Saahas Shram-Vigyan is a project devoted to exploring and developing children’s natural capacity to learn.
A conventional school educational system tends to discount this capacity, discouraging the urge to enquire that child possess innately. The tendency becomes more counterproductive in our contemporary environment, where internet learning platforms and competitive curriculum offer expanded scope and challenge for shaping and developing educational opportunities. It is now incumbent upon us to think beyond the conventional means of ‘disciplining’ minds – habituating them – towards narrow, so-called result-oriented goals alone. What is needed instead is to tap into and nurture children’s natural ability and adaptability to think and ask questions in fresh, bold and creative ways.
Saahas Shram-Vigyan is precisely about developing possibilities of enquiry-based learning, a form of learning that is more organic, innovative and less pre-scripted. Our purpose is to find ways and means of delving into these deeper aspects of learning and overcoming the crippling effects of rote learning which involves the passive consumption and memorizing of information, facts and data. We do this by constantly interrogating and reconstructing the basic premises of the quest for knowledge.
The project involves Saahas associates to work with school children and engage them – broadly and concretely – with the science of creation in an inclusive environment. Our associates and the children work together as a team to learn art and craft, basic life-skills such as carpentry, plumbing and electrical works, etc.
Our objective and aspiration are that, towards the end of senior school, children are able to face life situations with a greater equanimity of understanding and purpose; that they have a keener sense of the world we live in – the nature of community and work they are both engaged with and indebted to.
It is this organic link between environment, work and learning that orients the Foundation’s work – in its overall approach and in its specific endeavour in an area such as this.