Home schooling is something that is slowly catching on in India. Given the numerous options available, such as the IB and international systems, apart from the ISC, CBSE and other examinations in India, as well as the ambitions of parents, it seems doubtful it could have much of a following here.
Home schooling implies highly educated parents, with adequate time to spend with their children. It assumes that the parents have competence in a wide variety of fields – including science, maths and language. Do home schooling parents want their children to pass exams? Or do they want their children to be forever out of the mainstream? Do parents have the right to decide whether their children should be home-schooled or not? In insisting that children learn at home, what are the children being deprived of? Alternatively, in what way are they benefiting?
Some reasons why parents (a small minority in India ) are thinking of home schooling seem to be:
* the difficulty of getting into a good school.
* poor education and poor teaching.
In the first case home schooling seems to be a ‘second best’ choice.
In the second case, one question raised is whether the parents can do any better?
But there are other questions too.
School is not just about academics, but about making friends, about having a life outside one’s home, of the freedom to develop in one’s own way, without parental constraints. It is about experiencing a different world.
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