Students need to get breathing space, to get their bearings for the journey ahead, to find their passion and avocation.

What we do with our children is to make bonsai out of them and not to let them grow to their potential as we think bonsai is their potential.

The basis of vital and meaningful education is a relation-ship where individuals can constantly respond to themselves, to others and to their environment.

Here were people who were living what they believed in and what they preached, something that remains a distant dream for many of us.

An ethnography of an alternative school/commune, Kanavu in Wayanadu district of Kerala. It explores the diverse learning spaces and methodologies that have been incorporated into its system, where learning happens for children who participate. Kanavu is today facing several challenges as they have begun a new phase of handing the management over to the older students (now adults) who have graduated.

India boasts of a huge variety of languages and dialects. Many of these languages do not have scripts of their own. In fact many of them are on the brink of fading away into oblivion owing to the trend of people migrating to modern cities and hence newer cultures. However, a small academy in Gujarat is standing tall to save these languages from dying. Anand Giridharadas writes in this article on how the Adivasi Academy, based in Tejgadh, Gujarat, is working towards chronicling elements of rural culture.

With its firm belief in ‘Learning by Doing’, Vigyan Ashram at Pabal, Maharashtra has, over past 3 decades, transformed the lives of hundreds of rural youth who the mainstream education system might have rejected as ‘failures’. A modern version of the Gurukula system, “Vigyan” means ‘Search of Truth’ and “Ashram” symbolises ‘simple living and high thinking”.

Aarohi School is based in Bangalore. Aarohi Life Education team is a mix of parents and facilitators who want to dream and drive the concept of open, organic and child driven learning for Life. As Aarohi evolves, we are constantly learning, trying, erring, fighting, caring, enjoying, and growing.

Swaraj University was birthed in 2010 in Udaipur, Rajasthan as a two year learning program for youth. The focus of the program is on self-designed learning and on localisation entrepreneurship, including exploration of basic business skills redefined within the context of ecological sustainability, inner transformation and social justice.