There’s more to educating a child than academic knowledge.
What a child can do with good education is limited only by opportunity, attitude and exposure.
There are many successful initiatives in India that aim to increase school attendance in less privileged communities, but very few that enable children to discover where they can go from there. VIDYA works to fill this need.
Our flagship program, the VIDYA School in Gurgaon, was founded on the principle that true education requires head, heart and hand, and that less-privileged children should receive the same exposure and facilities available at the country’s best schools. It is accredited to the CBSE syllabus, and our students achieve grades that compete with some of the best schools in India. We expose them to ideas that make them think about the world around them, and many of our students here have dreams of social change and entrepreneurship. We use creative methods in our classrooms, and incorporate a system of learning values and spreading knowledge to family members and their communities. The Bal Vihar School, our first project, continues to enrich the community it resides in. The children look forward to each day of learning, and no teacher has left since the schools’ inception.
Other programs for children include the Bhavishya-yaan and Beyond School programs, where we augment the syllabus taught at government schools with classes on computer skills, life skills and spoken English. We believe these are pragmatic skills that increase a child’s ability to communicate confidently, focus on tasks and take initiative in finding information– and it continues to help them once they’ve finished school.