Bornfree Art School International {BASI}

... a special school exclusively for street, working children and freed bonded labor children. The objective is to educate and develop these children through the arts, putting them back into formal education. They share their life experiences, express themselves and contribute to the understanding of child labor in order to finally eliminate it. 127 million in India and 246 million in the world are working children.

The BASI through artistic learning will teach sculpture, painting, dance, music, theater, photography and filmmaking along with reading, writing, and mathematics. The BASI is conceived as a one-year study course to begin with. We take a tangible and tactile methodology in teaching that is by the pictorial sense, which has been an important method of education along with our flourishing oral traditions of learning. Study through entertainment and sharing knowledge will be the dynamic process of learning. Art is a means for children from such difficult backgrounds to generate interest in education and get them back to the mainstream of the society. When the student is ready for artistic expressions to turn to become a professional s/he will be taken to a higher level of study, either in the BASI or placed in a specialized education institute. 

Not an NGO, but a People’s Movement.
Bornfree Art School is not the establishment of another school, but a movement for the liberation of toiling children. This movement has to involve the people and they have to continue this endeavor. The establishment of BASIs has to expand especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America wherever child labour exists.

 

Vision

There are 333 million children in India who form a third of our population. Out of this, 183 million are out of school. 127 million are either primary school dropouts or working. Until we take up the task of educating and empowering our children, changes in the social pattern will become a distant dream. It is through the expressive idiom of the plastic and visual arts- theater, dance, mime, song and music and dialogue. We can bring about a social and cultural change in the mindset of the people committed to the cause of creating an egalitarian society free of toiling children. A new aesthetic order of the rights and equality of the brown people are needed, particularly for the Dalits (the Scheduled Castes). The Arts is a powerful tool for searching the truth and finding the spirit of the inner self, both of immense value in self and social education.

 

Aims

1. Endeavoring for the total emancipation of children from toil
2. The continuing education in plastic and visual arts, music, theatre and dance
3. The study of new artistic symbolism from the rural base
4. The production and creation of modern painters and sculptors among the Dalits and peasantry from the village base
5. The study and development of cost effective housing techniques that popularize these ideas by training school drop outs by imparting civil engineering science for the development of cost effective skills and its effective utility.
6. Environmental study center for growing medicinal plants, herbs and to increase a forestation.
7. Develop student co-operatives who will play a significant role in evolving the policies and principles and actively participate in the construction of the University of Gondwanaland. 
8. Foster the spirit of Internationalism for equality and universal social justice.
9. Creating a culture of peace, friendship and harmony with the people, for the people of the world.
10. Folk and subaltern culture

 

Goals

1. Conceptualizing and evolving syllabus of education to cater to the needs of formal, non-formal, open, and visual needs and requirements.
2. Continuous campaigning for the need for visual education
3. Identifying existing traditional heritage skills and knowledge and transforming it into a contemporary idiom.
4. Networking with National and International Art Academies, Artists, Museums and Campaigns against child labour to establish linkages and exchanges
5. Campaign among children and young people to build a cultural movement against child labour, to produce a culture against child labour and to raise funds for the University of Gondwanaland. With the support generated build the Art School infrastructure.
6. Campaign among the surrounding hamlets and villages the idea through cultural performances.