Suddenly gender segregated schools have fallen out of fashion. Co-ed boarding schools have become cooler and more stylish, not least because they implicitly teach boys good drawing room manners and gender egalitarianism. Here are India’s top-ranked co-ed boarding schools 2020-21. Once upon a time gender-segregated boarding schools — especially boys boarding schools such as St. Paul’s, Darjeeling, Bishop Cotton, Shimla, The Doon School, Dehradun, fashioned in the style of Eton College, whose sports education inspired Arthur Wellesley, aka the Duke of Wellington, to win the Battle of Waterloo (1815) — generated shock and awe as the high-end glamour schools of India. No more. In recent years, especially since the dawn of the new millennium, gender segregated schools have fallen out of fashion and have the flavour of schools for progeny of socially backward households that don’t practice gender equality at home and believe in arranged marriages. Suddenly co-ed schools — particularly co-ed boarding schools — are cooler and more stylish, not least because they implicitly teach boys good drawing room manners and gender egalitarianism. Simultaneously, they inculcate the spirit of gender parity and greater self-confidence in girl children from young age. Certainly your editor believes that a decade spent in an all-boys school set his social advancement and development of pleasing social skills by an equal number of years. Self-evidently, being a sports and games hero of girls is far more fulfilling than impressing yoboes. Be that as it may, there is a certain predictability about the co-ed boarding schools league table of the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) since they were introduced to the public in 2007. Ab initio the Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh)-based Rishi Valley School (RVS, estb.1926) promoted by philosopher-seer Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), also an extraordinary indigenous educationist whose teaching-learning precepts and practices centre around experiential learning and environment sustainability were far ahead of his time, has routinely been ranked India’s #1 co-ed boarding school. Built on a 350-acre campus that was neglected scrubland almost a century ago, this 94-year-old school which has been transformed into a pollution-free green oasis entirely through learning-by-doing pedagogies, has captured the imagination of the country’s sentient middle class. According to Dr. Anantha Jyothi, an English and linguistics alumna of IIT-Madras with several years of experience teaching English to the English in the UK who signed up as a teacher at RVS in 1996 and was appointed principal in 2018, the secret of RVS’ success is its culture of experiential education and the freedom and enablement given to students to pursue their co-curricular interests. “What the school gives to students is experiential, hands-on education which they are encouraged to apply in their chosen vocations and professions for the benefit of society. The RVS legacy continues when our students leave school and go into higher education and society,” says Dr. Jyothi. Jyothi believes the good reputation that RVS has established is also attributable to the community outreach programmes the school has ideated and implemented over the past nine decades. “Not much is written…
