“If we want to truly re-imagine education, we will have to re-imagine our selves and the lives we are living...”

As their legacies, operations and assumptions become more available for scrutiny, traditional schools are becoming less meaningful and more problematic. The idea that children are meant to be enclosed in buildings, removed from their immediate contexts, policed and pressurized to rise to imposed standards, branded and certified, and then released into a world that awaits them, is disconcerting – to put it mildly. In short, we need to listen to our children again – and, in the same gesture, find our way home. We have new response-abilities: to co-produce learning sites where our children can be free to do their work with the world, and to invite new ways of un/learning together that privileges play, community, ‘slow’ rituals, and earth-honouring practices.

But what does that look like? What about conventional education seems problematic? What haunts schooling in India and in most so-called ‘third world’ nations? Can the education system be reformed or does it have to be dismantled? How are we being enabled to counteract the colonial legacies of schooling, and what forms do these ethical responses assume in the specifics of our localities? What kind of radical educational practices and experiments are happening and possible now? What are the possibilities and shadows we need to explore in ‘unschooling’ practices? How can you start re-imagining education in your community? And much, much more.

In this workshop, leading social and educational visionary Manish Jain will host unlearning conversations and exercises around reimagining education, experimenting with possibilities for alternatives, and learning to meet our children – whose magic and work we desperately need today.  

This workshop will be very useful for those trying to build new learning spaces in their own families, communities, schools and alternative education spaces.

Contribution:
Like many places across India and around the world, Swaraj University is experimenting with rethinking our lifestyle and our relationship with ourselves, our work, our resources, and our communities. We are questioning, challenging and experimenting with our set notions of money. So, we welcome you to join our experiment and explore your relationship with money.
By participating in such workshop you are, in a non-monetary way , supporting and encouraging such learning spaces to thrive and stay alive. You are, in a beautiful way, taking forward the larger movement of reclaiming our learning.
However, it is important we all contribute and take care of the needs of the place and meet the actual expenses for hosting such a workshop.
The suggested contribution for this workshop is 7500/-. By contributing this, you would also, partly, be helping those who find it hard to access these spaces due to financial constraints.

About the Facilitators:

Manish Jain <manish@swaraj.org> is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse knowledge systems and cultural imaginations. He is one of the leading global voices for the unschooling movement. He has served for the past 20 years as Coordinator/Co-Founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development and as co-founder of Swaraj University, Creativity Adda, Learning Societies Unconference, Swapathgami Walkouts-Walkon network, and the Ecoversities Network. He has edited several books on Vimukt Shiksha (liberating learning). Prior to Shikshantar, Manish worked as one of the principal team members of the UNESCO Learning Without Frontiers global initiative. Manish worked as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley in the belly of the beast. He has been trying to unlearn his Master's degree in Education from Harvard University and a B.A. in Economics, International Development and Political Philosophy from Brown University. He and his wife Vidhi have been unschooling themselves with their 16 year old daughter, Kanku, in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

www.shikshantar.org

www.swarajuniversity.org

Mohit worked as a professor and taught psychology and mental health in Nursing colleges for almost 10 years. He is the co-founder of a Nursing education college, and a hospital. He also co-founded Cafe Satori in Udaipur. Passionate about re-imagining Education, he has worked on processes and people to introduce disruption in the current non-functional system of education and thus also birthed an alternative learning space called Mukt-Dhara Multiversity in Banswara. He has been facilitating for last couple of years in Mukt Dhara(break the cycle initiative), that focuses around self, perspective building, redefining education and health care. Mohit created Samropan Youth Program(SYP) in 2015 that works with the college going students, faculty and local government officials that offers three days workshops on reimagining education and participatory processes. He is also working on bridging the gap between the alternative learning and conventional systems through different kind of small programs which offer reclaiming, unlearning, shifting of the worldview and offer to empower the learners to get into the needed transition.

He is Mitra in swaraj university where he formally and informally works with the facilitators and khojis on assorted aspects. He also handles workshops that are hosted by swaraj university and swapathgami network. Mohit is also interested about the paradigm shift in the work culture of organisations and he is involved in hosting and facilitating workshops of Art Of Hosting. He has been practicing nature cure and he drastically improved and reclaimed his health. Mohit lives in Swaraj university campus with his wife and three beautiful unschooled daughters.