BENGALURU: B N Nandeesh, an organic farmer from Chuchugundi village, decided he would not send his now five-year-old to school even before she was born. He’s a PU dropout himself. “We live in beautiful surroundings, full of various forms of life,” he says. “So what’s the point in going to school and learning about dead and lifeless things?”
He is among the 200-odd parents and children — part of the Swashikshan community — who believe that education is restricted neither to the rote learning of classrooms nor to the fear-inducing school set-up. This year, the community held its annual meet, which concluded on Monday, at Visthar, an NGO off Gubbi Road. In the past five years, homeschooling in the country has grown exponentially, says Urmila Samson, a Pune-based parent, and one of the key organisers of the conference.
“People choose homeschooling for different reasons. One did because his children were into sports,” she says, referring to Lalit Bokadia, hailing from Salem.
“Most of my family, relatives and friends were hesitant,” he says. “I was answerable to all of them, and I knew of only one person who was homeschooling. So we followed a structure of sorts,” he explains.
Lalit shares the belief of many others who had gathered in the city – that life is a child’s best teacher, so learning can happen as easily through books as through cooking, gardening or travelling.
Concern about the effect schools have on kids convinced many other parents not to subject their offspring to it. “When my daughter sees me, she comes running. But when children see their teachers or principal at school, they run the other way,” says Sandhya Gupta, adding that the entire system thrived on fear. So when she moved to Himachal Pradesh from the USA when her daughter was five, she didn’t want to send her to school. “But she wanted to go,” says Sandhya. So the parent enrolled her in a government school “because there was least accountability”, and would take her there for two hours every day.
“All the kids would gather around me, and over time, I also started taking books because I realised those children had teachers and the infrastructure, but not the right environment,” Sandhya says.
Over the years, she and her husband, both with engineering backgrounds, realised they were meant to teach. “We understood science and maths, and used our knowledge to teach children,” she says. “So we’ve started a centre called Aavishkar, near Palampur, where we live.”
At the conference too, Sandhya organised activities to show kids how to apply scientific concepts in everyday life. “I divided the children into groups and gave each group some ice cream sticks, glue and tape. They had to build a bridge between two tables using that, and see how much weight they could stack on it.” If a learning centre of sorts organically evolved around Sandhya’s daughter, Urmila and John Samson pondered over starting one but let the idea go “because they were more involved with her (their daughter)”.
John, a dentist, says they discussed homeschooling as their daughter was born 23 years ago, and chose that form of education for her. “I had noticed that my nephews and nieces, once full of energy, became less enthusiastic about things after they started school,” he says.
A Delhi-based parent, Moin Ahmed, also says he was “worried, as a practising Muslim, what values schools would teach his children”. “I want them to be empathetic, look at all of humanity as one,” he explains. Growing up, he had had some exposure to an alternative school – one in which Arvind Gupta, known for his innovation in low-cost toys, was teaching.
But homeschooling wasn’t something he thought of till he realised his older boy was having a hard time at school. “His mother, from a mass communication background, had really worked on his English, so he was more comfortable speaking it than he was with Hindi,” says Moin. But he often got picked on by his peers for that.
An avid reader who had pored over novels meant for higher age groups, he found little interest in picking up children’s books on the shelf in his classroom. “When she noticed he wasn’t reading, the teacher didn’t bother asking him why, she just wrote in his annual report that he displayed a lack of interest in the activity,” Moin says. “That’s when I realised the complete lack of connection between the adult educators and the children.”
He promptly pulled his first son, in Class 2, and his nursery-going second son out of school. He didn’t enrol his daughter into a formal education institution. This was three years ago, but the family still smarts at the treatment the boy received. “We lost many things in school,” Moin says. “It hurts to think about it.”
The first of Urmila and John’s sons, on the other hand, used a similar experience to teach himself. The football enthusiast went to a coaching institute, a year or two ago. “Everyone was asked to bring their favourite books. He took Erich Segal’s Dragons of Eden, and they were impressed,” his father recalls. “But the next day, having never been to school or had a structured learning method, he wasn’t able to solve a simple maths problem. He later told me that he used the embarrassment to learn maths. In a year, he went from the Class 3 level to Class 10.”
He’s currently preparing for his IGCSE exams in maths and science. He’s going to a learning centre and my husband helps him with assignments,” says Urmila.
Her daughter, interested right from the beginning in dance and the performing arts, did a course in Eurythmy and even took an exam in it at a London university.
“You hear of people who have gone to school finding it difficult to get jobs,” she adds. “But children who have done homeschooling, as far as I know, haven’t had any trouble that way.” This is perhaps because, as Bengaluru-based parent Chetana Kulkarni puts it, whatever the child learns is need-based. “I realised my elder daughter — she’s six now — knows how to do simple addition and subtraction because she was telling me every day how many days of the conference were left, and keeping count of how many toys she arranged.”
The lactation counsellor’s daughter has been to school on and off for six months. “She has been to three different schools whenever she wanted to go. We don’t have a fixed structure. We take her with us when we travel within the city or outside, so she can meet people. We encourage her to ask questions, and try to answer them and help her choose what she wants to do.”
In the City
Although she says homeschooling is catching on, Chetana isn’t sure how many families in Bengaluru might be going that way. “I know of about 10 families in the city and 50 across the country, but I’m sure there are many, many more.” In Bengaluru, families have created groups in Jayanagar, Indiranagar and Whitefield, she says. “We live in Indiranagar but I haven’t felt the need to be part of any group activities in a long time, maybe because my daughters are still young. Earlier, a group would meet at Krishna Rao Park in Basavanagudi regularly, but that has stopped over the last year or so.”