Sikshana was founded in the year 2002, with a mission to evolve scalable and replicable models for an effective public school system.
To achieve this goal, over the year, Sikshana developed a unique way for students’ motivation to drive improved learning outcomes and has been recognized for its efforts and insights by the Govt. of Karnataka.
Another singularity about Sikshana is its team of dedicated, passionate mentors and teachers, who can do whatever it takes to retain the children in schools. These mentors try day and night to tutor their students in a way that they enjoy studying and feel motivated and acknowledged for their accomplishments. One of the routes that Sikshana takes to drive incentive among all the students is through organizing annual trips to various cities of India, where places like science museum, planetarium and big companies like Dell are covered. Such trips are meant to provide the students with not only fun but also motivation and empowerment. A goal behind these trips is also to recognize students who have excelled in the classes.
Students are selected based on excellence in academics, arts or sports. The teachers put their herculean efforts to make sure that maximum number of students can join these trips, but while doing so, they face many obstacles like cultural/religious barriers, financial/monetary limitations of families, where they have to fight against prevailing misconstructions and misbeliefs.
Here I am delighted to share one anecdote where a mentor had to go beyond religious and cultural
boundaries to make his student’s parents recognize their son’s qualities.
Like every year, a trip to Bangalore was arranged and 115 selected students from Sikshana adopted schools were going to be taken at various places, including museums and big companies like Dell.
During this year’s trip, one of the mentors, Yallapa Goudar, encountered a challenge where a bright student, Mohammad Nayaz Husen’s parents did not want him to go on this trip. They were reluctant as they were not really able to identify their sons potential. Mohammad had excelled in a Kannada language class despite of coming from an Urdu speaking family, which was a huge achievement for the boy. So his mentor, Yallapa Goudar visited his parents along with the Head Master, Mr. Haroon Basha. Both of them tried very hard to make the parents understand and see their son’s caliber. Both
the teachers were able to convince the parents to let their son go on the trip as the trip was not only for fun, it was also very important for Mohammad’s intellectual growth.
Thus Sikshana has been working for more than a decade, in transforming itself into a social enterprise where the focus has been on providing management consultancy to various state governments to improve standards of public schools.