Above:The Baha'i House of Worship of Asia. Below:Life and times of your fellow World Citizen, Kolya

DASDOI, UTTAR PRADESH, India — At first glance nothing about these eight people would tell you that they are founders of schools.

They come from the unlikeliest of backgrounds. One was a high-school dropout, another a TV mechanic, yet another a village “doctor.”

Nor is it always easy to guess – at first sight anyway – that what they are running are schools. For example, Ram Vilas Pal, the TV mechanic, shares a property with his brother – part of the land is home to a cowshed, the other part home to the school.

What is common to all eight 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, in India people often expect this from a school.

“The community and the family depend on the school to create a responsible citizen out of the child,” he said. “When a child is found misbehaving, people ask him, ‘Is this what your teacher teaches you in school?’”

At a time when many young people leave their villages in search of jobs in the cities, these eight – all but two are in their 20s – have chosen to stay back and help mold the next generation. And they are doing it without large investment and without making tall promises to parents.

Most of them set up their community schools by seeking the help of the villagers for land and basic furniture and by employing educated but unemployed rural youth as teachers. In return, they promise to provide good overall education for very modest fee (for a high school student, for example, it might be 50 rupees, or US$1.25, a month).

For the villagers, this is a welcome alternative to the existing state-run schools which charge no fees but where standards are so dismal that, as one parent put it, “you will find eighth-standard children who cannot count from one to 10.”

Today there are eight of these community schools spread out in villages in the Kakori, Banthra, and Kharagpur blocks of the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. They are not far from Lucknow, the state capital.

Some of the schools, like Vinod Kumar Yadav’s Glory Public School with 160 students, are doing well. Others, like Mr. Pal’s Nine Star School in Dasdoi with 73 children, are barely breaking even. Still others, like Brajesh Kumar’s Covenant Public School, are in urgent need of help. (For next year, Mr. Kumar plans to move his school to a different location.)

Assistance from FAS

Helping all of them chart their course and stay afloat is the Foundation for the Advancement of Science (FAS), a nongovernmental organization based in Lucknow.

FAS assists the schools by training their teachers, guiding them through difficult times, and even providing salaries for one or two teachers when the going gets tough. It is also preparing a new, innovative curriculum for use in the schools.

It was this foundation – after years of experimentation with setting up rural educational initiatives that were self-sustaining and self-sufficient – that spearheaded the establishment of the community schools.

“We had worked with many tutorial schools in Uttar Pradesh that were externally funded and that eventually failed. This made us realize that the solution had to come from within the village, with the villagers using mainly their own resources,” explains an officer of FAS.

For the community schools, he said, FAS started out by looking for individuals with the motivation, the vision and the willingness to struggle and persevere. Itself an NGO inspired by Baha’i ideals, it did not take the foundation long to find these individuals among the educated but unemployed Baha’i youth in the villages surrounding Lucknow.

The people working at the foundation knew that the young people were going to face an uphill task in setting up the schools, but they also knew from past experience that such a struggle brings with it a sense of ownership. As one of them put it: “Setting up a school in a village is a difficult job that requires both commitment and great effort. When these youth suffer for the school, their resolve is strengthened and their attachment to the school is intensified.”

Parents’ point of view

A man named Sunderlal, sitting outside his hut, is asked why he sends his son – who is beside him playing with a bicycle tire – to Brajesh Kumar’s school. His answer is immediate: “Because children of his school are good and respectful.”

This becomes a common refrain among parents and villagers when asked about the community schools.

Mr. Kumar explains why: “Our whole reason for starting these schools was not just to provide better quality of the same thing that is available everywhere but also to give something new and much-needed in the form of moral education.”

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