Sonam Wangchuk - excellent educator
In India, only a handful of the millions of students applying get to attend their dream universities, and unsuccessful applicants are often branded as failures. Worse, many so-called failures often find no place at all in the conventional education system. But high up in the Himalayas there is an educational institute where failure is the sole criteria for admission. Sonam Wangchuk is its creator. By Prerna Shah.
Leh, India. August 2020. Sonam Wangchuk was born in the remote village of Uleytopko, Ladakh, a cold desert region on the flanks of the Indian Himalayan region. Till the age of seven, he climbed trees, helped his mother in household chores, and learnt how to grow food and fleece sheep. Then he went to school. But there, he struggled to make sense of what was being taught; he was both unfamiliar with the language of instruction – Urdu or English – and utterly unable to master dictated rote learning. He was written off as an incompetent.
Dejected at being repeatedly ridiculed by his teachers and peers, he moved to Delhi where he joined a new school. Here, more approachable and supportive teachers transformed his education. He went on to fund his own education through coaching classes, eventually studying and graduating in mechanical engineering. But he was very much in the minority; at the time, less than 5% of the students managed to pass the secondary exam in Ladakh.
“I was convinced that it could only be the system that was failing and not the students”, he says. “Sometimes a gentle nudge or an encouraging word is all that is required in a child’s world.”
Years later, he returned to Ladakh, armed with the resolve to reform the education system. Teachers there were still often untrained and their key teaching aid was the ‘stick’. Worse, the books used spoke of elephants and tigers and not of yaks and snow leopards, monsoon rains but nothing on snow and glaciers. He realised also that many of the pupils could answer most questions in Ladakhi language. “Imagine knowing everything and still failing. I had to change this", he says.
Learning through doing. Courtesy SECMOL.
In 1988, he formed the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) and took local teacher training to another level with 10-day intensive sessions. These introduced attitudinal change among teachers and pushed for locally relevant, child-centric, experiential learning. Over time, the pass rate rose from a measly 5% to more than 75%.
“Our SECMOL Alternative Institute campus runs like a little country that has its own elected government that changes every two months. It has its own newspaper, a radio show, and even its own time zone that runs one hour ahead of the Indian Standard Time. It is the easiest way to get teenagers to sleep early and get up before sun-rise,” Wangchuk chuckles.
At the Institute, so-called failures from the conventional education system arrived as lost and confused souls who are gradually motivated to introspect, understanding and prepare for the reality of failure and to learn essential life skills. Not just academic subjects.
“The campus is off-grid and the sun is used for cooking, growing vegetables in the greenhouse, lighting, electricity, water heating and pumping. Even the cows in the campus live in solar heated cow-sheds,” Wangchuk says. Practical, home-developed innovations are an integral part of the school. It is built with mud and heated by solar energy. In winter when the outside temperatures drop below -15⁰C, the interior is a comfortable +15⁰C. Another unique invention is the Ice Stupa artificial glacier that provides a much-needed solution to the problem of water scarcity in Ladakh’s high-altitude desert.
Wangchuk’s Ice Stupa. Courtesy Ciril Jazbec.
By making use of high-school physics, plentiful winter runoff water that would otherwise go waste is piped into the valley and made to flow out like a fountain. It rapidly freezes in the -20 to -30⁰C outside air and creates a mountain (stupa) of ice that melts slowly in late spring when farmers need it the most. Wangchuk’s prototype supplied 1.5 million litres to 5000 saplings planted by locals. Today, more than 30 local villages have built ice stupas, and the invention has even been implemented in the Swiss Alps.
Wangchuk has recently launched the first university in Ladakh called the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives (HIA). This aims to acquaint people with local challenges and empower them to devise sustainable solutions. Apart from academics, each school of the university has live labs where students work on real-life projects. “The School of Sustainable Tourism runs high-end, solar-heated, mud-built hotels and homestays. The School of Sustainable Architecture is developing a smart green city around the university. And the School of Environmental Studies undertakes projects to combat climate change,” Wangchuk explains.
Many so-called failures from the conventional education system have gone on from SECMOL with its innovative approach to become entrepreneurs, film makers, teachers, and ministers in the government.
Wangchuk, engineer turned education reformer, aims to replace the 3R’s approach to education – Reading, W’R’iting, A’R’ithmetic – with a more holistic 3H’s approach. He brands this the 3H’s: Head, Hands and Heart mantra, and continues in his quest to embolden the young and inspire them to chase excellence, rather than mere success. The value of this approach was underlined in a dramatic way when, in 2016, he became only the second Indian ever to win the Rolex Award for Enterprise.
“Without skilled hands, education is useless and without a kind heart it can even be dangerous”, he says, and questions the people who raise eyebrows at his return to his native villages in the mountains instead of carving out a lucrative career in the city.
"I am surprised when people talk of me sacrificing a career. Sacrifice is giving up something you enjoy doing. I have not sacrificed anything," he smiles.