Shakuntala Mankani over 40 years ago. Starting out as Jumeirah International Nursery, Fortes Education has progressively grown into an educational enterprise of over 900 educators.
Mrs. Mankani firmly believes that education should provide a solid foundation in values and character development. Fortes was thus built on the premise of providing a strong foundation for an “Education in Human Values”.
With its first school and nursery, Fortes responded to the needs of the community of families in Dubai which had few schooling options many years ago. Families were torn apart with the wives and children living abroad in their homeland while the husbands worked in Dubai, or where the families in Dubai had to send their children to boarding school abroad.
Mrs. Mankani herself experienced this predicament with her own children who went to board in the UK and India.
The establishment of schools, also presented an opportunity for the Mankani family to actualise its long-cherished dream of getting back into education to serve the community, as it had done in the late 1800s in pre-partition India. At this time the family owned and operated an all-girls charitable school called ‘’Dayaldas Kanya-Paathshaala’’ which blended the time-honoured Vedic “Gurukul” approach to education with a modern-western pedagogy of the times. The school’s ethos was to develop in each child a strong foundation of the human values of Love, Truth, Right Conduct, Peace, and Non-Violence, respectively, from which all sub-values such as Courage, Resilience, Honesty, Tolerance, Curiosity, etc., emanate. Fast forward to today, the Mankani family believes that it has reclaimed part of its lost heritage by bringing back “Education in Human Values” to its schools through the scientifically validated “Positive Education” philosophy and “PERMA Theory of Wellbeing”, which are based on the field of “Positive Psychology” created by Professor Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, USA.
