Well behind the director’s chair, the cameras and the sets of Chester County’s famous filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is a sixth sense to revive a dying American dream for thousands of local children. And his wife’s heart beats for suffering children a world away.

In the quiet of their Malvern home, away from the hype of Shyamalan’s locally-filmed “Sundowning” flick coming soon to theaters and the next-year debut of his TV series, “Wayward Pines,” is a serious and dedicated mind that has delved deeply into the mire of our public school problems and engineered a reform memoir-manifesto, “I Got Schooled,” chock full of innovation, expert analysis and most importantly, raw data.

“My dad chose Philadelphia as the beacon of America,” Shyamalan told Main Line Today in an exclusive interview. “When I watched the miniseries John Adams, I was weeping; I also wept reading Adams’ biography. It’s the American dream, and I’m very aware that I’m a product of that because I had the educational opportunities that my parents provided.”

Unfortunately, far too many inner-city parents haven’t been able to do the same for their kids for far too long.

Shyamalan sees that as an unacceptable compromise of American values,” the article stated, and he “of course, wants to change that. As for his wife, she wants to change the world.”

As he directs his nonprofit M. Night Shyamalan Foundation to the public school problem, his wife and Bryn Mawr College doctor of psychology, Bhavna, invests in education from the couple’s home country of India to Tanzania, Guatemala, South Sudan, Nicaragua, Kenya, Ghana and Liberia.

“… The Sixth Sense didn’t change my life,” Bhavna said in the article. “Having children changed my life. And meeting poor, uneducated, abused children around the world has changed my life. What The Sixth Sense did was give us the ability to change the lives of those children.”

And it hasn’t altered their character, refined by years of living off one income out of Shyamalan’s parents’ home in nearby Penn Valley.

“It was a struggle, but I didn’t mind that,” she explained. “The times that I feel the most strong are when I go through a struggle and come out of it. Because then I know I can do it.”

It’s no different today when she visits some of the poorest places on the globe.

“We stay in tents or huts, usually without indoor plumbing and sometimes without beds,” she added. “We eat stew or soup and some bread — whatever everyone else is eating — and we bring protein bars.”

In the end, it’s the changed lives that are priceless.

“I’m asking you to care about people you’ve never met in a country you’ve never visited,” Bhavna concluded in the article. “But I have to tell you that I left my heart in Liberia.”

Read more about the M. Night Shyamalan Foundation and its initiatives on Main Line Today here.