Thought i’d put this up in this forum…since this is obviously ‘just’ another educational institution - though drastically different than what any of us have attended.
i saw a documentary about this in one of my uni classes. The College is based in the village of Tilonia in Rajasthan, India.
The Barefoot College](http://www.barefootcollege.org/)
The Barefoot College began in 1972 with the conviction that solutions to rural problems lie within the community.
The College addresses problems of drinking water, girl education, health & sanitation, rural unemployment, income generation, electricity and power, as well as social awareness and the conservation of ecological systems in rural communities.
The College benefits the poorest of the poor who have no alternatives.
The College encourages practical knowledge and skills rather than paper qualifications through a learning by doing process of education.
The College was entirely built by local people. The campus spreads over 80,000 square feet area and consists of residences, a guest house, a library, dining room, meeting halls, an open air theatre, an administrative block, a ten-bed referral base hospital, pathological laboratory, teacher’s training unit, water testing laboratory, a Post Office, STD/ISD call booth, an internet daba (cafe), a puppet workshop, an audio visual unit, a screen printing press, a dormitory for residential trainees and a 700,000 litre rainwater harvesting tank. The College is also completely solar-electrified.
http://www.barefootcollege.org/html/about.htm
An individual’s will to learn and aptitude for learning is more important than any formal degree or paper qualification. This concept of learning is the foundation for the Barefoot College. It is applied in every field at the Centre. For example, the new campus at Tilonia was designed and built by one of the villagers, who can barely sign his own name. The campus itself reflects the adaption of both traditional, as well as new methods and technologies. Old, traditional methods have been used to keep the buildings cool while solar energy is used to provide electrical power the campus.
People with minimum paper qualifications, trained at the Barefoot College, work in every field - as night school teachers, health workers, computer operators, solar engineers, or hand pump mechanics.
The College serves a population of over 125,000 people both in immediate as well as distant areas.