In this day and age when schools are beginning to resemble resorts with their landscaped premises and manicured lawns, architect-designed buildings and focusing on the ‘facilities’ offered, Prakriya School comes across as a breath of fresh air with its serene surroundings and unpretentious, elegant buildings housed amidst abundant greenery.

Seetha Ananthasivan founded Prakriya, an ICSE school, as a ‘space’ that would go beyond schooling and be a context for an expanding group of individuals to search for learning processes that would be meaningful to themselves and the society they live in.

Although an alumnus of IIM (Ahmedabad), Seetha was never attracted towards a corporate career – she was sure that was not the path that would help her in her search for eco-sensitive ideas and processes of living.

So right after her post graduation, she worked with World Wildlife Fund (India) for over a year. She then worked for a plantation company managed by her family in Munnar, where her focus was on integrating business management with community management. And for effective community management, the focus had to be on core issues as opposed to surface issues.

So alongside her commitment for external ecology, she felt the need to focus on this ‘inner ecology’ that exists in each one of us and across organisations and communities.

Personal growth

Meanwhile, Seetha trained as a professional facilitator in human resource (HR) management with Professor Pulin Garg, who was then a professor at IIM Ahmedabad.

Since then, she has been an HR consultant with several organisations.

In 1995, she set up Aastha Foundation for Human Learning and Growth, so that teachers could avail of the unique, specialised programmes on personal growth and empowerment, programmes which till then was mostly available to corporates only.

The next step for Seetha was to establish a school in an effort to create a foundation for more holistic work. Thus Prakriya came about in 1999, as a confluence of all streams of her HR experiences. 

Prakriya, set up with the intention of moving away from factory-style standardised teaching, has smaller classes to enable a closer relationship between teachers and children and make it easier to focus on every child’s unique strengths and learning styles.

Real life projects

Seetha believes that awareness and understanding alone do not lead to action unless children do feel strongly about them.

And that children are able to act from their feelings only about real issues concerning their present and future; bland information and theory do not evoke as strong an interest or response as real life.

Hence, children participate in a ‘real life’ project, which can bring out a greater level of involvement in them. 

One such project was on ‘sustainable development’ where they studied biodiversity, the sources and requirements of water for Bangalore and tried to understand the massive problem of global warming.

As Seetha says, “Many of us are working together on these projects – and  learning and evolving too” and adds, “The idea is not to get dispirited because we can’t make a huge difference but make the whole process a ‘manthan’ (churning) and hopefully we will get to a little bit of amrith (nectar)…”