Schools That Dream: Transforming Kerala’s Schools into Empathy Engines

Book excerpt: AN IDEA THAT HAS SPARKED A SILENT REVOLUTION: THE STUDENT POLICE CADET SCHEME, WHICH HAS CONVERTED SCHOOLCHILDREN INTO CHANGEMAKERS, POLICE PERSONNEL INTO ENABLERS AND SCHOOLS INTO INNOVATION HUBS. Students carried a voting machine to a remote community in Attappady, encouraging the indigenous community there to vote for the first time. Yet other schoolchildren set up and implemented a waste-management system that changed the village community’s attitude to plastic use and waste segregation. Student cadets set up an aqua-farming project that sparked innovation in their community. An idea could change lives: teaming up schoolchildren with police personnel, both partners in change, each one impacting and sensitising the other. This is the idea behind the decade-old Student Police Cadet, or SPC, scheme in Kerala. Today, over 12,000 schools across India have implemented the programme, of which 1,000 are in Kerala. SPC anticipated the need to move beyond the usual measure of success in schools—high marks, sporting achievements, debating competitions—and towards becoming innovation hubs. Young people would need to be engaged with the challenges of a fast-changing world, becoming changemakers and agents of empathy. When P. Vijayan took over as the police commissioner of Kochi, he was actively engaged in community participation programmes for the police force he commanded. It was in the course of this that he struck upon the idea of bringing schools and the police force together. Over the years, SPC has transformed the attitudes of the police men and women who have been part of it, just as it has the lives of students.