Founder
Vidyashala was founded in 1953 by Swami Shambhavananda, a Ramakrishna Math monk born in Kodagu.
Shambhavananda, an early president of Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, Mysore, was an educational pioneer who sought to offer younger students in their formative years a "man making education" which Swami Vivekananda had described as a "total development of man which includes the physical, mental and spiritual." Vidyashala would operationalize Vivekananda's calls for a higher intellect through sound health.
Vidyashala was preceded for at least three decades by the Ramakrishna Students Home, a boarding facility for poor students of whom some, such as the writer K.V. Puttappa, went on to gain eminence in pre-Independence Mysore. Vidyashala began in a small house in the Vontikoppal ward but shifted to its present campus in Yadavagiri after Shambhavananda purchased for the institution a patch of barren wasteland that he went on to transform into a verdant green.
In the early 1950s, Shambhavananda physically led the building construction despite his advancing age. A legend is that he walked around Mysore's Yadavagiri ward seeking bhiksha on behalf of the new school. Seeking bhiksha is a Hindu tradition of begging for alms with the purpose of self-effacement or ego-conquering.
Read more about this topic: Sri Ramakrishna Vidyashala
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