Ever since my misguided and definitely wasted years as a rebel teenager, rebel young adult, and some other adjectives best not described here, I have held one rock solid belief – I have complete trust and faith in our armed forces.
Again, this stems from certain adventures on motorcycles during the turbulent times in Punjab before Bluestar. Let me just say that I owe my survival on a few hairy occasions to officers who were willing to listen to my side of the story as to what the heck I was doing at 2 am on a motorcycle in December on a highway that even truckers avoided at night.
While I explained the pressing reasons for my being where I was at the time I was, I knew there were multiple rifles and even a light machine gun behind the searchlights that were blinding me with the soldiers manning those guns waiting for one sign from their officer to start firing.
Leaving aside the personal shenanigans, I have always held that no matter what is wrong with our system (and there are many things wrong), the armed forces have been our most trustworthy institution and continue to be so. Rock solid.
Okay, so motorcycling never left my system as you must have surmised by now & I managed to even get this activity aligned to a Montessori preschool – probably the first and only such initiative worldwide – OM Rides – https://oliviamontessori.com/om-rides/
To show my respect and gratitude to our armed forces on the one hand and on the other to offer quality early education to children from financially disadvantaged backgrounds, Olivia Montessori has started offering limited seats at half the regular fee to children from these backgrounds.
In both cases, it is the solid base that quality early education provides for later growth and learning that has pushed us to make this offering.
We understand that there are Army schools, Air Force schools etc., where children from the forces can be educated at fees similar to what OM charges so what is the differentiator, you may ask.
The difference is the alternative method of early education that the Montessori method has successfully demonstrated for over a century, the method which many industry leaders agree made a difference in their early years while creating a solid base for higher learning. To offer this method to children from the forces as well as underprivileged children – this is the start we have made. Let’s see where this leads, shall we?
