To start with, let’s be on the same page about what is homeschooling. The concept is about educating children outside their traditional school setting. Homeschooling doesn’t mean any compromise in imparting age-appropriate learning modules to children by competent parents, tutors, or online teachers. Homeschooling can vary from highly structured to more open and free forms.
Benefits of Homeschooling
- Custom learning: Parents can decide the curriculum, teaching style, and educational materials if they can suitably assess their child’s needs.
- Autonomous learning: Homeschooling inculcates an independent approach to learning vital for nurturing a child’s perspective development.
- Flexible learning: Homeschooling is flexible and suited to a child’s most productive learning hours in a day or weeks or months.
- Real-life learning: Homeschooling offers exposure to real-life experiences and problem-solving.
- Cost effective: Homeschooling is financially suited to a parent’s income and avoids huge donations and tuition fees that schools in general demand
With this acknowledgement of the positives of homeschooling, I have here an interesting case study of Vidhi Jain’s take on homeschooling as shared on Josh Talks. To me, I find several objectionable instances in her idea of homeschooling or unschooling.
Case of Vidhi Jain on Josh Talks
Vidhi goes to 12 of the BEST schools
- Vidhi has financial support and social capital
- Does Vidhi think every family can afford that luxury?
Vidhi asks, “What did those 15 years of education help me in?”
- Vidhi denies being the outcome of the collective impact of her 12 BEST schools on her intellectual development
- IS she then denying that her ability to construct the new doesn’t stand on the shoulders of the perceived and ineffective old?
Vidhi asks, “Did they help me to live a good and meaningful life? Did they make me a creative human being?” [alluding to the 12 schools she studied at and called them BEST already]
- What is a good and meaningful life if not her liberty to do good and meaningful things in life?
- What is being creative if not building her own space for new age schooling?
Vidhi claims, “Today’s global system of education, which I also call factory schooling, is creating millions of unemployed, visionless, wisdomless youth.”
- E.g.: How old is Sundar Pichai? Is he unemployed, visionless, and wisdomless?
- Do schools really create unemployed, visionless, and wisdomless millions?
Vidhi asserts, “It has been about 17-18 years, both me and my husband decided that we would UNSCHOOL our family…”
- Did her child, with their personal intelligence, after experiencing the drawbacks of regular schooling, consent to discontinue their schooling, or is it Vidhi’s biased experience along with her husband to never give them the formal experience?
- While Shikshantar is a space for people who do not want to go to school and college, don’t want degrees, and people who want to create their own path of learning, is it also a good capitalization?
The Reality of Homeschooling
- There is no revolt in choosing a whole new path. Revolt happens from fighting a system within a system.
- Formal schooling is the right of every child and also to then choose to discontinue after learning. Parents cannot hijack a child’s agency in this decision.
- Unschooling, homeschooling, or whatever is not possible without parents having sufficient education, luxury of time, and resources. So, not applicable for all.
- Homeschooling emanated from the days of kings and queens who didn’t want to subject their children to the same system they were governing, and hence the withdrawal.
- Traditional schooling has a huge lot of challenges and drawbacks but that is how it is, breathing too much of forest air exposes lungs to pollens and dust.
- We have to break and build from what we have, which helps every parent understand that they don’t have to homeschool and if they wish to, they don’t have to cancel traditional schooling.
In closing, I went to nondescript schools but that didn’t limit me from my ability to argue Vidhi’s case of elite schooling with questions that would need some critical thinking. So, you know your situation best. Do as you deem within your intellectual budget. You are not missing out on anything if you are not in a position to homeschool your child.
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