Letters from a Forest School

Letters From A Forest School is a passionate account of an educational experiment carried out in the 1950s in a school established in a forest in Orissa. Written in the form of letters to a newspaper, it records the joys and difficulties accompanying the founding of an ideal in a world rotten with prejudice, mired in bureaucratic apathy and burdened with a mindset that is suspicious of any kind of change. The experiment continued for four years, but its significance continues to be relevant as it dramatizes the courage to be different and the passion to transform human fate through education.

Freedom fighter, educator and writer Chittaranjan Das is one of the most prominent thinkers of the post-independent India. A social psychologist, he had close contact with eminent personalities like Martin Buber and Nabakrushna Choudhury. He wrote his thesis on Spinoza at Visva Bharati and was trained in clinical psychology by Viktor Frankl at the Vienna School established by Freud. In his later life, he has devoted himself to the task of establishing schools modelled upon Sri Aurobindo's Integral Education System.

Diptiranjan Pattanaik teaches English at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. He went to Ohio State University in 1996-97 as a Fulbright Fellow to work on children's literature. He won the National Katha Award for creative writing in 1995.