CLASSROOMS WITHOUT WALLS
RISHI VALLEY SCHOOL, CHITTO0R, ANDHRA PRADESH
Annual fee: Rs 1,10,000

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The Rishi Valley School has literally knocked down the walls of its classrooms. Here an outdoor expedition is as much a class as a formal lesson is. Today, the classroom is under the banyan tree; tomorrow it could be a geography lesson on a hillock. The oldest and the best known of the six schools run across the country by the Krishnamurti Foundation, the Rishi Valley School is at the heart of the Rishi Valley Education Centre that also includes a rural education project and rural healthcare effort. A residential school set up 76 years ago, it’s spread over 250 acres on the Rishi Konda hill in Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh, about 133 km from Bangalore.
The school still follows its founder J.D. Krishnamurti’s philosophy. Teachers are friends who can be questioned relentlessly and students are individuals who are not judged by their academic, artistic or sporting credentials. On the playgrounds, invectives don’t fly to improve performance—only polite encouragement.
‘‘In the junior classes children are sometimes fickle with their choice of activities, flitting between craft, painting, music and drama but in higher classes, we expect more commitment from students,’’ says principal Dr A. Kumaraswamy, an IIT-Madras alumni who has been with the school for 25 years. Teachers at Rishi Valley have a lot of freedom in deciding curriculum, teaching methods and evaluation, especially in the junior classes and they share a close bond with students.
The average teacher-student ratio here is 1:9 and at present there are 360 students (from formal Class IV to class XII) and 60 teachers on campus.
‘‘As students we did not address our teachers as sir or madam. We were encouraged to address them as anna (elder brother) or akka (sister). This allows a great deal of informality,’’ says V. Nanjappa, a journalist and alumnus of the school. The school counts former president Neelam Sanjiva Reddy among its well-known alumni.
But life after Rishi Valley can be a bit hard. ‘‘The students mostly miss the rapport they enjoyed with their teachers. But in the long term they however do well,’’ says Kumaraswamy.