Masti Ki Paathshala

Conventional education is beset with a lot of problems – use of force and fear to get work done, curbing curiosity, age based division, etc. The list is long. On the contrary, Masti Ki Paathshala is a democratic learning space where children have the freedom to do what they want to do. These learning spaces will be situated in rural areas. While the immediate goal is to provide children with a friendly learning environment where skills take precedence over theoretical learning, this venture has 3 larger long term goals: 1. Leveraging the energy of the youth in order to solve problems that exist in rural India. 2. Livelihoods - Ensure that the young do not have to migrate to cities in search of livelihood. In fact, it is this migration that sucks the oxygen – the energy of the youth – out of all rural development. 3. Development of a scalable replicable alternative education model. Our first learning centre has been operating in Agar, a village in the Alwar District of Rajasthan, since April 2017. At Masti Ki Paathshala, there are no marks, assessments or exams. What we do have is a lot of workshops. In the recent past, we have done workshops on physics, meditation, photography, various forms of art, etc. The larger vision behind these learning centres is to use them as institutions for development in rural areas. Effectively, the students would be actively engaged in solving problems prevalent in the village. For instance, we will soon start working on the Swacch Agar Mission, a cleanliness program. As a part of this campaign, we will run a communication campaign. For this purpose, we intend to do workshops on Photoshop and Coral, puppetry and nukkad natak, film making, etc. Thus, not only would children have solved a problem in the village, but in the process would have also picked up valuable life skills which their school wouldn't have ever taught them. By engaging children in ‘hands on’ work, they should be able to discover their raison d’etre.