Why home is a better place to learn than going to school
Do we really need more schools for the upper middle classes? As the schools of the Raj decay and crumble under the weight of their own archaic inadequacy, and new schools attempt to figure out whether they should be turning themselves into academic exam factories or attempting to be progressive - more and more parents are turning to homeschooling.
Interesting fact - homeschoolers are to be found in every city and they even have their own national association! Check out - Swashikshan (Indian Association of Homeschoolers) complete with their Facebook site.
So why this shift in perspective? Most home educators see schools as a place where children are wasting their time in pointless and meaningless exercises that stifle their creativity and restrict their mental capacities. Many are worried that their children will be spoon fed someone else’s ideas instead of developing their own.
And it is not just parents who are worried about these effects – respected mainstream educators from Harvard are expressing the idea that schools are “dumbing down” our children.
They point to the regimented exam orientated imposition of ways of learning as being highly detrimental. This is not new. Over the years many visionary thinkers including Mahatma Gandhi and Mark Twain have argued that state schooling was detrimental to children and highly undesirable. These "anti-school" advocates are not against education, they are against the kinds of mainstream schools that most of us send our children to.
The criticisms of schooling are numerous. It is claimed that conventional schooling confuses teaching with learning, and gives primacy to learning over thinking. Many believe that mainstream schooling perverts the child’s natural inclination to grow, explore, think and analyse and replaces these noble activities with the demand for instruction, rote learning and subservience to the tyranny of exams.
Most of us have been taught to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true. Another of the myths is that schooling somehow produces better human beings than those who are unschooled or poorly schooled, but the truth is that schooling is often an impediment to creativity and leadership, and many of our most saintly men and women were not schooled. Instead they gained wisdom by meditation, praxis and reflection.
Gandhi became a great leader despite being a failure in the schooling system. So too, at the other end of the spectrum did Winston Churchill. Edison spent only 12 weeks in school and there is no record of Shakespeare attending school at all.
Home educators don’t believe we need compulsive schooling: seven classes a day, five days a week, and ten months a year, for 12 years! In a different environment children can find much better, more profitable, more useful things to do than sit all day with 40 others being told, and made to repeat stuff that has no relevance to their lives.
Their alternative is to encourage the child to pursue a myriad of interests and find formal support in the numerous learning institutions that have blossomed over the last ten years. If the home educated child wants to formally learn a sport they are helped to enroll in a sports academy. If they want to play sport they can sign up for local basketball, football, or cricket leagues. If the child wants to formally pursue the theatre they enroll into a children’s theatre group. If they want to pass an exam a home tutor is brought in. If they want to play with new children then the local home educators group is contacted and a play date arranged.
Consider this. We live in the information age. If a child needs information they can google it, buy a book or watch a programme on one of the TV-learning channels or on YouTube. It is an age where education has become an industry and specialist education is easily available in bite-sized pieces.
However many schools continue to train children to be conforming consumers, and knowledge is turned into a commodity to be given or denied irrespective of the child’s interest. They train children to obey reflexively, to accept uniformity and conformity and most schools are not in the business of developing critical free thinkers and adventurers.
Home educators believe that these children in schools are conditioned to dread being alone, and seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, and the cell phone. They argue that home educated children can learn how to meditate in solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, and conduct inner dialogues. Also that the home educated child can be encouraged to take on the serious material that schoolteachers avoid, and be introduced to the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology, that will challenge and confront them and make them analyse their world and their place within it.
In India, the number of parents who are pulling their children out of school is increasing. These parents believe that their children can learn better and faster without the many distractions and negative influences that are part of the package of the school environments. It is a trend that will continue.
In this age of instant information, geographical mobility, open social interaction, private education institutions, support groups, private sports academies, study groups, tutoring and social media, there becomes less and less reason for full-time schooling!