Schooling The Future

I have previously written about my life goal which is to work towards educating others. Seeing the contemporary state of my homeland (Bihar), I feel that I owe the world my share of effort towards education, especially when I was educated for free in the famous Super 30 program. I think the goals of education should be to produce as many great people who could fend a great life for themselves in a globally competitive world and produce a productive environment for the next generation of the society. Produce those who can speed up the growth of our great country and make the world a better place.

I do not think great minds appear only in any certain class, be it rich or poor, high or low born. But the privileged need lesser external intervention and already have a lot of people to guide them. Since my capacity to help is low and there is a vast pool of human resources requiring help, I can afford to be picky!

I have been contemplating various ways where I could put my constructive effort. And following are the few but not exhaustive ways that I could reconcile so far:

1: Scholarship - This initiative is easy to do, will have a limited width of coverage but has a remarkable capacity to find hidden gems with a very precise selection. I am thinking to help extremely underprivileged kids who are super strong in science (preferably computers). I will rather want to ensure myself that my help is going towards a sufficiently superior person who would otherwise be wasted. I will have to either rely on the mark sheet of their class or take an additional test. I will hit gold one after another once I crack the craft to find super kids.

2: School - This initiative will be very procedural and will need a lot of patience, and I am not good at either. I checked that opening a school requires 3 acres of land in the rural area and 1.5 acres of land in the urban areas. This limits me to be able to open a school in my native rural place only. Moreover, since this space is very regulated, I cannot intervene with the syllabus much. Plus, such syllabi changes by a naive me is a recipe for creating more bad than good.

3: Coaching - This initiative is tough to pull off. Coachings run on charismatic teachers. I will have to personally learn innovative teaching to be able to succeed in this area. I am not fully aware of teaching kids of various age groups. Some say it’s fun, some have mixed opinions about the stress and low impact it has on the life of kids.

4: Library - This initiative is easy to set up and also manage if I have people serving for free. My idea is to set up a kitaab do kitaab lo (give a book & take a book) library, where users can give a minimal or no fee to become a member. They can submit any book to lease any book they want. It will need to have an online directory of available books so that people can search and visit.

5: Modern Pedagogy - This initiative involves free testing across schools and enabling other practices which modern pedagogy advocates. Again I will have to personally learn this craft and even then it’s operationally heavy will need a lot of social groups to bring kids to the tests even conducted online. It will cover the needs of those who do not have a good platform for testing and competing with their peers.