Special Report

India's budding home school movement

A nascent home schooling movement is gathering momentum countrywide. a growing minority of disillusioned parents are switching to customised home education for their children instead of sentencing them to overcrowded classrooms in which little learning happens. Summiya Yasmeen reports

Ten-year-old twins Mohini and Mallika Bariya live in the relatively quiet Bangalore suburb of Jayanagar, reportedly Asia’s largest residential layout. As for most middle class school girls, their day begins at 7 a.m. Following a time-table on the wall at 7:30 a.m they play badminton and do some cardio exercises, often as simple as running up and down the stairs of their smart apartment complex. After breakfast, at 8 a.m, they get their study materials together for the school day to begin at 9. But to get to school Mohini and Mallika don’t have to clamber aboard a dangerous overloaded bus or crowded auto rickshaw and negotiate the garden city’s infamous traffic snarls. Nor do they have to change into individuality-destroying school uniforms. In their T-shirts and capri pants, they hop across from the dining to the living room.

Mohini and Mallika are home schoolers, part of the global home schooling movement which is gathering momentum as disillusioned — and usually highly qualified — parents switch to providing their children a customised education experience instead of sentencing them to dull, homogeneous, usually overcrowded classrooms in which little learning happens. Every morning the spacious living room of the twins’ three bedroom flat transforms into a classroom with a desk, three chairs and a laptop. The first period (9:00-9:55 a.m) from Monday-Thursday is reserved for maths. Other subjects — science, art, English, Hindi, writing, Indian history — have their own time slots. There is a generous one-hour lunch break and the school day ends at 4:25 p.m. The twins’ teachers are their parents — Suhag Shirodkar and Anand Bariya, an industrial pharmacy postgraduate of Purdue University and a chemical engineering Ph D of Stanford University respectively. Suhag, a technical writer and Anand, a computer chip designer, juggle their work and take turns to educate their twin daughters at home.

Welcome to the new world of schools without classrooms, black boards, headmasters, teachers, students, and boring textbooks. The Bariyas are part of a large and growing home schooling community worldwide (albeit minuscule in India), which believes in educating their children at home rather than in formal schools or learning centres. In the United States an estimated 2 million students are being home schooled by parents and this number is growing by 7-12 percent every year. According to Brian D. Ray, president of the Salem (Oregon)-based National Home Education Research Institute, home schooling "may be the fastest growing form of education in the United States".

The growth of the US home schooling movement is extraordinary given that in the early 1980s, a mere 15,000 students learned at home in America and home schooling was illegal in most states of the country. But in the late 1980s Christian conservatives, unhappy with public schools teaching Darwinian evolution, and transforming into ‘God-free zones’, pressed for change. Laws were reformed and a home schooling revolution began. By 1990, there were as many as 300,000 American home schoolers and by 1993, home schooling was legalised in all 52 states of the USA. Since then, home schooling has transformed from a fringe to mainstream movement — the next push coming from secular parents dissatisfied with low-quality, and even dangerous, public schools. By the mid-1990s the number of home schooled children in the US had more than doubled.

Several factors are fuelling America’s home schooling movement. According to the 2003 US Census survey, 33 percent of home school households cited religion as the motivational factor. The same study found 30 percent believed that regular (local government) schools offered poor learning environments, 14 percent objected to the syllabus/ curriculum, 11 percent felt their children weren’t being sufficiently stretched in school, and 9 percent were concerned about moral laxity in America’s public school system.

"In the past decade, home schooling has proven itself to parents and researchers as a highly effective alternative to public and private schooling. Although parents home school their children for several reasons, the principal stimulus is dissatisfaction with public education. It gives parents an opportunity to impart a particular set of values and beliefs; leads to higher academic performance; saves the expense of private schools and provides a physically safer environment in which to learn," writes Patrick Basham, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based public policy group, in a research study on home schooling (Frasier Institute, 2001).

Across the Atlantic in Europe, the number of home schooled children is also swelling. In Britain, the population of home schooled children is estimated at 50,000 while in France the number is estimated at 20,000. Germany is perhaps the only European country where home schooling is illegal and students have to compulsorily attend school. In Australia about 20,000 households are home schooling their children. In China, though the exact number of home schoolers is not available, reports in the local media indicate that the number of households, discontented with the country’s staid education system, and home schooling children is rising.

In India with its ancient legacy of utmost respect for schools and teachers, home schooling is a radically revolutionary concept. Rough estimates put the number of home schooling households at a mere 100-150 (excluding expatriate families). Nevertheless parental interest in home-based education is growing, ironically even as opulent five-star international schools are mushrooming across the country.

According to Clive Elwell, moderator of www.alternativeeducationindia.net, a support group for parents in India who are home educating their children, group membership has grown from a mere ten in December 2001 to 267 currently. The New Zealand-based Elwell, who home schooled two of his children in Australia and New Zealand, says in an e-mail interview he started the yahoo support for home education in India because of a "realisation that although there are some good schools in India, they are very few in number, and the vast majority of Indian parents don’t have access to them".

"It seemed that although home education is largely an unknown concept in India, it’s one that deserves consideration. And, it makes sense to encourage a group that home educates children in a multi-cultural country with the world’s largest child population. They have shared concerns with issues like curricula and exams, and there is the possibility of families actually meeting up. I home schooled my children because I did not want them to regard education as mere accumulation of knowledge and be influenced by people — particularly teachers — whom I knew nothing about. I didn’t want their learning capacity to be impaired and their love of learning destroyed, turned into drudgery and burdened by huge amounts of homework. These reasons for choosing home schooling apply to parents anywhere in the world, including India," says Elwell.

Against this backdrop of a growing global movement for customised home schooling, EducationWorld corres-pondents searched out pioneer home schooling households in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai to report their motivations and share their experience.

In Bangalore Suhag Shirodkar and Anand Bariya switched to home educating their daughters because both they and the twins were less than happy with their upscale school, teachers and curriculum. Until 2004 the girls had attended a public school in California, after which the family moved to Bangalore and the girls were enrolled in the avant garde Valley School, among Bangalore’s most reputed new age schools. The family gave the school a one-year chance before deciding with the full support of the school’s director, to pull the girls out after class IV. "My daughters’ experience in school was unsatisfactory. The overhead of attending school was not commensurate with the learning happening during the school day. The curriculum was fuzzy and the teachers weren’t great either. That’s when we decided that my husband and I could do a much better job teaching them at home. Their former teacher in California advised us on the curriculum and sent us plenty of books to use. Now there’s great flexibility and choice in what they learn and explore. They love the freedom to study at their own pace and enjoy the personal attention they get. Moreover since they are not bound by school timings, we get so much more time to travel as a family and learn from it," says Suhag Shirodkar, who owns and manages Teclarity, a Goa-based technical writing firm. "We really have to be organised because I shuttle every two weeks between Goa and Bangalore, and Anand teaches the twins while I’m away," she explains.

"Schools have become factories producing robots for the job market. Children emerge from school without thinking skills, opinions or decision-making know-how. We want to develop their creativity and imagination. Home schooling gives us the opportunity to let our children learn what interests them rather than be circumscribed by a set curriculum. There are no prescribed textbooks; they refer to encyclopaedias, magazines, books, and the internet to find answers to their own questions and curiousities. Moreover an uninspiring education system apart, another important reason for home schooling was to shield my children from the MTV culture and negative peer pressure in schools," says Nikhat, a full-time home schooling mother while her husband Ashraf runs a brokerage firm.

The continuous pressure that upscale private (ICSE and CBSE affiliated) schools, obsessed with maintaining institutional reputations, impose on children to excel academically is a major factor driving parents to pull their children out of mainstream education. It’s no secret that even toddlers in kindergartens are put through the rigours of early rote learning to enable them to clear the tough admission tests of the country’s too few moderately priced private schools. Malcolm Printer, an alumnus of Stony Brook University, New York and founder of One India Trust (estb.1988), an NGO committed to eradicating hunger in the country, home schools his five-year-old daughter Samta in Mumbai after he became aware of the strain two of Mumbai’s top ranked primary schools put on his young daughter to precociously learn reading and writing skills.

"Both the primary schools we tried were too regimented and stifling, giving children hardly any time to play with each other. Except for a short snack break, the rest of the time was all studies. Instead of enjoying her time in kindergarten, Samta was stressed out and over-anxious to please. That’s when my wife and I decided that we didn’t want our five-year-old to go through the insanity of coaching classes and the admissions nightmare. We have been home schooling for a year now and the experience has been very positive. Samta loves reading and asks questions all the time," says Printer who decided to stay home to school his daughter. "My wife is a medical instructor in the Indian army. She is due for voluntary retirement in a year. I intend to get back to work after that," he adds.

The common characteristic of the Printer, Mohamedy and Bariya households is that they are mainstream middle class families residing in metros and not hermits, hippies or bohemians experimenting with alternative lifestyles. Contrary to popular belief they home school their children not in pursuit of ideology, but because of the inadequacy of the existing school system which takes joy out of the learning experience.

In reality home schooling requires huge investment in terms of time and patience for a parent to spend all day, every day, relearning algebra, science and geography and passing on the learning to the children. Moreover home education requires at least one parent to sacrifice or put his/ her career on hold. That’s why despite widespread dissatisfaction with the school system, home schooling is largely confined to a small minority of well-off upper middle class households. No matter how disgruntled they may be with the private school education system, most among India’s 300 million-strong middle class are double income families who simply can’t afford either parent to quit work and take on the unpaid work of schooling the children. As for the vast majority of illiterate parents who send their kids to underperforming government schools, home schooling is not an option as they don’t have the skill sets to home educate their children.

While the tradition of home schooling is several centuries old, the seeds of contemporary home schooling were planted in the 1960s and 70s by education reformers and authors who questioned formal school pedagogies. Notable among them were Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society, Charles E. Silberman (Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education), and the prolific John Holt (How Children Fail, How Children Learn). A teacher who eventually gave up reform of America’s entrenched school system as hopeless, Holt started publishing Growing Without Schooling, a magazine advocating home schooling in 1977. Around the same time, Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore began publishing books and essays that questioned the wisdom of conventional schooling, highlighting the harm that can be done by prematurely pushing children into the existing school regimen (Home Grown Kids, Home Spun Schools, Home Style Teaching, and Home Made Health). In the 1980s and 90s the home schooling movement gathered momentum and spread across the US.

Inevitably in the land of fast-track private enterprise, by the late 1990s a full-fledged supplementary industry offering teaching-learning aids and equipment to support home schoolers had sprung up in the US. Currently the annual expenditure of home schooling households in the US is estimated at $870 million (Rs.3,900 crore) and a gamut of materials ranging from subject curriculums, books, teaching aids, manuals and lesson plans are available to parent-teachers. However back home in India since the home schooling community is very small, teaching-learning material is not readily available. Home educators here use an array of books/ CD-Roms of publishers such as Scholastic, Cambridge, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Math Lab (Creative Education, Delhi).

According to Neena Paul, the Bangalore-based regional head of IL&FS Education Technology Services, teaching-learning products developed by her company are ideal for home schoolers in India. "Over the past five years IL&FS ETS has developed over 4,000 multimedia lessons in maths, science and the social sciences. These kindergarten-class X lessons developed by a dedicated research team comprising teachers and educators, use a variety of simulation, animation, audio-video and graphic elements to arouse the interest and motivation of students. They are conceptual, don’t follow any particular examination board’s curriculum and most important, are India specific. While currently mainstream schools purchase these lessons for remedial education, they are also ideal for parents home schooling their children. Each lesson available on CD-Roms is priced at a very affordable Rs.60. Moreover our publications division has published books on geography and history which combine fun and learning," says Paul.

Enabling teaching aids and lesson plans apart, the single most important information technology innovation that has given home schooling wings, is the internet. The availability of internet/ e-mail has enabled home schoolers to access information and online learning resources, facilitated information sharing between home schooling families across the world and incubated online support groups for home schooling households worldwide.

Says Suhag Shirodkar (quoted earlier) who is a member of an online support group for home schooling parents: "Broadband internet has made home schooling much easier and practical. We use online resources to answer the many questions that come up. We joke about Google being the part-time teacher in our home school. Moreover online support groups are very helpful as they enable us to share information, get advice and understand the experiences of other home schooling families."

Home schooling parents have little time for the common criticism that home schooled children are denied the companionship of peers and mature into adults with deficient communication and inter-personal skills. Usually home schoolers get around the isolation disadvantage through extra-curricular activities such as art classes, drama workshops, sports training and yoga sessions. "Popular belief holds that home schooled children are socially backward and deprived, but research shows the opposite: that home schooled children are actually better socialised than their peers. Several studies have shown that home schooled children are happier, better adjusted, more thoughtful, mature and sociable than children who attend institutional schools," writes Patrick Basham (quoted earlier) in his report on home schooling.

Another alleged disadvantage of home schooling is that when all expenses are aggregated, it is substantially more expensive than formal school. This may be true of the US where most middle and even upper class children attend free public schools. But in contemporary India where no self-respecting middle class family given a choice would enroll its children in a government school, this argument is superfluous. Indeed home schooling parents from high income households who have withdrawn their children from expensive private schools (where annual tuition fees range between Rs.1-4 lakh) report considerable savings. Says Amita Sharma, a single mother who home schools her two children Dev (15) and Tara (12) on a farm in suburban Bangalore: "I pulled my children out of the Canadian International School two years ago where I paid Rs.2 lakh per year per child for tuition and other expenses. Since I began home schooling them, I’m saving more than half that amount."

Sharma is a Waldorf home schooler subscribing to the education philosophy developed by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian educator. "I’m a member of an online support group of parents who are adapting the pedagogy developed by Steiner used in Waldorf schools worldwide, to the home setting. Books and teaching aids can be ordered online. In a nutshell Waldorf home schooling focuses on educating and developing the whole child, not just her intellect. It allows children to develop at their own pace in a secure home environment where there is a balance between academics and arts and craft, music, dance and nature," says Sharma who adds that her son Dev, who is technically in class X won’t be writing any board exams, as they are a "poor way of assessing a child’s learning capability".

But Dev is an exception among home schoolers. Most home schooled children are ready, willing and able to take on class X and class XII school leaving board exams and other standardised tests. In India home schoolers have the option to write the class X exam of the National Institute of Open School (NIOS) or the Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) as private candidates. However the Delhi-based CISCE board doesn’t allow home schooled children to write its class X and XII exams as private candidates, while CBSE allows only home schooled girls to write its board exams.

NIOS (estb. 1989) is an autonomous body of the Union HRD ministry catering specifically to students who for whatever reason can’t attend school. Last year 2.67 lakh students wrote NIOS’ class X exam. However while its class X and XII certification is recognised by the Association of Indian Universities, within academia NIOS has the reputation of being a relatively light-weight school leaving exam. That’s why perhaps CIE’s ‘O’ and ‘A’ level exams are becoming popular with most home educators in India. "Home schoolers in India can write CIE’s exams as private candidates from a CIE affiliated school. We have over 100 schools affiliated with us countrywide," says William Bickerdike, the Delhi-based manager of CIE.

Even India has its home-schooled prodigies. A case in point is Chennai-based Nirupama Raghavan (18). Home schooled since the age of two, Nirupama translated the famous Tamil novel Parthiban Kanavu by Kalki Krishnamurthy into English (Tullika Publishers) when she was just 16 in 2004. Moreover she recently represented India at the International Democracy in Education Conference held in Germany. Her parents Aruna (a former teacher at Kodaikanal International School) and Raghavan, a chartered accountant, run a primary school for 100 socio-economically disadvantaged children in Kumbakonam, 273 km from Chennai.

"We enjoyed home schooling Nirupama. When she was four years old I taught her to read using flash cards. Later when it was time to teach her science and maths, Raghavan took over. Our parents also got into the fray and began teaching her languages, shlokas and even Sanskrit. She was a voracious reader by the time she was nine years. Teaching and learning happened through broad discussion of subjects with us functioning as guides rather than teachers. Nirupama’s extraordinary talents are a result of parental involvement and personalised teaching — the basic requirements of home schooling," says Aruna.

Admittedly home schoolers in India represent a small minority of aware and highly educated middle class parents. But there is accumulating evidence of parental interest in home schooling. With state and municipal government schools characterised by crumbling infrastructure, chronic teacher absenteeism, overcrowded classrooms and English language phobia being deserted en masse even by working class families, and the country’s estimated 20,000 private schools lumbered with obsolete curriculums and pedagogies, the number of converts to home schooling is growing steadily.

Simultaneously with new information communication technologies (ICT) — especially broadband internet connectivity — permitting easy networking and information sharing and facilitating access to teaching resources, the home schooling movement is poised to experience a great leap forward. However aspiring home schoolers should note that considerable parental sacrifice in terms of time, money and effort is required. Instead it might make sense for parents to increase supplementary education at home while demanding greater accountability and pedagogy innovations from private and government schools.

With Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai); Autar Nehru (Delhi) & Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)