Solving one of the most pressing problems of our movement

The lack of good Vaishnava schools in our movement is a monumental problem. Unfortunately, we don't have Vaishnava schools everywhere, and many of the schools that exist have a problematic record.

The lack of good Vaishnava schools in our movement is a monumental problem. We have devotees practically everywhere in the world, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, but unfortunately, we don't have Vaishnava schools everywhere, and many of the schools that exist have a problematic record, to put it mildly.

Most of us understand the dangers of materialistic education, and thus we look for options, but there are just a few good options for schools run by devotees, and most of them are quite far away. Many couples thus take the choice of moving to the communities where good schools are available, accepting the inconvenience in the name of the education of their children.

The problem is that once they move, they quickly find out that either there are no jobs available or they pay too little to maintain a family. In Mayapur, for example, there are many jobs and remunerated services available, but the salaries are usually in the range of 50 to 150 dollars per month (yes, it looks like a mistake, but unfortunately it isn't!). Can you conceive how one can maintain a family and pay school fees with this amount? Me neither.

In such a situation, most families with children decide to split, with the mother staying with the children in the community and the husbands going back to their countries of origin to work and send them money. This, however, leads to another problem: the children grow up without their fathers. This creates all kinds of challenges.

There is a reason Krsna created things in a way that both a father and a mother are necessary to conceive a child. For a child to develop properly, both are necessary. Both boys and girls need a father to show them the proper example, and good as the mother may be, it's impossible for her to fulfill all the needs alone. Children who grow up without fathers face all kinds of challenges, and this puts extra pressure on the schools and on the community at large, which need to deal with all kinds of problematic children.

We can see that often it is not the fault of the fathers, the mothers, the teachers, or others. Everyone may have the best intentions, but the situation creates these kinds of difficulties.

Couples living far away also create other problems, since men and women living alone become more propense to having affairs that can have a devastating effect on the communities. A wife living alone may fall in love with some married man (or vice versa), and this may lead to the split of two families. After this happens a few times, other ladies start to become afraid of someone stealing their husbands, and people stop trusting each other. We can see how problems can quickly escalate.

How to solve this problem? Part of the solution lies in creating opportunities for families who decide to establish themselves in the communities to maintain themselves. For this, devotees with a talent for business, who can generate wealth and jobs, are desperately needed. Just like a prosperous society can't exist with good spiritual and material leadership, it also can't exist without competent businessmen capable of generating wealth. If you have this kind of talent, this is probably the most useful service you can do. Being a spiritual society, we have many Brahmanas, but the head can't survive without the belly.

Another solution is to open schools in smaller yatras, reducing the necessity of couples moving from their home cities in the first place. Homeschooling can also be a good solution, but of course, it also brings its own dose of challenges. There are also some cases of small home schools, where a couple that is doing homeschooling takes a few more children from the community. This may also be a good model if properly implemented. This is possibly the best model from a Vedic standpoint, since it puts children under the care of couples who already have children, and thus know how to properly take care of them. It's important to note that the Vedic model of gurukulas was based exactly on brahmana couples who would accept children from the community, and raise them like their own children, developing an affective bond with them.

Small local schools, either based on the family model or some other model, avoid another problem, which is cultural differences in enrolling a child in a distant country, which are cultural differences. Indian schools, for example, operate under standards that are very different from what parents from many countries would expect, and which may also be different from what the children may be used to. Local schools, maintained by local devotees, can do much better in this regard and help to strengthen the local communities.

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