Have you ever imagined a school without formal classrooms and where a student in a tree-filled meditation room, an ideation lab, or a test kitchen? This kind of new school will soon be starting in Chennai.
This school is also known as School of happiness because The school’s primary goal is teaching children how to be happy. Learning skills comes next.
The founders come up with a unique idea of a school in a radically different way.
Source: Danish
“If you think of typical schools, the priority is knowledge acquisition–cramming kids’ heads with information, then skills, and if you’re lucky, maybe your school cares about your personality and character and what type of person you are,” says architect and principal designer Danish Kurani, whose team designed the school’s campus.
Danish also shares, “They said, you know what, we want to flip this model. We’re going to focus first and most on students’ character and personality. We want to cultivate happy kids, compassionate people, people that are going to go out into the world and do something useful.”
Source: Danish
The new campus will be built in a rural area outside Chennai; it will be surrounded by farmland and the ocean. This design will support the goal of cultivating happiness. Danish says the campus of the Riverbend School (School of happiness) was inspired by villages – where, according to anthropologists, personal relationships are most reliable.
Danish shared that his team researched to get the best possible outcome for the concept. He says, "Harvard study that has tracked people over the last 80 years, which found that healthy relationships are critical to a happy life. In other research, he discovered that the format of villages tends to foster strong relationships, so the layout of the campus would look like a village."
Source: Danish
The campus will have “chat labs” for collaboration, rooms for physical prototyping or digital creation, rooms that can be used as galleries or for presentations, recording, music, art, and dance studios.
The school will focus on teaching students how to learn about a subject or skill that interests them–and exposing them to a broad range of subjects–rather than imparting a particular set of information. In this school, Students will decide what they want to learn themselves.
Danish Kurani firmly believes that the student of this school will be a better person with emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills.
Source: Danish
