Education All
According to the UNESCO report of 2018 25.63% of the population, aged 15-24 are illiterate in India. More interestingly, in 2017 around 112.96% of the population enrolled for Primary education which dropped to 73.48% for Secondary education and, a major gap can be seen in Higher education where only 27.44% of the population enrolled. These figures are horrendous. We all are aware that lack of education has been the root cause of the majority of problems in our country. If we continue with this rate imagine the situation after 15-20 years.
Considering this we started our project "Education For All" in January 2017, in 3 slums of Delhi Manohar Nagar, Shankar Garden, and Goyla Dairy. We being naive to this completely started interaction with children of these slums through various games, stories, and learning activities. We took the Art of Living Bal Chetna course to jell up with them. Though the free chocolates are the main attraction children started enjoying interactive learning and started feeling comfortable with us. We talked to their parents and started teaching them the basics of Maths, Science, and English along with meditation.
We started teaching in shelters build in a nearby park. We used to bring them slates and chalks. We also identified the children who not going to schools and communicate with their parents for the reason. There were several reasons some have just migrated, some don't have documents like Aadhaar card, some have been absconded because of low attendance, some go to work, etc. We tried to resolve those issues, convinced their parents about the importance of education, and helped them in school admissions.
Currently, around 95+ students are enrolled with us. Our weekend classes have been transformed into weekday classes at Goyla Dairy, our open shelter classrooms have been transformed to closed rented classrooms our interactive learning has transformed into smart classes. We also introduced computer classes to the children doing in regular classes.
Around 8 of them have moved to the secondary level and 4 of them have reached to higher education level. We are hoping these children will achieve their dreams one day.