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Paradise School Goa

Goa’s most exciting and innovative school

We launched in 2016 with a simple aim – to put Goa on the educational map. There’s many great schools in India, but we wanted to do something special. Showcase what education can really be about. Our innovation comes from using SOLE and also picking the most modern and up-to-date subjects from the Cambridge catalogue for our IGCSE and A Level programmes eg Enterprise, Environmental Management, World Literature, Design and Technology and Marine Science to name a few – as well as the usual stable of Maths, English and the Sciences.

We pioneered Digital Citizenship from the start, which has now become Digital Literacy from Cambridge and championed Global Perspectives early on. We believe teaching children about the internet and who they are in the world are important foundations for a relevant education. Likewise we are keen on the co-curricular subjects for our Primary children like farming, pottery, music and movement.

SOLE is more than a method in our school and has become part of our culture. It means inquisitiveness is encouraged and children are not afraid to tackle the big issues – but also that it gives them great agency over their learning. They are choosing and guiding their own educational experience, that’s what self-organisation means. Children put together their own committees, parties, magazines and events and we give them full freedom to pursue their interests at school.

At IGCSE level, we give them the versatility to plan their own exam schedule over the November, March and June exam series, so even the examination process is within their own control. In fact overall, we would say we make the system support our children rather than forcing them to fit into it. It’s just a matter of perspective. Kids are way ahead of us when it comes to the future – we need to catch up with them, not the other way around, and design schools with that in mind.

In all these ways, big and small, children thrive in Paradise and grow into who they are with beauty, power and precision.

Shilpa Mehta

CEO & Founder

Shilpa is a former broadcast journalist for the BBC, Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel from London. She used to present Lonely Planet, as well as many other travel, history and environmental documentaries – going all over the world to chase tornadoes, climb volcanoes, explore virgin rainforests. After having a child, Shilpa moved to Goa with her young daughter and began her tropical adventures.

Initially, they lived in South Goa where Shilpa set up various businesses, including her first Primary School in 2014. Then as her daughter grew, she moved to North Goa and set up Paradise School as an International SOLE Cambridge School in 2016. She deeply believes in the educational potential of Goa and indeed for it to be one of the most extraordinary states in India, given its wide-ranging appeal to people from all over the world who are seeking a new way of life.

Dr Sugata Mitra

Advisor to Paradise School Goa

Dr Sugata Mitra is the world’s leading expert on the internet and children’s learning. He worked uptil 2019 as a Professor and Principal Research Investigator in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK.

In 1999, Dr Mitra conducted the ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment, where a computer was embedded within a wall in an Indian slum in Delhi and children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught computers very easily without any formal training. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE).

The Hole in the Wall experiment left a mark on popular culture. Diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Dr Mitra’s experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel that went on to become the Oscar winning movie of 2009 – ‘Slumdog Millionaire’.

In 2013, he was awarded the first $1 million TED prize, to put his educational ideas together to create seven laboratories called ‘Schools in the Cloud’, with SOLEs going viral all over the world. Here, he studied learning as emergent phenomena in an educational self-organising system. These results question the ideas of curriculum, examinations and the meaning of ‘knowing’ itself in the internet world of the 21st century.

Sugata Mitra is Advisor to Paradise School Goa, the world’s first SOLE School, which is taking SOLEs into mainstream education.

Our Mission

We have left the old shore behind at Paradise and are heading for a new horizon

Our classrooms are personalised not standardised; our environment is collaborative not competitive, we embrace the educational potential of the internet and everybody has a voice in our school.

We are not a top-down hierarchy, but an inclusive working space for children to optimise their learning and themselves. Likewise, teachers are allowed to innovate and expand their classrooms as they see fit and are given full autonomy and respect. When teachers are switched on, so are their classes.

These elements have created a positive and uplifting educational community at Paradise School where children are willing participants in their own learning journey. We treat education as an adventure, not as a punishment or a means to an end.

Collaborative

Self-organised

Internet-based

What makes the school unique is it has combined the International Cambridge Board with SOLE, Sugata Mitra’s $1 Million TED Prize winning idea.

Paradise School is a Cambridge Pathways School from Grades 1 to 12