A School Where There Are No Teachers And You Have Freedom To Choose

[JANASENA]

A School Where There Are No Teachers And You Have Freedom To Choose What To Study

 

 

Project DEFY (Design Education for Yourself) is a school without teachers, at village Banjarapalya, on the outskirts of Bengaluru. The school is based on the cooperative learning or pier to pier learning model, where students learn by interacting themselves and online training. The main element is the education reform happening at the grass root level.

In our country there had always been a shortage of efficient teachers due to the high student ratio. Also, the subjects which are required to be studied at different levels are lesser interesting for many students.

This model is now becoming popular in the Bengaluru area and is expanding exponentially. Abhijit Sinha founder of this organization have a different view on what education means. He said “Traditional academia is top down, where you are taught what someone else thinks you should learn. True education is where the person goes out and teaches himself the things he or she really wants to learn, where they take responsibility for their own education and have fun with it. These kids love learning in this space and hate going to school, a fact that has put the local headmaster’s nose out of joint.”

Mr. Sinha is just 24 and he achieved a break-through in imparting the education to the rural children by his innovative step. Despite being an Engineering Graduate the real knowledge he himself gathered from MOOCs (Massive open online courses) and other such platforms. This instinct led him to the formation of Project DEFY.

 

How does it work?

First the students are set free to take up any project in any stream they like to pursue. These students then watch videos online understanding the different aspect of making the project and then they create the models by the available resources in their vicinity. These videos and projects are uploaded for mass. It is really amazing to see the creativity of the younger ones.

This was started as a pilot project after 1.5 years of experimentation it has gained a great momentum. People from every stream be it intellectuals from MIT or the common Bengaluru people are supporting the task.

 

Some work by students of Project DEFY students:

Kushal, Centre manager of Banjarapalya who is also a student there, took out battery cells and in less than a day, with his brilliant self-learned concepts in electronics and soldering skills, he came up with this power bank for charging mobile phones.

 

A nine-year-old boy who had never coded before he entered this space, created a game on Scratch, a programming language; other ‘projects’ included an aquaponics system, as well as a toy boat that measured pollution in a lake.

 

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