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Subject: Jain Education program in India for students going to English Medium schools | |
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Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 13:59:23 +0530 Dear Friends, Some of you know that Shri Shantilal Muttha and I are working on establishing Jain Education System in India. This program is intended to Jain students who are going in English medium schools who might be left out from learning Jainism. Others all will be able to take advantage of it. It will have much of its base from JAINA Education System and many more things will be added into it. Let me show you the scope of the program bellow. As we know we in NA take one to 4 classes a month. Here it will be four classes a week. We also in NA have many ages together except in LA and may be a few other centers. Here in India, we will have a separate classes starting from Jr. KG to 9th standard for each year. We will skip 10th standard and again will start in 11th standard. So over all we have course for 12 years. There will be 4 classes each week. Each class will be for 45 minutes. We will be taking classes 120 days every year. We are working on material and program in such a way that it will keep them busy through these days. We are going to use presentation technology where all the classes will be projected on the screen through the computer. This will make it easier for teacher as well as students because the interest of students will be maintained. It will have interactive multimedia, animation and video presentation through the projector also. Even though material prepared for JAINA Education system will help in creating mostly needed material for the classes we will still need much more material. For these we are preparing two books for each year with 30 lessons in each book. 1st book will have a 30 topics on Jain teachings and 2nd book will have 30 Jain and moral stories. So in short we will be adding many more subjects/topics, stories and styles since the requirement for this program is very vast. We have hired team of full time people in various areas of their expertise to help us preparing art work, writing stories, rhymes, songs, etc,. Books for jr. KG, Sr. KG and 1st Standard and 2nd Standard will have 90% pictures and only about 10 % text. Every line of expression will have full page picture. For this reason we will be splitting many books in 3 to 4 volumes (100 pages each) since pictures will add to size of books. All pictures will be in 4 colors. Jain community should feel very opportunate these people are willing to spend this kind of money. Just the pre-publication preparation cost will go over Rs. 20 lacs. You can imagine the publication cost as well as providing each class with projectors and computers for each school. This is one more reason we need your input now so we can incorporate whatever needed from the very beginning. This program will start on June 7th 2003, next year in existing Jain academic schools (not in derasar or sthanak pathshalas) as extra class during a day. In second stage we will expand this teaching in derasar and sthanak pathshalas as well as web based learning. We are expecting to start this program in at least 50 to 100 schools throughout the India. As time goes by we will introduce to a few hundred schools through out India. If this happens then it will change the learning techniques not only in India but also everywhere else. It will introduce taking advantage of high tech and will become a model for every Jain school as well as pathshalas. I know many of us might have various ideas to enhance this program. We will appreciate if you all take some time out of your busy schedule and share those ideas so while we are working on this program we will be able to incorporate them. Your experience and participation will be great service with much more implication in Jain education program. So I will encourage you to consider on this a little but seriously and send us the ideas or material you might have. I will be here in Poona for next two to six months. My phone #s are: 020-4011174 at home and 4013636, ext.1200 at the office. I can be reached at office from 9am till 9pm and at home from 10:00pm till 8:30 am. if anyone of you is making a trip to India or Poona area, please, visit us and we will be happy to show what and how we are doing this. Looking forward to hear from you. With warm regards, Premchand |