Street Children and Their Response to Schools

Todays, Every child responsible to make the educated person like this type incident, a child is old six years that is name of Akshay, fled his nomadic community in 2001, boarded a train that took him from Siliguri railway station to Kolkata. Today, he is a student of Class III in Bethoni Convent School and an inmate of Snehalaya, a home for care and rehabilitation of the young at risk in Guwahati, thanks to Father Lukose Cheruvalel, the director of the institute. While Father Lukose has a sound reason to keep a constant vigil on his study, Akshaya fails to understand why everybody in the institute is constantly monitoring him. In a discrete meeting that his Father held with his teachers, he shared with them” Madhukata, is a nomadic community that he belongs to.

The community moves around from place to place in search of a livelihood. If everything goes alright, is going to be the first literate person of his clan -. This is why I always keep a special eye on his progress. Akshaya was a street child who was picked up by Father Lukose and taken to Snehalaya - A refuge for street children. At first, the child had a feeling of staying in 'captivity'. Then after 6 months came the improvement. An average performer in his class, he can now read an English story or poem. Giving education to a child of a nomadic clan that moves about on the streets was a challenging task.

The term ‘street children’ is usually applied to children under the age of 18, who either live or make a living on the streets. Many children have family connections, but others are simply abandoned or choose to run away from home, often due to domestic violence. The transient lifestyle of street children makes it extremely difficult. The United Nations estimates that there are at least 140 million children living on less than a dollar a day on the streets in India's major cities.

The Street children are highly concentrated in developing countries with struggling economies so the majority of them are illiterate, have either never been enrolled, or have dropped out of the formal education system, and it is difficult to secure funding for the kind of informal education which suits street children’s lives. The lack of education and educational opportunities make street children particularly vulnerable to trafficking, child labor, sexual abuse, exposure to HIV/AIDS and other STIs, and police violence. As plastic takers (rag pickers), beggars, street vendors, tempo boys, these street children don't have a very positive image on the public.

They are called rude names. Some of them become thieves and are considered social parasites. Their dirty language, shabby clothes and refusal of any social constraints makes the general public think that street children are basically and internally unsocial persons. However, the best part about these street children is their high level of flexibility…to adjust with the minimum. They can sleep anywhere, eat anything and have no demands out of life. They can’t afford to have an ego, like ordinary children and are quick thinking to find out how to survivors. It is this attitude that makes street children the survivors that they are.