In March 2019, Vishal Talreja, Cofounder, Dream a Dream was invited to be a speaker at GELP Israel 2019, an International Conference focused on discussing the latest developments and trends in Education globally. As part of his participation, he was interviewed by The Haaretz and his interview was subsequently published in Hebrew. Below is an English translation of his interview and the Hebrew version can be downloaded here.

Interviewer: Eyal Shani

Photographer: Tomer Appelbaum

Date: 15th March 2019

Vishal Talreja, cofounder of an organization for empowering children from disadvantaged sectors in India, says he was stunned by a visit to Finland and why there is no connection between success in school and success in life.

This is a dramatic transition – you were an investment banker and you decided to dedicate your life to working with children and youth at risk. Tell me how it happened.

I was born and raised in Bangalore, under very modest conditions. In fact, in poverty. We lived in a bad neighbourhood, but our family was exceptional. My father, who lost his father at the age of 13, managed to get an education and was a lawyer. My mother, who also came from a large family, was the only one in her family to graduate from college. She is a doctor. My parents taught themselves the importance of education, so even though there was no money in the house for luxury or toys, and my mother worked four jobs at the same time, they invested everything they had in our education. My sisters and I studied at the best schools in Bangalore. My parents taught us from morning to night that education is our key to getting out of poverty. It worked for them. I was an outstanding student. I managed to get to university, I could choose what to study and I chose economics. I started working as an investment banker. Then, as part of an exchange of students, I went to Finland and my life changed radically.

Why?

I had never left India before. I did not even know where Finland was on the map, but when I got there, I saw a whole different world than I had seen before. I realised that I, and any other child who wanted to advance in India, were under tremendous pressure from the first grade. If you want to go to high school or to college, you must be at the top of the class, but there is no place for mistakes but in Finland I saw students who continued their studies until their thirties, when they went to developing countries to volunteer and contribute. You look at education in a completely different way, as a goal rather than a means.

Education, for them, was a way to explore themselves, to experience and understand what they wanted to do in life. Suddenly I realized that this was a better and more correct way than the endless race for achievements. The second thing I saw in Finland, which shook my world, was the way they treat work. I made friends there with a hotel guard, and he invited me to dinner at his house. He lives in a beautiful apartment, in a good neighbourhood. I was in total shock. I just could not figure out how a hotel guard might have such a beautiful house. In India, someone who works as a hotel keeper can probably not afford to buy a nice apartment and live comfortably. He explained to me that in Finland the world of work is different and that the possibilities are open to all.

Once I was walking with a Norwegian guy who told me that there were no poor people in Norway. I knew that Norway was a rich country – but the idea that there was no poverty problem shocked me. For those who grew up in Israel, certainly for those who grew up in India, it seems completely disconnected – a safety net of the state and equal opportunity.

In India your honour is measured not only in economic status but also in religion and caste. The separation is so clear that even we, who lived in a bad neighbourhood, knew nothing about the woman who would clean our house. We had no contact with her class. In Finland there was no separation. They all had access to education and health services. Everyone lived with everyone. I remember writing in my diary: I want to go back to India and change the way we think about education and dignity. We must work with children to be like Finland.

An ambitious target. India is developing, but 30% of the world’s poorest children live in it. And you have no training in education.

An ambitious goal, but that was the beginning. I returned to India, gathered a few friends, talked to them about what I saw and understood, and established the DREAM A DREAM association. None of us had experience in education or in the establishment of associations. We found a mentor who guided us. We told her we wanted to work with poor children, and she gave us the best advice we could give. She said – do not try to solve the problem, just live it and understand it deeply. That’s what we did. We worked with orphans, HIV-positive children and cancer patients in shelters and poor communities. We just spent time with them. We took them for walks and movies. We flew kites. We talked.

And what do you understand about the situation you did not know before?

The depth of prejudice and fear. HIV-infected children were completely assigned to the shelter home. We tried, for example, to do an art workshop for them, and when the gallery owner discovered that they were sick children, he would not rent us the space. To our amazement, we discovered that the same prejudice exists for children with cancer. Whose parents hide them from their neighbours, because they fear that the community will expel them and force them to leave the building. We tried to make a summer camp for children – to connect middle-class children with distressed families – and the parents of middle-class, enlightened and educated people told me, “We are not ready for our children to spend time with street children.” We understood that the right way to act was to explain, to dispel the ignorance and to try to bring these children closer to the community.

You know, there is a lot of research literature on the failures of associations. About how the authentic desire to help does not fit the reality on the ground and sometimes even hurts people. You chose to go the other way. The so-called grassroots movement.

Anyone who wants to change must understand what he stands for. We must not think we know better than the people we want to help or judge their choices. At the beginning of the organization, we worked with young children who were drug addicts. During one of the workshops, we gave them a question that guides one of the children, “Why are you actually using drugs?” And he replied, “You do not really want to know the answer.” The facilitator insisted, “Look, I live in the street, I eat from cans, rotten and disgusting food that other people have thrown in. The only way I can eat the food is when I’m drugged, and I do not smell it and it does not disgust me. In the night, all kinds of boys come up to me from gangs or other homeless people and abuse me, policemen beat me with clubs in the middle of the night to get up and walk away from where I sleep, the only way I can get through the night is when I’m drugged and when I wake up in the morning I do not remember what happened to me at night”. This is the life that this 14-year-old must live. So, who am I going to judge his choice to take drugs? What right do I have to decide right/wrong? I must respect his choice, out of a deep and intimate acquaintance with the circumstances of his life. Only then, perhaps, can I try to drive change. It’s a long process. We have existed for 19 years, and we are far from understanding the full context. We still peel more and more layers of the problem.

Your model seems interesting – you strive to influence not only the individual child, but also the environment, the ecosystem and society.

We want to provide children with a better life, so naturally, the child is at the center. In the first ten years, we worked directly with children through two main programs. For children – post-school frameworks, specializing in art or sports, through which we also taught them skills such as problem-solving, teamwork, etc. For youth ages 15 to 18, we built a program designed to prepare them for a functioning adult life. The children and adolescents in our program grew up in distress and deprivation, without a responsible adult who would satisfy their emotional needs and enable them to develop and acquire life skills. They do not know, for example, to deal with conflicts. When they encounter something that did not work for them, they simply leave it, often in anger and aggressiveness. We taught them to contain conflicts. to cope. Clarify their position. negotiate. In both programs, we managed to reach 10,000 children a year. In a country like India, it is a drop in the ocean. But we decided not to try to increase the number of children,

Which, as noted, is the environment.

Ultimately, the child’s quality of life is determined by his environment. By parents and teachers. We decided to start working with teachers. We understood that the reason children persist in our frameworks is that we respect them and care for them, not because we distribute football shirts. We tried to understand how we can make teachers create such an atmosphere in class. Childhood is a period of insecurity and fluctuation. The presence of a stable adult who provides emotional confidence to the child, who does not judge him, teaches him to be creative – can make all the difference. So, we built a program designed for teachers. To teach teachers to be the attentive and empathetic adult in the classroom. This is a program that 8,000 teachers in India have already learned. But even that, of course, is not enough for a problem like poor children. We moved to the next level – an ecosystem. And there, of course, the main player is the government. We approached government agencies and suggested that we help them promote children to the 21st century. That is how we created the so-called “Happiness hour”

What is?

Most children, especially those who come from weaker families, do not like going to school. They are afraid of teachers. These are children who do not feel loved and desirable in their homes and not in their community. We decided that school could be their safe place. All the children in the program, from the age of kindergarten to the age of 14, start the day with a Happiness Class which is dedicated to practising Mindfulness, stories, emotional play, creativity. More than a million children in Delhi alone begin their day like this.

You have succeeded in making a change in the ecosystem as well.

Yes. We are already working in five states within India. This is the third level.

And that brings us to the fourth level. The mindset.

Yes. This level has not yet been broken, I admit.

It is possible?

I believe so. I think that a change in policy does not change the consciousness. If you want to create a society that is based on respect and on the perception that every job respects its employee, it is necessary to change consciousness. This will happen when parents realize that their children do not go to school to learn multiplication and division, but to be better people.

This already corresponds to another insight – we understand that the education system has finished its traditional role. The children no longer need the school to give them knowledge. The education system must focus on other directions – values. Social skills. Flexible thinking. Human values. Interpersonal interaction. These things are more important than ever. If you take a surgeon from a hospital in the 19th century and place him in an operating room in a hospital today, he will not know what to do. But if you take a teacher from the 19th century and land him in the classroom today – he’ll work out.

It seems obvious to us all that a child should go to school. This is a social norm. A hundred years ago it did not exist at all. It is time to rethink how we perceive education. What education do we ask our children? What is the purpose of the school’s education? For me, the goal is for the child to grow up to be a good person. To lead a meaningful life. Be productive and contribute within his community. But people do not see it that way. People are educated as knowledge – children think so, parents think so, teachers think so and governments think so. Under these conditions, it is impossible to create change. We need to think of education as something transformative.

It is difficult to prepare the children for the future and the labour market, where many of the professions in which they have not even been invented.

India already has a surplus of talented and educated people who simply do not have jobs for them. Since we do not know what reality our children will function in, we need to focus on their life skills. Adapting to a changing and deceptive reality. No one can tell his child today – you will learn, you will achieve and become an engineer. There are not enough jobs for engineers today, and no one knows if this profession will exist at all in 20 years.

What else did you learn in your laboratory?

Young people growing in the 21st century is already different from us – they are more suited to life in this age. We somehow think we understand better than them, but that’s just not true. I see the change in our laboratory, in front of my eyes. It really is a different generation. In my generation and in my parents’ generation we were focused on what we wanted and in the different ways to achieve it. The young people I see today do not think only of themselves. They want to make a change in their communities. Change in the world. Many of the children who grew up and changed in our organization come back to give back to society.

There is, for example, a girl who came to us when she was 14. A girl who was severely abused at home by her father. She joined our football program and was very successful. It helped her build an identity. She had changed from an insecure and anxious girl to a determined young woman. At the age of 18, she returned to us and asked to be a facilitator. We hired her, and she worked at the school where she was a student. Since she knew the neighbourhood in depth, she knew that one of the problems there was that the children did not have a playground. She decided to change it. She met with politicians and community leaders, she built an entire campaign and managed to harness more and more people to her struggle. In the end, one of the community’s wealthy agreed to give her free space. She has got additional donations from various philanthropists. I cannot even imagine how I felt when she invited me to the beautiful big playground that was born inside her head. She had no money. She had no connections. But she managed to change people’s lives. If we succeed in harnessing young people to change in their community, we can all move forward.

You talk about communities, but most people no longer live in a communal society.

This is a very individualistic society. There is no doubt. That is why we need cooperation between education leaders from around the world. Let them talk to each other. To conduct studies together. Each of whom will contribute his experience and coping methods so that we can all join hands in this important front – shaping education in the 21st century.

You know, I often interview social activists. I always try to understand how a person who encounters a problem of this magnitude decides that he, the little one, will try to solve it. Is it a matter of personality? Of the need for meaning?

The need for meaning is certainly one of the things that drive me. In addition, in the past 20 years, I have seen so many young people changing the world, and I perceive my role not as a person who makes a change, but as a person who supports those who make a difference. Look, the road was not easy. It is not easy yet. There were crises. There were moments of doubt in myself, in what I chose to do. The erosion is tremendous. I needed psychological treatment because I had difficulty carrying this emotional burden and was depressed. I do not know exactly the answer to your question. I think about it while I’m talking, but I think I’m afraid to despair. Despair frightens me. The thought of hopelessness frightens me. As long as I’m so afraid of it, I can keep going.

You came here to lecture at the GELP International Education Conference. What can we learn from your experience in Israel?

When I travel around the world, the initial insight that follows me – no matter where I am and in which culture – is that where there is poverty and deprivation there is also distress and failure in development. Children who come to school and behave violently, or do not cooperate, or exclude themselves, have apparently experienced some distress during their development and are the ones that prevent them from thriving. You must understand that there is not really a child who just does not want to learn. When they understand this, it will be possible to try to formulate a response.

There is an over-diagnosis of ADHD today.

It’s dangerous. This is the system’s way of dealing with someone who is not suited to it. I do not think so many children really have attention deficit disorder. I do not think the problem is with them. The problem is in a system that finds no way to interest them or challenges them and turns to the easy way of diagnoses and medications.

What would you advise the government? For decision makers?

I have been advising governments for several years now. Anyone who is looking for change should engage with the government. Governments have the means. I think a government, no matter what country, should listen to the associations that work in the field. NPOs have insights and maybe even solutions, but they do not have the ability to make a big-scale change. We, in India, have reached a million children thanks to the government. In the same way it will be possible to reach tens and hundreds of millions of children in all countries. Each country has other difficulties, but many of the obstacles are universal. If we all join hands, we can reach the common goal – that children thrive and can drive change in the world.

These are big words. Inspirational but great. Many parents who read this, I suppose, will identify deeply, but tomorrow their child will go to the regular school, as every day.

Parents must understand that a successful child in school is not a successful child. They must ask themselves what life they want for their children and if the school leads them there. If the parents begin to create a supportive emotional environment for their children, if they understand that the school’s role is to instil values and a worldview, if they decide not to send their children to school until there is a change, the system will have to change and adjust. Do not ask for school achievement or good place in the national rankings. Ask him to teach the children about empathy. About the ability to deal with challenges and difficulties. Ask him to help you make your child be a better person. Do you know what my biggest dream is?

Tell me.

Close the organization. Not that we failed – but that we succeeded. Because we solved the problem. Because we succeeded in bringing about social and conscious change.