LEARNING TO UNLEARN

I started the journey of looking into homeschooling in detail when my daughter was born in 2019, though I was aware of it even before. The journey of researching about homeschooling, threw a lot of light into the art of parenting, and what I conclude right now is that schooling or not schooling in the conventional ways, it’s all about living life, slowly, and passionately and showing children on what life is all about. How you learn to know your own self, work on our inner emotions and how you deal with situations or people around you. It’s also about listening to the child and being there for them, and trusting the child, process of life, and having faith. All these are my learnings and it’s growing each day with each new perspective I get while talking to one other person. I feel my life restarted after I had my kid and wonder what I had been looking in to, for all these previous years.

Since my daughter is turning 3 soon and the schools being reopened post Covid, I started facing this question of which school are you sending your child to? Or when are you starting to send her to school and all. To some, I say, I plan to homeschool/ un – school, to some, I say, not too soon, she can be with me for some more time and then will think and so on. The answer totally depends on my judgement of the other person on the receiving end, whether I think they are really asking out of concern or if it’s just a random conversation. I also find few people who genuinely ask me to know what my ideas are, and to them, its endless conversations, and a learning for me too.

This is to keep it open that, we can explore our life in various dimensions, find our own self to grow into ultimate happiness in life, by living each moment, for which schooling is not the only option and there is just not one route, to be a well-educated or successful adult as we term. Schooling is just one area, where education is provided, but not the only one way to go about.  There are many ways of learning, and each person or child has his or her own learning styles and to cater to different learning styles, I resonate with the saying that the whole world is my classroom.

With my current understanding, I feel, all of us are hooked to the term schooling, but not as much to the term life. Parenting is an art is what I have understood. I recently heard, “parenting styles are also being transferred from generations to generations just like how physical features or character traits are being transferred.” It’s not bad, and it’s not wrong, but somewhere there is a missing link, where we fail to understand our own truth, and I feel that, is the main essence of parenting. All we know is to look back and identify a few methods which our parents did, that did not resonate with us and quickly conclude that we don’t do that to our children, without even knowing and understanding what the child requires to be nurtured, our parents have also done the same, so it’s not a blame game 😛 But, when it comes to schooling, it’s not questioned usually, because that’s what the larger population adheres to, whether you liked it or not, we do the same to our children, and even if we feel unsure, due to limitations in the alternative education sector, or not having much open opportunities, and since homeschooling might not be everyone’s cup of tea, the only option is to send kids to conventional schools. But it is still a conscious choice to make, and any path you choose is not easy, it has its own challenges.

With my research over the past few years and experience working with children and families all along, I felt there is a lot of pressure to fit into the system.

I would like to draw an analogy here, about cooking. There is no one way of cooking a dish, you could do a fast process with a pressure cooker or an oven with which sometimes the effective nutrients might be lost, or you might choose to do a more conscious conservative cooking methodology to retain most of its nutrients for better absorption in the body. Learning is also similar. Learning with a lot of pressure to excel in assessments vs learning because you want to know something and because you are passionate about it are 2 different aspects.

This again pulls me to draw attention to different perspectives each kid would be perceiving.

I was very lucky to have parents who were very open and did not want me to study for marks, probably I was sent to school just because everyone went to school, and they weren’t aware of other options then. But I was a person who takes up a lot of stress and tension, even though my parents never pressurised me, so I tried to study hard and was totally tensed and stressed up before exams. And whenever my marks came, it used to be on an average side, my parents were totally okay with it, but my report card always said, “Can do better!!”. May be my teachers felt I sincerely could do better, but with all the hard work done, it always left me with the idea that I was not good enough, whatever I did was never enough. There was a constant expectation benchmark set. I still have this insecurity and fear in me, that whatever I do, I feel it’s not enough. Even if my parents supported me on my journey, the words of “Can do better” and the feel that “I am not enough” is deeply rooted in me till date.

This is just one example, but there are many more positive and negative stories, from many different people, and I do not say that I am against schooling system. I still love my school.

This might not be the perspective of another child who went to the same class as I did and have a totally different scenario at home. But from speaking to many from the same classroom environment we were in, it has given me different ideas. With which I decided to choose my journey without formal conventional schooling.

It is for me to explore along with my child and retain her curiosity and encourage the innate nature of thinking, and questioning, and help to have more clarity in our thoughts with as much lesser distractions as possible and living as close to nature. To view our world as our classroom and each person we meet as our teacher and make every opportunity a learning experience. I vision this to be a teamwork of exploration, adventure, and fun, mixed with passion, enthusiasm and even downfalls. It’s a whole journey that will ultimately lead to independence. I can only do this by modelling how I live and all my work for unschooling starts with me, how passionate I am and how I wish to grow with compassion and purpose.