~ selenghat valley school & education as freedom ~
As the development of our website is not nearly as complete or rich as the innumerable details of our work, we offer in this page only a glimpse of our school while inviting the reader to our repository of deeper references such as our reports & journals, concept note (2019), video documentaries Our Story, People, Principles & Philosophy (2021), Glimpses of Freedom & Offerings of Peace (2023). Our CV contains additional deeper references of our work spanning various awards & recognitions to references in external media, publications, as well as other websites & blogs.
Selenghat Valley School, a school for the people, by the people, has been the fountainhead for our vision, path, and principles of action and, as such, is built & run entirely by our rural community to deeply explore & develop the model for education as freedom*, and in the process also for larger development as freedom*. The school started in 2020 with 79 children in grades Nursery to UKG and has grown to 160 children from Nursery to Class 5, and it planned to add a new class each year till class 12.
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Over the years we have worked deeply to create a culture of freedom among students, teachers, and parents that cultivates conditions to allow for education to happen on its profoundly non-linear & wholesome freedom flow & not be reduced to fear-based fragmented system of mechanically driven rote-learning. Such span:
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deeply original ground-up & first principles based curriculum & pedagogy
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wholesome systems of assessment
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cultivating deep community engagement
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developing real-world peaceful & practical frameworks & solutions for people & the environment
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We are also collaborating with local government schools to create a larger & shared vision of education as freedom.
Govt School Collaboration
Gradually, after setting the precedent for such a vision for education and a community school, and developing related capacity and building trust in our community, the experiences of our community school has been becoming a basis to collaborate with the larger education ecosystem, where we are currently working with 7 Lower Primary Schools/Anganwadi centers in a systematic collaborative effort towards the same vision of education as freedom.​​
​​* Even as we are carving~calculating in words the meaning of such freedom from its embodied knowing, we offer the life & teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh as but one of several wholesome references for such freedom that wholesomely spans the depths of heart~body~mind of human beings to the great interconnectedness of life, which, at least in our worldview, is wholesome with such scholarly references as Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen which attempt to expound this same freedom at the scale social-political-economic domain.