Kids staying at home in times of corona ≠ Homeschooling

I've been reading and listening to families', especially mothers' struggles with working from home, kids being at home, and of course handling all the corona-related stress as well as measures to stay safe and well stocked. Some have used the term “homeschooling”, perhaps to describe the way kids are currently learning now.

In this post, I first talk about our own understanding of the word “homeschooling” and whether this corona-induced period of homestay is a good time to consider homeschooling. We have been homeschooling our daughters aged 8 and 5 since 2016. The older one attended a year of playschool. The younger one's never been to school.

I share here observations from our own experience so far with our children. Other homeschooling families may have different takes.

The second part of my post deals with the “benefits” of homeschooling as I see it in these difficult times. Of course, we have reaped more from homeschooling than we have sown and I believe we will continue to do so. I am only sharing a few observations here that may ring a bell with the larger, non-homeschooling audience who may read this.

Now, what does “homeschooling” mean (to us)?

1. The term “homeschooling” can be misleading. It's true that the home is central to our lifestyle choice as against going to school or even office (yes, that's another choice, but may need another post), but homeschooling does not necessarily mean that the kids are always at home, learning from their books. In fact, many a homeschooler spends a significant part outdoors, be it in the garden, farm, on the playground, or travelling. It's for this reason that other terms such as “open learning” and “self learning” may come closer to describe this way of life rather than the term homeschooling.

So, what does homeschooling mean to us? Being cooped up with kids at home doesn't equate to homeschooling. For us, homeschooling has meant that children learn what they want to at their own pace and in their own space. Their natural inclinations and curiosity leads them to explore and discover. We as parents largely stand by the sidelines and give them our help, counsel when they need it.

Many a homeschooler spends a good part of their time outdoors.
Some even travel as part of their learning process.  

Homeschooling is a recognition of the fact that the human learning process is continuous and omnipresent. School is not the only place where “education” happens.

2. Homeschooling was one among many gradual changes we made in our lives. As we started slowing down our pace of life and making more sustainable choices, homeschooling fit like a glove. Hence, if our decision to homeschool is seen in isolation as only an education approach for kids, you may not understand it in its entirety.

3. We weren't forced to homeschool, you shouldn't be too. We decided to homeschool because of a deep dissatisfaction with the education system. At that time, we did not have a very clear understanding of how schools can systematically tamper with and destroy the human brain's capacity to learn. Nor were we aware of how the schooling system feeds into other exploitative systems that take the individual far away from what could be their natural existence and thus weaken their relationship with their self, society, and nature. But now that we know, we stand strong and happy with our decision.

Our decision took time. Our decision has strong moorings. But it was our own decision. It was not forced on us because of a Covid-like situation. Most families are now being forced into “homeschooling” and that can give you the wrong idea. And, I can easily see why. When you are not used to having the children around all day, it can feel stressful, especially if you also have to work from home during the same time, which too you may not be used to.

But homeschooling, really, has been one of the most liberating things to have happened to us. I am sorry that it may not feel that way to you right now. However, now that you are a sort of a forced homeschooler, it doesn't hurt to come over to our universe and see for yourself what homeschooling can be and how it has helped us keep the hair on our heads in these times. Please do note that it is a difficult time for us as well: the kids are used to engaging and fulfilling social interactions which they now have to do without. However, our choice to homeschool has definitely kept us and our children sane in these very strange times.

1. Children learn to self-manage. Our children approach us if they seek something from us, be it food, help with a toy, or simply our attention. While they do need our attention at times, we don't sit with them all day. We have never done that apart from the first couple of years when they needed us to be constantly around. (I've had the support of my in-laws and my parents in looking after the kids until they were two-three years old. I still have their support, but my kids don't need it much now.) However, when we do spend time with them, it has to be mindful time. It can't be colouring with them with one eye on the phone or laptop. If children have never been to school, they simply don't need anyone to hover around them from morn to night, monitor them, or tell them what to do at what times. They simply be.

Impromptu and self-made games and props are
stock-in-trade of our homeschoolers. 

2. Children understand when you explain. My children understand that I have household duties to attend to, a day job (though now part-time), and that I too need my own time. When we decided to homeschool our older daughter, it was not a parent-led decision. My daughter simply didn't want to go to preschool any more. I used to work full-time from home then. So, one of my big initial concerns with homeschooling was how I would get anything done with her around from morn to night. I sat her down one day and explained my situation to her: that she no longer had to go to school, but that didn't mean that I would be available to sit with her all day or that she would watch TV all day. She readily agreed. All she cared for was that school was out. It has been the same way since then: if we need to get something done or draw a line that the kids need to respect, we explain it to them.

I spend a certain part of the day with the kids, usually in the evening between 4 to 6 pm on certain days. I work two days a week, so those days are off limits for the kids. They know that. Yes, there are times when they do get cranky, hover around my computer when I am working, or be more demanding than usual, but these are exceptions rather than the rule. At such times, I pause my work, attend to whatever's bothering them, and they usually let me go after that.

That children being able to understand when adults explain has got nothing to do with homeschooling, per se. It is to do with trust and respect. I need to trust that my child will understand and I need to respect any concerns she may have. This sort of relationship-building comes with the territory with homeschooling. You need to build a solid, deep relationship based on trust with your children, else homeschooling can't work.

3. Their creativity blooms, untampered as it is by school. My children come up with impromptu songs, dances, even full puppet and dance shows, all on their own. They also create games of their own with simple props. While their days are hardly empty, neither are they crammed with “activities”. There is stuff they do together as well as on their own. When it's time to switch off the lights at night, I have often heard my older daughter grumble that the only time she gets to read is at night and that it isn't fair that the day came to an end so quickly. Yes, you read that right.

Our children immerse themselves in a dozen things from morn to night,
without necessarily being busy. 

4. No reliance on a schedule, go with the flow. The kids have blocks of time roughly assigned to certain tasks or activities. This “schedule”, if we can call it that, is something we have collectively agreed on. For instance, playing in the garden and bath are what they do before lunch. Post-lunch, they have their hour of TV watching. In the evening, we go out for a walk, cycling, playing with their friends. But these are large blocks of time and are intentionally designed that way, so that there is no micro-managing of their day. This schedule keeps changing with the weather, kids' preferences for that particular day (bathing and breakfast still have to be dealt with in the morning), or with any external factors such as if we have visitors.

Whether to homeschool or not is not a decision you can come to under duress. However, it's a good time to think about the possibilities of children being and learning on their own, of blooming to their full potential, and how they can grow up with the sense of the self still intact. And, what a difference it could make to the world.

Kempu Kanagile -- Kids' watch their first play

Bhargavi and I went about half hour before the scheduled start of the play to buy the tickets. We settled in with a packet of chakkli and waited for the show to begin and for my mother to arrive with Maya.

As we had bought a family pass after paying a bomb (well, Rs 500 per head is a bomb by Sirsi standards, at least), I felt entitled to sit in the second row. This was rather daring of me, because usually in small towns like Sirsi, the first two rows have to be left empty for the press or dignitaries even if you have premium tickets.

But, I began to chicken out as some event organizers began to come around and started sticking “Press” labels to the row of chairs in front of me and “VIPS” or “Ganyaru” on the wall beside us. We eased out of our really premium-feeling second-row chairs to the third row of chairs while they were still available. Life in Sirsi has taught me to be grateful that I made this move fast enough to still get the seats in the third row.

My mother and Maya came. Maya duly demanded her share of chakklis and munched them, while our wait still continued for the play to start. I was hoping that this being a paid event, the organizers may skip their pound of flesh and start the play right away. But the templatized “sabha karyakrama” was hard to evade, though it was a shortened version. And, what is sabha karyakrama you ask? Well, you have to live through one to understand it, but I’ll spoil it for you: a true sabha karyakrama begins with a lighting of the lamp, then an invocation to God. Next, the Chief Guest and the President (not of the country, but the event) is honoured with shawls that they will never use in their lives and some “moments” (really, you didnt know they were mementos? You are not living the life, I tell you.) packed in shiny, plasticky paper. Then the Chief Guest is invited to talk and how long he/she speaks really depends on how kind he/she is feeling towards you.

The President is next in line to speak and it’s the same about his kindness. Sometimes I suspect they are just prepping you to be the next Chief Guest and President, because you can’t really be a good one unless you have weathered the role of the audience.

Now, if there are no special felicitations, it quickly moves to the Vote of Thanks(!?). Why vote, why be thankful, I have often wondered. The Vote of Thanks is taken particularly seriously as I have seen the Thanker going all red in the face if they forget to thank anyone and needs to be reminded.

But I digress. So, yesterday we did have a sabha karyakrama, but an abbreviated one and the play finally started a full hour after the scheduled time.

The children had their eyes riveted on stage from the moment it began. There were questions all throughout: about the stage props, about the fantastic costume of the emperor/gold mine magnate. I didn't provide explanations for everything as I thought it may interfere with the viewing but kept feeding some info to Bubbu so she could get the threads. When I told Maya that the fantastic-looking creature was actually the Raja, she was not convinced. She said a Raja didn’t look that way.

It was a good performance by everyone, especially the lead actor, Disha Ramesh, who played Nandini. I think the kids loved the play more because it was a musical. Too much conversation would probably have made it difficult for them to follow. On some levels, it was simple enough for them to get it. This is what they understood: there was this girl who seemed to like red flowers. Some people were slogging it out and some other people who really looked evil seemed to be flogging them, etc. When the evil-looking people were on the scene, there was much lashing of the whip and threatening, but when Nandini was around, they could relate more as there was music, which they loved. Why the emperor found it difficult to sleep, they could not fathom. Nor about why the people were chained.  

When Nandini sees through the emperor's fearsome facade for the tortured creature he truly is, it was for me Jeevan Vidya re-visited all over again. Indeed, how can a person who feels prosperous and happy want to violate anyone? It is the one who feels deprived who may act depraved.

The play also made me think we need more of Tagore in our regular reading. Very relevant and required. 

That night, we had a more detailed discussion on the play. Maya wanted to fill in all the gaps in her understanding of the play. She asked why the emperor had touched Nandini with an oversized hand, why he constantly stayed on an upraised prop (which was his palace), why there was a hole on the stage -- this was the opening that represented the entrance to the gold mine.

Bhargavi told her dad that the play was about red flowers, when I asked her to describe the play to him, as he had not watched it. It seemed all she could remember from the play was the actor who played the role of the emperor. That he was particularly good-looking. Well, well.

Homeschooling -- Some notes

In August 2016, I pulled my daughter out of pre-nursery and started our “homeschooling journey”. There was a lot of dissatisfaction in me about our education system and what it does to children. I was keen on alternative schools, but those are so few and far between in India. And, most of them are in big cities, while I was not.

My daughter was very excited at the idea of getting out of school. She had already been resisting school every day. Initially, I remember being a little tense at how I would manage her, now that she would be home all day.

Now, looking back, I am amused at this fear of mine. Why would I be scared at the thought of having a four-year-old at home all day? I could already see how the school had begun dictating the way we’d lead our lives.

The initial days
My daughter and I did arrive at an understanding that we would have to have some sort of schedule. We agreed that she would have to leave me alone for certain times during the day, when I’d be getting my work done. I remember being quite surprised that she was able to understand these terms of the adult world and see why are important to me.

It was only the beginning of my understanding of my daughter, in a sense. Until then, she was to me a person whom I intensely loved and cared for but I had no inkling of her capacity to understand, to know, to learn.

The other thing that I started to do, now that the nuisance of school was out of the way, was to actually spend more time with her. From the moment she woke up, I would be with her through her every morning ritual. Breakfast was when the adult concept of time would be daily challenged. Who knew it would take 10-15 minutes to observe the intricate designs of a dosa and an equal amount of time to savour each bite?

She would wake up at her own time. There was no school to rush to, no breakfast to gobble down. Things were definitely more relaxed. And, she seemed to have a lot of energy through the day.

When we started homeschooling, I bought some text books and activity books of Oxford University Publishing. Though I now see that a child’s learning trajectory doesn’t exactly follow the structure of a textbook, we still go back to these books at times.

Over the last year or so, Bhargavi has become more attached to me. Separation is not something she prefers. But at the same time, and contradictory as it may seem, she spends a lot of time playing on her own, too. She enjoys the company of her friends, whom she meets once a week. Yet, she is equally at peace on her own. I don’t need to “entertain” her or look for activities to keep her busy.

Getting bored is something I frequently see in school-going kids. And, initially, I too feared it. But I didn't have to, as I learned. A child’s world needs no props. I routinely see my daughter and any child, for that matter, make toys and games out of nothing but their imagination.

As I paid attention to the learning process of a child, I would be amazed everyday. It continues to amaze me. I couldn’t stop her from learning, if I tried.

Two important reasons to homeschool my daughter:

• A distrust of the current education system. I strongly believe that our schools and colleges, by and large, are built to kill curiosity and the urge to learn. They are also unequipped to teach our children the skills and values needed to live their lives. For instance, it’s considered important for a five-year-old to write in cursive than be able to dress on her own or clean up after playtime. Of course, there are exceptions and there are also students who miraculously escape the system. Still, schools these days leave no space for childhood in a child’s life. I recently heard from a local school teacher about how her colleagues call up her wards at five in the morning to make sure they’re up and are with their books. Such horror stories abound.
• An earnest interest in her learning. What will my child learn about her society -- its problems and its triumphs? Will she be able to think independently and learn to exist in a collaborative, cooperative spirit rather than in a competitive one? Will she respond to problems creatively? Can she learn to understand and accept failure, anomalies, disappointments in life? Will she be willing to share her privileges? Will she grow up into a kind and brave person? These things matter a lot to us and I didn’t see how she could learn such things at a school, given its obsession with exams and certificates.

And these were not the reasons for which we decided to homeschool
But it’s important to mention here that I don’t homeschool my child because I think she is unique and a school is in some way below her. The other day I was mildly disappointed and surprised to see a post on the Facebook page of an unlearning community about how a child prodigy was the poster boy of homeschooling.

Child prodigies are simply born that way. They cannot be explained and often have done nothing to attain the level of expertise/skill in whatever they are masters of. I have nothing against child prodigies -- how could I? They didn’t choose to be that way, but I wouldn’t celebrate them either.

Celebrating them would be a disservice to them as well as other children who are learning at their own pace.

I am not homeschooling my child to hone a particular skill or interest of hers. Not at this stage, at least. It’s all discovery now and we are simply savouring each moment.

I don’t believe that homeschooling is only for the fast-paced or the slow learner. Homeschooling or unschooling is simply the most natural, unhindered and unhurried way for a child to blossom, learn, and discover herself and the world at large.

It doesn’t preclude formal or institutionalized learning at later stages. The learner should be able to decide if she needs such education and if so, what direction it should take. That, indeed, would be one of the goals of homeschooling.

Homeschooling is now the most natural state of being to us. We would have it no other way.

Hating or loving Dangal?

A few days I had an email conversation with a friend of mine on the movie Dangal. She said she hated the movie for the following reason:

Mr Phogat, played by Aamir Khan, foists his wrestling dreams on his daughters. While the girls go on to excel at the sport, this does not take away from the fact that Mr Phogat is undoubtedly a patriarchal figure, who actually may need therapy over his unresolved issues, my friend says.

I could understand her line of reasoning, but I presented some counterpoints:

If you switch wrestling with, say, academic excellence, which would certainly ring a bell with most of the audience, then you would not have a movie. (Actually, academic excellence may be the wrong term. It's just acing the exams that we are after.)

For, that's what it is about: your parent making your career choices for you and making you bring their dreams to reality. 

Yet, there's also a few other things to consider here: there comes a point in the movie where the girls realize they are privileged for having wrestling as a career option as compared to a life of domesticity. Here's where they stop pushing back and own their father's dream. Of course, you may ask what choice do they have? 

But if we do find joy and meaning in what we are doing, does it matter so much how we came unto that choice? Does it matter that there were other roads (worn out though they maybe)?

Thing is, yes if Phogat weren't in rural Haryana, he should have been consulting a shrink. Or, if he was asking his daughters to ace the JEE exams. But because he is in rural Haryana where female-male ratio is one of the lowest in the country, the choices he makes for his daughters definitely make him swim against the mainstream, and thereby qualify him to be a hero. 

Yes, he is making the decisions for his daughters, but would feminists be happy if he were not to? That is, if he were to just accept that wrestling was not for his daughters and married them away? 

If you remove the particular circumstances of a story, you end up with a controlled environment. But then all human reality would more or less be the same, removing perhaps the necessity for art and its criticism.

Dangal can be looked at from the alternative education viewpoint, too and you would arrive at much the same points and counterpoints. Phogat’s way of parenting is very much mainstream, parent-led rather than being child-led.

But does the outcome justify the means? Again, this is not an easy question to answer. For, if it were just mainstream academics that the father was pushing the girls into, the answer would be straightforward enough. However, in rural Haryana, if Phogat hadn’t exposed his girls to another possible world for them, they would have hardly had a chance at life, much less sporting excellence. How would the girls know what they had in them if their father hadn’t shoved them into the akhada?

But does that validate the rat race Indian parents enter their children in, with the justification that they know what’s best? Hardly, I’d say. Still, this movie does pose some tricky questions.