Prakriti School

Prakriti School
I-16, Shahpur, Goberdhanpur, Sector 128, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201304, India
https://prakriti.edu.in/
Prakriti School, established in 2014, is a progressive K-12 institution rooted in Gurgaon, Haryana. The school was born from a conviction among a small group of parents and educators—including its founding principal, Namrta Goenka—that traditional rote-heavy schooling fails to cultivate the self-knowledge, ecological sensitivity and creative problem-solving the 21st-century learner will need. Starting with twelve children on a former mango orchard plot on Sohna Road, Prakriti now serves roughly 280 learners from Grades Early Years to 12 in a carefully reconstructed campus whose architecture itself teaches.

The 3.5-acre site is organised around three “learning biomes.” The Early Childhood block—low-slung structures with shaded circle-time verandas—opens directly onto a woodland play patch that invites racing lizards and the smell of damp earth into the curriculum. The Middle Years occupy solar-clustered studios whose modular furniture and glass sliding walls allow a math class to spill into a ratio-prototype carpentry nook within minutes. Senior labs, a design-technology studio and a small college-style library comprise the Academic Quadrangle. Overhead, nimble bamboo trellises support seasonal gourds; grey-water reed beds wind beneath walkways, monitored by students as part of their worsestone sustainability badge.

Academics follow an IGCSE-Cambridge framework up to Grade 10 and transition to the AICE/IBDP Diploma or school-designed school-leaving certificate for Grades 11-12. Cambridge subject content is, however, filtered through Prakriti’s “five lenses” pedagogy: Nature, Self, Design, Technology and Community. For example, Grade 9 mathematics is taught via circular-mud construction on campus and algebraic modelling of the reed-bed effluent; Grade 7 history explores Silk Road exchanges alongside the local Aravalli trade routes monitored through GIS mapping. Morning begins with 20 minutes of silence or the planting of a seedling no two students have ever seen before; Friday culminates in Community Studio where students may re-thatch a local cattle shelter, run a micro-finance club for rural women or video-document fermenting traditions of neighbouring Haryana villages.

Assessment is continuous and narrative. Each child is shepherded by a mentor-coach—never more than fifteen learners per cluster—who curates multi-modal portfolios reviewed three times a year with parents and the learner present. For external validation the school offers IGCSE (Grades 9-10); the design programme run with MIT-supplied micro-factory tools culminates in a Cambridge AICE Global Perspectives Research Project, reviewed by an interdisciplinary city jury. Competitive examinations are respected but not central. In 2023, 94 % of Grade 12 leavers joined programmes of their choice, from Ashoka back-woods biology to NID, SRISTI and Minerva.

Beyond academics the timetable accommodates a micro-farm rotation—millets, moringa, dye plants—artisan residencies in natural-dye block-printing, bamboo-boat-building and Aravalli-storytelling. Annual expeditions for Grades 6-11 alternate between desert salt flats, the Sundarbans and a joint farm-engineering stint with Barefoot College, Tilonia. The PE programme centres on parkour, Kalaripayattu, bird-watching circuits and citizen-science marathon-bioblitzes.

Faculty is selected for pedagogical appetite and ecological empathy, not mere certifications. Thirty-two educators hold qualifications ranging from wildlife biology to sculpture; the campus honours native species and demonstrates zero-single-use-plastic. As the founding manifesto states, Prakriti School endeavours to “grow children who lead meaningful, regenerative lives rather than prepare only for examinations.”

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