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Society MAGAZINE | NOV 28, 2011 

Dola Dasgupta with her home-schooled kids, in DelhiEDUCATION: HOME SCHOOLING

The Two On Two MathA factory-like education system forces parents to explore home school optionsSMITA MITRA 

The Self-Learning Curve

• Learning Societies Conferences: Held annually in different locations, they bringtogether people who want to nurture diverse learning communities, vernacular traditionsand intercultural dialogue. Have taken place in Udaipur, Mumbai, Brazil, Jordan,Pakistan, Iran and Himachal Pradesh.

• Shikshantar: Based out of Udaipur, Shikshantar is an alternative learning space thatsupports organic farming, sustainable living, community networks and practices,indigenous culture and knowledge streams and the gift culture economy.

• Swaraj University: A two-year learning programme that helps young learners to developthe skills, knowledge and perspectives they need to create viable green-collar enterprisesand to support healthy and resilient local communities.

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• Gandhi Ashram: Located in Chhatarpur, MP. All activities at the ashram relate toGandhian thought, whether it’s directly teaching it or, for eg, employing it in an organicfarm. It has activities, workshops and camps that focus on work that is constructive andcreative, and suitable for all age groups.

• Deer Park, Bir, Kangra, Himachal Pradesh: Centre for study of classical Indian wisdomtraditions

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Vidya Ashram: Located in Sarnath, UP, the ashram emphasises the importance of “lokvidya” or folk knowledge and finds extraordinary ways to cultivate and preserve it.

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“Did you learn the most important lessons of your life in school?” asks Manish Jain, an

educationist. He has asked this question to over 5,000 people till date and the answer has alwaysbeen in the negative. Always. The question goes to the heart of what we ‘brand’ as learning. Tomost of us, schools that teach the three Rs and a set syllabus is an integral part of our children’seducation, the key to a secure future. But now there are a healthy number of parents in Pune,Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and even smaller cities like Udaipur, Surat and Varanasi, who arequestioning this practice.

The reasons why they seek an alternative vary. Ruchi Kaushik, a doctor, could not understandwhy parents were putting their child into “pre-nursery classes” just so that they are “prepped” toclear school admission interviews. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t send my son Saras to schoolthat early and ended up home-schooling him when I realised he was too bright for school.” It’s agamble that has paid off, with Saras, a child prodigy, making it to IIT at age 14.

Vidya Shankar in Chennai had a markedly different problem. Her son was repeatedly beinghauled up to the principal’s office. “Sometimes it was because he was disruptive in class or hadbad handwriting. His teacher continuously shamed him and demeaned him,” she says. It wasn’tlong before Vidya took him out of school and taught him at home with some help from Saraswati

Kendra School, an open school, where her son went for classes twice a week for the socialisationhe craved with kids his age. Vidya has since started Cascade, a “learning space” for home-schooled children in Chennai with other parents who want to turn away from the factory-likeschools. “Have you seen the schools nowadays? They have 10,000 or more children within their walls. That’s not a school, that’s a prison,” says Vidya.

Ann Manning, one of the first home-schoolers in Mumbai, wanted to bring up her son anddaughter (now 23 and 27 respectively) with Christian values like charity and compassion rather than the cut-throat competition encouraged in schools. Another Mumbai home-schooler, MathewPeedikayil, was appalled by the narrow scope for interactions and the curriculum at regular schools. “Kids just mug up facts to pass tests, they only interact with kids of their age. That’s nothow life works. In life you have to interact with people of different ages, in different situations. Andschools don’t have playtime anymore so their socialisation skills are really affected,” he says.

But questioning the mainstream doesn’t mean that they have abandoned it entirely. They havestill maintained a link, albeit tenuous, with mainstream education through exams. They coachtheir kids using the cbse or ssc syllabus so that they can give their 10th and 12th boards throughthe National Institute of Open Schooling. Some parents, especially ones who have lived in the USor UK before returning to India, prepare their kids for the International Baccalaureate program or the Cambridge International General Certificate of Education’s A and O levels.

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But there are also bravehearts who are making a clean break from any form of conventionaleducation. “Unschooling is about growing in complete freedom, without curriculum or boardexams,” says Urmila Samson who has three kids, daughter Sahya, aged 19, and two boys, Raynand Niom, aged 14 and 11 respectively. None of them, except Sahya, who briefly attended schoolfor a few weeks, have ever seen the inside of a classroom and they are not sitting for any examseither. “We do not separate book learning from all other kinds of learning, nor do we give it moreimportance than other kinds of learning, like how to handle emotions, how to stay healthy,physical activities and survival skills like farming and cooking, community interactions. In short,everything that goes on that is relevant to the individual, rather than the state or the corporateworld,” says Urmila.

Even for home-schoolers, these “unschoolers” are too radical a bunch. To reject the mainstreamcompletely is something deeply unsettling for most parents. But for unschoolers, it is a way tocreate complete human beings in charge of their own learning and thus, their own destinies. For Dola Dasgupta, unschooling has meant allowing her children, aged 10 and five, to learn from awide range of life situations and tools. “In radical unschooling, every opportunity in everyday life isseen as a potential learning experience. My children learn in ways that are intrinsic to their intuitive nature. I, as the facilitator of their learning journey, just provide the impetus, resourcesand knowledge.”

 

Kanku’s mother worries, but father Manish is nonchalant. As he puts it,“Tagore didn’t start reading till hewas 10.”

Resources could mean a trip to an organic farm, or watching films, or learning through theinternet, or talking to people in the neighbourhood. “It means that any source of inspiration is aguru,” says Manish Jain. With a rich and varied background, including two years spent oncreating UNESCO’s Learning Without Frontiers transnational initiative, Manish is a co-founder of Shikshantar in Udaipur. It’s now one of the main hubs of self-directed learning that unschoolers inIndia gravitate to. The philosophy is simple. The factory model of schooling is seen as part of theproblem where children are put through a homogenised learning experience that creates dull

adults who have fixed answers to fixed problems and most horrifyingly, fixed views, and areunable to think out of the box. As Manish puts it, each child has different skills and interests thatneed to be nurtured through an “individualised, not individualistic” learning path. It meansrecognising apprenticeship and other experiential learning practices as more powerful and usefulthan mere theoretical knowledge spoon-fed to children. It means that someone with an MBAdegree might be less successful at running a business than someone who might be illiterate buthas learnt the ropes by actually running one.

Manish’s own child, Kanku, still hasn’t learnt to read or write fluently but successfully helps run apani-puri store, sells hand-crafted items at their local ‘gift-culture’ cafe and knows almost as muchas a professional make-up artist (this by watching online make-up tutorials). While Kanku’smother worries about him, Manish is nonchalant for, as he puts it, “Tagore didn’t start reading tillhe was 10”.

Now, inspired by Manish, more parents are debating an education system that fails to create

real learning and only provides the top achievers with financially successful careers. One suchcouple is Anita Borkar and Nitin Paranjape, who have been working with community mediainitiatives. After they and their child Sakhi interacted with Manish over a year, Sakhi decided toquit school. She started studying at home and kept up with friends by organising Warli paintingsessions and the ‘Teenage Film Club’. She’s learnt two languages, dabbled heavily in art and

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music and travelled all over the country with her parents. After giving her 10th boards throughnios, she decided to try formal college education at the local Nashik university and topped thearts division. It was this ‘success’ that changed attitudes in her community for people have sinceopened up to the idea.

Sakhi is now part of the initial batch of students at Swaraj University, the first self-directed

learning institute in India. The students and facilitators—including Manish, Anita, Nikhil and RevaDandage, who has fought her own long battle with mainstream education— call themselves“khojis” or seekers. Meeting every two months and keeping in touch via Facebook andnewsletters, each khoji seems thrillingly unique. Like Vikas Wadje, 28, who saw India hitchingrides on trucks, worked at marketing pesticides before quitting it all and turning to organic farmingand ayurveda. He is learning from a traditional ayurvedic healer, and has asked to apprenticewith him for five years.

Then there’s Harshita Wadhya, 23, a Lady Shri Ram College (Delhi) graduate who just got tiredof the rat race and is exploring alternative healing techniques. Jayesh Mohta fought his family toquit his job at a broking firm to pursue theatre and has opened an organic cafe and “learning anddoing space” in Udaipur. Rama Barhat, who was scared of even travelling alone before but hadnursed a long-time dream of making films, is thrilled at winning an online International Student

Filmmaker award—her filmJazba

was shown at the Women’s Voices Now film festival in NewYork. She’s now travelling across the country to hone her craft. Rahul Hasija got through IIM andTISS and was remarkably depressed about it before he began accessing alternate learningspaces, like a library in Indore called Banyan Tree, where he first read about the failures of theGreen Revolution, about Monsanto, about the lesser known aspects of globalisation andprivatisation. After meeting Manish, he decided to join Swaraj University but is still undecided ona long-term future.

While their stories differ wildly, there is something similar about all the khojis. They are all veryarticulate, very alive and very opinionated. So much so that some like Sakhi even question the‘alternative’ system, talking about the “security” of a formal degree, before commenting that sheisn’t sure she’ll fit in anymore. Meanwhile, others who have been through the grind, talk about thesuffocation in mainstream education and careers that they feel no longer haunts them. Their self-

confidence is bewitching to watch precisely because they are so sure that they’ll achievewhatever they want. Eventually. Roger Waters must feel proud. They certainly have come a longway without schools and (formal) education!