HAPPY AT HOME: Asawari (top) and Hrishika with their families

When Sahal Kaushik joined the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur this year, he notched up two records. It was for the first time that a 14-year-old had entered the portals of an IIT as its student. It was also the first time that Sahal had sat in a classroom to study.

Sahal never went to school. His mother thought a structured education wasn’t worth the effort needed to get him admitted to a school. “I was put off by the entire admission process — standing in queues for forms and getting grilled in interviews. Clearing the IIT was easier,” says Ruchi Kaushik, who quit her job as a doctor in Delhi to educate her son. This year, Sahal cleared the Class XII exam, ranked 33 in the IIT entrance exam and enrolled for the five-year integrated masters course in physics.

Home schooling is no longer an oxymoron for an increasing number of urban Indian parents opting out of the school system. “Schooling schedules have become tight, high-pressured and competitively driven. Many new-age parents are not comfortable with this,” says Manish Jain, founder, Shikshantar, an Udaipur-based foundation promoting unschooling — an educational philosophy that centres on allowing children to learn through life. Started in 1998, it mentors over 100 unschooling families.

Pune-based Hema Bharadwaj unschools her two children, Raghu, 7, and Zoya, 4. “My son spends his day cooking food with me, reading comics and surfing the internet. When he showed an interest in chemistry, I sent him to a local children’s laboratory,” says Bharadwaj, who believes students are turned into “assembly-line products” in schools. “I want my children to grow up differently.”

When Bharadwaj decided to educate her children at home, what she missed was a support group of like-minded parents. Six months ago, she started an online community called the Pune Home Schoolers Group. “It’s a forum to exchange ideas on alternative education processes,” says Bharadwaj about the 100-member group.

Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan believes home schooling is becoming popular in India because college degrees are losing their shine. “There are many unorthodox career options available today which do not require a degree,” he says. Also, companies increasingly prefer creative minds over decorative degrees. “Many companies don’t want to hire mass-produced graduates anymore. They look for out-of-the-box minds. This is taking the focus away from traditional education,” he adds.

In the West, home schooling is a popular concept. Four lakh families are home schooling their children in the US. “In 20 per cent cases, one parent is a teacher,” says Shikshantar founder Jain.

Jain’s eight-year-old daughter Kanku learns her biology as a volunteer at an animal shelter in Udaipur. She picked up maths while assisting a neighbour run his chaat shop. “Home education does not have any format. There are a range of options available,” says Urmila Samson, co-founder, Pune Home Schoolers Group.

But most home schooling parents in India are still not complete nonconformists. The home may have replaced the school, but often the study curriculum remains the same. “Most stay-at-home children sit for board exams and join mainstream colleges,” she says.

The New Delhi-based National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) — an autonomous body set up by the human resource development ministry — allows students who don’t attend school to sit for board exams. “Students can take two to three exams at a time. This means there is less study pressure,” says Gowri Diwakar, public relations officer, NIOS. Four lakh students took the exams last year, up from 2.5 lakh in 2005.

Some parents, on the other hand, do child-led education. “They do what the child wants to do. Education happens through activities like field trips, experiments, travelling and social interactions,” explains Samson.

Two years ago, Ratnesh Mathur bought his daughter Asawari, then 10, a book on Alexander. “She refused to read it, saying it was not a part of her school curriculum,” recalls Mathur, who runs a child development centre, Genie Kids, in Bangalore. This was a wake-up call for him. “I realised my daughter was studying to clear exams, and not for the love of learning,” he says. Mathur decided to pull his daughter out of school.

Asawari now decides what she wants to learn, and at what pace. “She does projects on any subject that interests her,” says Mathur, who has created a website to document his daughter’s work.

Many study options are now available for home schooling. Eight years ago, Vidya Shankar had to scout around for study material for her son. “There were no resources available,” recalls the Chennai-based educationist.

Shankar is now setting up a resource centre — called Cascade (Creating Alternative System for Children Aiding Development Experientially) — which will have mathematics, science and language laboratories. “It’s a support tool for parents who home school their children,” says Shankar. The centre starts in January next year.

In Udaipur, Shikshantar started the Swaraj University six months ago. “We neither ask for degrees nor do we give one,” says Jain. “There is no set curriculum. Each student designs his or her own syllabus,” says Jain. A 20-year-old student, for instance, is doing a course on alternative energy technology. “To understand the subject, he travelled to Pune to meet a man who makes water pumps that run on bicycle-generated power,” explains Jain. The university has 20 students.

It’s not only a belief in organic education that pushes parents to home school their children. Sometimes it’s because of pressures of other kinds. Take Hrishika Rajesh. Tennis leaves no time for the 12-year-old who trains all day at Bangalore’s High Power Tennis Centre (HPTC). “People told me I was making a mistake by letting my daughter play tennis rather than go to school. But I wanted her to do what she liked,” says her mother, Shalini. Hrishika studies through correspondence, takes tuitions and does her science experiments in the kitchen.

Like Hrishika, 24 children have quit school to play tennis full-time at the HPTC. “We have a long waiting list,” claims Sunil Yajaman, director, HPTC, who feels urban parents have changed their approach to education. “Three years ago, I had to hard sell the benefits of full-time tennis over school. Now I don’t.”

Education may have a new definition for urban parents, but psychologists believe homes don’t always make the best schools. “Home schooling is very demanding on parents. They have to be committed and learn to be good educationists as well as parents. This puts a burden of playing dual roles,” says Sulata Shenoy, child and adolescent psychologist, Sagar Hospital, Bangalore. She adds that stay-at-home children miss out on the company of peers. “This could affect their social and emotional development.”

Samson says that unlike unschoolers, home schooled students adjust easily in colleges because they are used to following a set study curriculum and examinations. “Unschoolers usually don’t join mainstream colleges as they grow up believing that learning is a life-long process. Also, they don’t have school leaving certificates,” says Samson, who knows of unschoolers who have become agriculturists and started NGOs. “These professions don’t require board results,” she says.

Sahal’s mother has found that sometimes home schooled children cannot cope with pressures. “School-going children know what routine and pressure mean. They also learn to do what they don’t want to do,” she says.

She recalls how Sahal always protested about sitting for exams. “He couldn’t understand its logic,” Kaushik remembers. IIT will probably teach him that. And that will be another record.