The Day Boarding School being set up by PYDS is addressed to meet the needs of the poor living in the rural area of this State of Uttarakhand. The experiment has been limited to a small number and embraces about 200 children at the present time.
It is not intended to provide just ‘some’ education but excellence in education to these disadvantaged.
The idea is to pick up children for the purpose of imparting comprehensive education from the pre primary stage to the higher secondary school stage and thereafter make them capable of competing with the more advantaged citizens of the country and seek intellectually challenging occupations. The hope is that in this manner, leaders capable of transforming this Community would be born from among the locals.
In the choice of the candidates for admission for these quality educational inputs, we are now careful to identify:
(a) Poverty, so that the scheme is not hijacked by the comparatively better endowed. (b) Academic potential, so that the resources garnered by the Society are not frittered away on children incapable of absorbing the range of expensive inputs that we seek to provide. The fact is that there are a very large number of such children awaiting attention
(c) an enlightened home in which the parents are keen to provide their all to make sure that their wards will excel through education.
This is an attempt at encouraging the best in the Society and helping the intellectually strong. In that sense this is an elitist school.
In setting up this Institution we were convinced of its need, since Government schools in our area do not even aim at such excellence capable of stimulating the best in their outstanding wards. Alternate schools or private schooling is mostly driven by the profit motive and therefore target the wealthy and not necessarily the intellectually endowed. The poor and the marginalized are thus condemned to a second rate education in either government schools or poorly run private schools. Good schooling is expensive and the poor deserve it and this country needs it if we are to empower the rural community. Leaders of these communities will emerge if the best among them are chosen and nurtured through excellent schooling.
The curriculum is meant to include all elements necessary for the complete growth of the child. The Society encourages the child to live in their own home and carry the influence of the school into their home. The working hours of the school are long since it seeks to provide the child fun and games in addition to academics. Holidays are very limited and do not include the conventional breaks that all schools observe for winter and the summer. These additional periods of time are used to provide the Extra Academic inputs, which are considered as important as the academic.
This is therefore a model in which we as an NGO are attempting to garner private participation in the running of an excellent Institution for the poor, in a situation in which there is a vacuum needing to be filled. Our goal is not universalisation of education although we are not questioning that idea. Our challenge is to help rural parents who are incapable of affording an education that transforms personality, through child cantered pedagogy respectful of the child’s physical, mental, emotional and social needs.
This is a poverty alleviation programme but seeks to achieve the goal in the long term through leaders that the initiative will create. This is a model where private capital is sought to be used through an NGO that has good governance prescriptions. This is an alternate private school that is not low cost (no wasteful expenditure though), run for no-profit but seeking excellence by addressing the elite of the Community. Every member of its management is expected to provided their services and time not merely free but with a monetary contribution.
This school seeks to address the physical needs of the children through attention to their nutrition, their medical needs, and immunization, sports and yoga. Attention to their emotional needs is supported through music, arts, dance and drama. The mental health is addressed through a well equipped library, awareness of the environment and through access to values. The effort is to constantly improve our methods and evolve steadily towards excellence.
——-G.K Swamy
