Dear All, Very Nice Thread and the one I like the most....Daily following it and have loooot of thoughts to put in here. Thats why took my own time to post my views here.
Different types of schools/organisations exist and their methods of bringing up the children or bringing out the soul hidden in each child. Knowing them and understanding them itself is a veryyyy big herculian , but intersting task.Even then we, or any one , cannot follow any of those thoughts, but only can get some ideas frm them and we, or whoever it is, should have their own idea of running it and their own methods and ways and even the goals differ. Auroville or Jiddu krishnamurthy rishi valley school or Rishi vidya gurukulam in bangalore and vizag, all these are tried and tested and succeeded organisations/institutions running schools with very high standards. But each of them has a different objective and goal and more than that, they are run by organisations that are internationally repute and in teh beginning they hav spent crores and even then they need lakhs to maintain and so they collect lakhs per year frm each student. (Auroville is an exception though for collecting fees) Its not just abt money I wanted to stress here but the actual thread we started is abt setting up a children home with self sustainablity as much as possible. Though Aurovile is one school which is self sustaining, it has a large base of volunteers/followers who believe in Sri Aurobindo and they come there for peace of mind and his blessings. i have been there couple of times.What I mean to say is that a strong force is working behind the organisation, that is the aura and the positive energy of Sri Aurobindo and his 40 or 50 years of sadhana/tapas. For us, I think it should start just as a small home helping kids to grow in a good and positive environment. We have to concentrate more on type of kids(which type of kids come in and how and where do we get them). this is more important bcoz, even to tune them to sit properly or to keep themselves tidy n clean, we need some time. Then they all will be of different age groups and of different classes(if at all some of them have attended school before) Again comparing this with the above great schools, there the parents are so much educated and even the children has some idea abt the organisation and the way it runs and what is expected frm them.Not in our case. What I wanted to conclude is, visiting great schools is indeed very good and surely we will learn lot more things and I will also join u all in that visit unless its around Aug 20th :((( . But I strongly believe for our concept Home to eb run by TMAD, there wont be much use. May eb we will be either confused or if we try to follow some of their procedures or methods, they will not suit us I feel. We better visit some small schools and Homes run by NGO s with different age groups together adn with different backgrounds that they have come frm. My father ran a school for school drop outs and he planned it to run very ideally but he had to face so many problems and finally he closed it after the first year. Though all the kids were rejoined to formal schooling stream after a year, the next year he dint continue it with new kids.I will write abt that in detail some where else. So we can visit such schools first and then orphan homes with different ages, classes, backgrounds and even govt run social welfare schools and hostels to know the problems there and then we will know what exactly to look for in our Home. Then we can have an idea what our Home will do. I am for it and we are going to start One very soon. As many in this thread said, I too had this idea and this is the only idea and goal I had through out my life............ One last info, Dr. S.R. Parimi of vikasa vidya vanam in vijayawada, left his profession in USA and he started a school in vijayawada 25 years back and still he is striving a lot to improve. After 25 years now he wanted to shift that 5 acre school campus to a 50 acre collective where a Live in school is being planned which will have kids frm urban area join with fees and live/study with teh kids of surrounding rural area and they work there. FIsheries, farming, diary, carpentry, etc are all part of their syllabus besides math n physics n languages. For this, he has been discussing planning frm the last 4 years. He too visited all those above said great schools of India. So lets start it in small scale and achive great heights and then we can emulate some of the best schools in the world Am not sure if I am clear!!!!!????!!!!!!!! Arunkanth T
