If you’re a dropout, there are reasons. You probably come from a one or two-room house that you share with six people in your family. Privacy is non-existent.

You play soccer in the street with rocks for goal posts. There are no parks and no public spaces in your part of town. You’re also probably working. Probably 80 hours a week, for $3-4 per day. In your free time, you hang out. If you’re a boy, you hang out on street corners, smoking and often sampling alcohol. Or worse. That’s what “home” is like for you. If you’re a girl, you have no free time to be with any of your friends.

If we are going to encourage you to join a Non Formal Education (NFE) class to get a 10th grade diploma, to get out of this dead end, it’s going to have to be totally different than what you are living in now. You need a space that’s safe – that home should have felt like. You need a teacher who really likes you and likes to see you. And you need to be with friends who are also waking up to a thirst for learning. This space, which is like home, is what we call an NFE classroom.

For you and 24 of your friends, Ibn Tufail school in Abu Nasr suburb of Amman is your NFE home. There, your teacher respects you. You and your friends are the ones who make the classroom a cool place to learn. In that environment you can talk and people will listen. You can listen when people talk. It’s real participation. And real participation empowers everybody.

Saif is one of those 25 who found a home in the classroom at the Ibn Tufail school. He even dropped out of that! But, he came back. Mostly because his friends and teachers in that class make him feel like he’s part of a family and that he’s at home.

The Non Formal Education program of Questscope makes a home and gives a young man or a young woman the freedom to stay or to go. And they stay. And this leads them to that 10th grade diploma that can get them out of that dead end.