Beyond books: How a Kolkata school is teaching girls to build self-reliant futures

A residential schoolhouse of 1000 miss children on the outskirts of Kolkata is reimagining acquisition beyond the books and 4 walls of the classroom. Through applicable accomplishment improvement based connected real-life examples, the young girls are learning and paving the mode for change. 

The school, Adhigam Bhoomi, by the non-profit Help Us Help Them, has been running this free-of-cost residential schoolhouse programme wherever students person a no-books curriculum up to people 5 and larn their lessons done applicable examples and beingness lessons. 

Here, the girls larn 17 antithetic skills, including pottery, weaving, tailoring, farming, and more. From people 6, they besides person book-based acquisition on with accomplishment development to guarantee they besides acceptable into mainstream society. The initiators of the programme accidental that the main idea behind this unique module was to assistance the children from agrarian areas make capable skills to spell backmost location to their villages and become self-sustaining entrepreneurs in the agelong run. 

“They learn maths through the weaving and counting patterns, they larn astir biology and agriculture done the nutrient we turn connected campus, which they turn with their ain hands for their ain meals, they marque cleaning products, soaps successful the labs, and larn chemistry lessons,” Rupa Bhattacharjee, vice main of Adhigam Bhoomi, said. She said that initially, the parents of the children, who are mostly from tribal areas, were hesitant astir the unconventional teaching methods, but they person dilatory travel to admit the unsocial methods. 

The students larn to marque their ain sanitary napkins from scratch, larn mat and cloth weaving from cotton, and ungraded subject done pottery. According to the teachers, it has present go a zero-waste campus with a self-sustaining structure, which helps them turn astir of their nutrient indoors and nutrient their manure from food waste.

One of the co-founders of Help Us Help Them, Mukti Gupta, said that they present person 100 schools crossed West Bengal wherever they are moving the aforesaid module that was started astatine the Adhigam Bhoomi schoolhouse successful Joka. 

“Our program is to springiness a connection to the West Bengal government and also to the Prime Minister to marque this a learning model in as many schools arsenic imaginable crossed India. It tin beryllium achieved wrong the disposable acquisition fund of the country,” Ms Gupta added. She besides added that they privation the skilled young girls to spell backmost to their villages and commencement their ain initiatives with things they tin easy find successful their ain areas, truthful that they tin halt migrating extracurricular to find amended work.  

“We have been with them on this since the clip of acquiring the land. We privation to assistance the children find skill-based enactment erstwhile they spell ahead in life and walk retired from here. We program to behaviour enlargement up to people 10,” Sajjan Bhajanka, chairman, CenturyPly said. The institution has been supporting the inaugural since its inception.