GREEN VILLAGE SCHOOL ‘SEBA’ IN BANKURA, INDIA:
DEVLOPED BY INDIAN AND AMERICAN FRIENDS
Krishna P.Bhattacharjee, Architect and Planner
Alumnus, U.C.Berkeley . Professor and Executive Director
Center for Human Settlements Int’l {CHS-Habitat}
[email protected]
Introduction:
“Don’t let school interrupt your education..” said Mark Twain {whose real name was Samuel Clemens} the well known American Author. He spent most of his youth on steam boats going up and down the Mississippi river earning a living; he lost his father when he was young and could not complete his school education. Later he went on to write many books- “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and others.
At the other end of the world, in India, the Nobel laureate poet Rabidranath Tagore, who had established the institution “Shantiniketan” {meaning ‘an abode of peace’} expressed similar sentiments when he established the institution; he too did not complete his formal school education. He has stated .. ”My object in starting the institution was to give the children full freedom of joy of life and of communion with nature. I myself had suffered when young through the impediments, which were inflicted on most boys while they attended school and I have had to go through the machine of education which crushes the joy or freedom of life for which the children have insatiable thirst. And my object was to give freedom and joy to children {of men}”.
Freedom of expression, living without fear, joy of learning and reaching out to the marginalized families have been the three principles on which the CHS-Habitat developed its philosophy towards life and learning. The Executive Director of CHS-Habitat {Prof.K.P.Bhattacharjee} has been exposed to India’s Freedom Movement {having witnessed India’s freedom struggle and non-violence movement initiated by Mahatma Gandhi} and Nobel Laureate Indian Poet Rabidranath Tagore’s cry for freedom and democracy scripted in his poems. During his years in UC Berkeley campus he observed the famous Free Speech Movement and the brutal force unleashed on students by the state to curb freedom of expression.
The founders of CHS-Habitat longed for the type of democracy which the Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote in his book ‘Gitanjali, “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high…”. Similar writings on freedom have been written and propagated by many authors including the famous Irish author Iris Murdoch.
The directors of CHS-Habitat initiated action research on socio-economic issues and development to provide economic freedom to the economically weaker section of the population .
In order to extend the output of its action research<
2005
2008