being a good human in today’s world can radically change society, something I can say confidently because I personally have felt my perspectives change. Every time we go out onto the streets, instead of ignoring those less privileged than I am, as I used to do previously, I try my best to help them or think of ways to do so. Although it may result in nothing, the quality of empathy is something that is so very key to humankind and is something I strongly believe in.

Observation is the first step to being a good citizen, although unfortunately it’s probably the most overlooked. I’ve noticed that a lot of the time people don’t have the patience or the time to take a step back and view the “problem” as a whole. The second step, based on my learning, is to create a goal, or a “best-case scenario,” as we call it in school, and design a process you want to work toward. The third step is the one that everyone always skips to, the “do.” However, I do feel as though this step is the least important; how can you have a prominent and effective “do” if your process isn’t well formulated in the first place? My school follows this FIDS (feel- imagine-do-share) process as a part of its citizenship program, something I feel is highly beneficial to the entire process by giving it a concrete structure.

Coming into the eighth grade, we are allowed to choose our own “persistence” program, an idea that we have to persist with for the next five years of our schooling. After being told what to do for five years, having the opportunity to choose our own programme was immensely empowering, almost as if giving us a taste of the real world where being a good citizen is our own choice, not pre-structured into our routine. I chose to work with the local Red Cross and went there every Sunday to volunteer with the patients. This continued for a year, but after the pandemic everything was switched offline. To be very honest, at this moment I had given up on persistence. I felt as though we couldn’t do anything online. But this is where the school prevailed. They gave us an opportunity to work with Teach for India (TFI) students and help them with their English grammar. Although it felt strange at the time, there was something incredibly rewarding about the weekly calls I had with my buddy for that year.

Citizenship, I’ve learned, isn’t a skill that is inherently in us; it’s something that we must develop. It’s a skill and a quality that can only be brought about by constantly being reinforced and evolved through the years, which is why it’s essential to all education systems. I’m genuinely grateful that the school I go to is one where citizenship is treated as equal to academics and isn’t shunned even during exam season or the school break.

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Adya is a 15-year-old student at the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India. You can often find her lost in her own world, reading a book and listening to music!