A mountain school and Wangchuk’s experiments with educational reforms
If you have watched the film 3 Idiots, you may remember the school where Rancho was finally found. The school is SECMOL, the Students’ Educational
If you have watched the film 3 Idiots, you may remember the school where Rancho was finally found. The school is SECMOL, the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh, founded by Sonam Wangchuk, who has been more famous as a climate activist than as an educationist. SECMOL, nestled in the mountains of Phey village in the Indus Valley, about 18 km from Leh, is perhaps best known in popular culture as the campus associated with the film’s closing scenes. Most important, it lets us peek into a window of Mr. Wangchuk’s four-decade engagement with education, long before his hunger strike, supporting Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), brought him back into the spotlight. Wangchuk co-founded SECMOL in 1988 after returning to Ladakh following his studies at the Institute of Technology, Srinagar. The organisation emerged from a belief that the region’s education system was failing Ladakhi children because it had little to do with the place they lived in. The campus itself reflects that philosophy. There are no uniforms or rigid classrooms. Learning is experiential, and students spend as much time solving practical problems as they do reading textbooks. Building ecological toilets, designing solar-heated buildings, and learning sustainable ways of living are treated as part of education rather than extracurricular activities. According to SECMOL, the roots of Ladakh’s education crisis lay in a system detached from its linguistic and geographical realities.
Until Class 8, children studied in a non-Ladakhi language, unfamiliar to many Ladakhi students, before shifting to English in secondary school. Textbooks printed in Delhi described ships, oceans, coconut trees, and the monsoon — the references that meant little to children growing up in the high-altitude cold desert. The organisation points to poorly trained teachers, frequent transfers, and almost no community involvement in government schools. Parents often did not know they had the right to question how schools functioned. Around 95% of students from government schools had been failing the Class 10 Board examinations every year in the late 1980s, according to SECMOL. Operation New Hope It was against this backdrop that SECMOL launched Operation New Hope in 1994, bringing together the State Education Department and village communities in an attempt to reform government schools. The reform effort worked simultaneously on classrooms, teachers, and communities. The organisation formed village communities to give parents a formal role in running schools and holding them accountable. SECMOL trained nearly 1,000 committee members in school governance, planning, and financial management. It trained teachers in child-centred and activity-based learning. Working with government teachers and education experts, SECMOL developed textbooks and teaching material rooted in Ladakh’s landscape and culture. Instead of distant examples, the books featured familiar people, places, and experiences, making it easier for children to learn English without feeling alienated from their surroundings.
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