A collaborative enterprise of transformative intellectuals who are committed to execute their intellectual and social responsibilities to create a society of free thinking intellectuals who would be creatively intervening in social phenomena
The Academy is going to undertake a series of programmes targeting a wide spectrum of students, teachers, institutions, the skilled and unskilled youth and job seekers
There will be free Learning materials and materials that can be purchased online both in hard copies and soft copies.
The academy acknowledges the long tradition of great thinkers hailing from both the Eastern and the Western worlds and has initiated unpretentious efforts to add a strand to the web of schooling that will keep the stake holders of education united under a single umbrella of knowledge-sharing community who will be working together for the cause of humanity.
We consider it our privilege to submit our school to the service of the humanity. Now it is the turn of the parental community to critically evaluate its strengths and limitations and join hands with us towards materializing our ever cherished goal of nurturing our children as the builders of our Nation.
Creating a Platform for Intellectuals who work for Transforming the Society !!
Nurturing the builders of Nation
To create a society of free thinking individuals who love and respect every living and non-living things around them and are committed to work individually and collectively by carrying out their intellectual and social responsibilities towards the welfare of the individuals and the society and build our Nation as ‘a heaven of freedom,’ which is ‘not broken up into fragments of narrow domestic walls.’
Rethinking Schools / Schooling
As a parent or as a person interested in schooling you may have come across terms such as activity-based, learner centered and child friendly classrooms. Have you ever got any opportunity to observe what exactly is happening in most schools? Quite often these terms become meaningless epithets as they are interpreted in varied ways and are translated into classroom practice in different ways. Won’t you get annoyed with the wide gulf between what is claimed and what is done? Whether the school is following the State curriculum and syllabus or is affiliated to CBSE or ICSE or other agencies what can be disappointing is that most decision makers, schools, teachers and administers fail to distinguish between information and knowledge. Consequently, unwarranted thrust is given to transmitting information loaded in the textbooks and ushering the learners into learning the contents of the textbook. Rote memorization replaces authentic learning process. This surely is an undesirable practice, which calls for rethinking schools /schooling and that is precisely what Anandan’s Academy is committed to demonstrate.
Dreams Grow Here
We are sure, as parents you will have been nurturing dreams about your children and you may have done everything to make your dreams appear like their dreams. In the thick of the efforts to fulfill your dream, have you ever paused for a while to see what their dreams are? We respect your dreams but more than that we respect the dreams of your children. We will be with you to materialize what so ever dreams you have about your children or your children have about themselves.
There is much more. We have a dream about the world we live in. It is our life mission to make it ‘a heaven of freedom,’ as Tagore has put it, a world which has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls’. This dream will be materialized only if the school becomes responsive and teachers reflective, and the school as a whole provides a conducive learning ambience for the learners to evolve as transformative intellectuals committed to execute their social and intellectual responsibilities. This of course, is a big dream and we realize that we have to dream big to become the dream.
Continuing the legacy of Korczak
The world today has almost forgotten Janusz Korczak. At least, schools have. It was Korczak who, first came out with the most adorable idea that every child has the right to respect. Schools do talk about child friendly learning but are not free from the crime of working as centres of oppression; children come to schools with free and unpolluted minds but the present day schooling fills their minds with different kinds of institutional fears. Everything at school becomes a tool for oppression, which include, teachers, textbooks, examinations, authorities and what not. We have to go back to Korczak who was killed along with 192 orphans in the smoke wagons under the Nazi regime to understand what schooling must be.
What we believe in
As a school committed to its transformative agenda, we subscribe to a few assumptions that have gained much currency among educationists across the world.
Knowledge is not just a ‘bank’ of facts to be transmitted from the teacher to the student; it is a cognitive process undertaken by teachers and learners alike who discover how different types of information are given precedence within educational institutions.
Consequently, new forms of culture and knowledge become possible. This may involve a reformulation of so-called objectivity and reason in recognition that knowledge can only be partial and particular, reflecting its participants’ social position.
Education has a potential to transform learners into political subjects to whom ethics and questions of good and bad, as well as of truth and knowledge, are central.
What we aspire for
We have a critical approach to schooling. Hence, there is a desire to reintroduce education into the realm of a critically conceptualized society, as educational theory and practice “are grounded in a desire for social change” . Our efforts are to create a better world in which learners develop an identity and ‘voice’, whilst teachers act as ‘transformative intellectuals’ working towards social transformation.
We acknowledge great thinkers like Freire who have given to the academic world critical pedagogy which problematises existing structures, systems, practices and belief systems and shows what could be the right path for the pursuit of knowledge.