OUR MISSION
Our mission is to transform the lives of underprivileged children, their families, and their communities, through an education that teaches clear and creative thinking, makes possible intelligent informed choices, instills respect for self and others, develops leadership skills, and results in individual responsibility to society. Our goal is to bring high quality education, appropriately suited to the needs of these children, so they can become valued and of use to society, rather than used and discarded
Where and How
Mandawali, an underprivileged community of East Delhi, India, is our initial location, although we intend to work with other, underprivileged communities of third world countries.
Alpha Montessori School, the educational vehicle of IGNITE, was founded to make it possible for low-income children to receive a high quality education that teaches them critical thinking skills, and gives them the ability to go beyond the rigid limitations of their social class. Without such an education, these children are limited to working in the same low wage, labor-intensive jobs, many of their parents are also limited to, due to their lack of educational opportunities.
The goals of Alpha Montessori School include educating the children in the basic subjects of Math, Science, Hindi, English, communication skills, and the arts, among others. The school also promotes the students' awareness of hygiene, discipline, morality, respect, courage, truth, and equality in their and their families' lives.
We educate children from nursery through 1st grade. In our experience, we found the Montessori Method to be an exceptionally effective system to educate children of this community. The children engage quickly and deeply in their studies and develop citizenship skills at a level rarely seen in any school. We will gradually expand the children's education through 5th grade. In addition, we conduct parents meetings and provide students annual medical check-ups with health professionals. Our four years of preliminary studies with this educational work has shown us positive results at the school. As far as we know, there is no other group conducting this kind of work in this geographical area.
IGNITE is a non-profit foundation, created in the United States to fund Alpha Montessori School, a project of Adhyatmic Vikas Shiksha Sanstha, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in India.
Need for IGNITE
There is a growing need for schools in poor communities of India and other countries to provide high quality education
With the increase of the middle class, children of low-income families face difficulty competing with students receiving the higher level of education provided in private schools that the middle class and wealthier families can afford.
Government sponsored and funded public schools, while free, are at best terribly inadequate in educating their students. Most of them employ a system of rote memorization, which is of little use, beyond enabling students to produce the right answers on tests
