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Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
DASDOI, UTTAR PRADESH, India -- In this small village known for its fine mango orchards and fertile wheat fields some 25 kilometers northwest of Lucknow, a quiet revolution is taking place.
Like many revolutions, the spark is coming from the school ground. Only instead of a university campus, the venue for action here is the village school. And the agents of change are a group of young and dedicated teachers with a fresh vision of education and its transformative role.
The school in Dasdoi has about 80 students. Named the Nine Star School, it is run by Ram Vilas Pal. It is one of eight village-level private schools that have been started since 2001 by a group of young Baha'is working under the guidance of Foundation for the Advancement of Science (FAS), a Baha'i-inspired NGO located in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.
The schools are an integral part of a pilot project to train and support educated rural youth in the processes and profession of primary education, with the goal of starting small, sustainable, and effective private rural schools.
The owners of these schools, who are also their principals, come from unlikely backgrounds. Mr. Pal was trained in television repair. Another school founder dispensed medicine in his village as a local "doctor." Another was a farmer.
And it is not always easy to guess--at first sight anyway--that what they are running are schools. For example, Mr. Pal's school in Dasdoi operates in a mud-brick building with a thatched roof. A wall down the middle divides the school from a cowshed. Many of the schools began as a gathering under a tree or a simple thatched roof shelter.
What is common among all eight principals is their passion for social transformation and their conviction that school is the place for this to happen. Indeed, as the soft-spoken Mr. Pal says, "The community and the family depend on the school to create a responsible...
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