The Doon School
The Doon School is a boys-only private boarding school in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. The school is relatively new among Indian boarding schools; its founding in 1935 was the culmination of canvassing by some moderate Indian nationalists led by Satish Ranjan Das, a Calcutta lawyer. Although Das died before the school could open, he is credited as the institution's founder because of his "assiduous lobbying" for the school's founding in the 1920s. He foresaw a school modelled on the British public school, but alive to Indian ambitions and desires. Jawaharlal Nehru encouraged a move toward establishing the school, but Mahatma Gandhi was not interested in it. The school's first headmaster was an Englishman, Arthur E. Foot, who had spent nine years as a science master at Eton College, England before coming to Doon, and returned to England right after India's independence. The present headmaster is Peter McLaughlin, who has occupied the post since 2009 and is the ninth headmaster of the school.The school houses roughly 500 pupils aged 13 to 18. Admission to the school is based on a competitive entrance examination and an interview. Every year in January and April, the school admits pupils aged 13 in Grade 7 and aged 14 in Grade 8 respectively. Doon pupils take the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education in tenth grade and are thereafter offered two strands for the final two years: International Baccalaureate or Indian School Certificate . The school began offering the IB curriculum only in 2006, before which all pupils had to sit the ISC examinations in twelfth grade. A quarter of the school's pupils are children of alumni.
