Class Of Their Own

The homeschooling movement is gaining momentum as a growing tribe of parents rejects the cookie-cutter approach to education.

- Chinki Sinha

Almost a century ago, Rabindranath Tagore wrote Tota Kahani, the story of a free-spirited parrot who would do nothing but hop, skip, fly and sing all day. A king ordered that the bird be ‘civilised’, and so it was put in a golden cage. So much instruction was forced down its throat that it soon forgot to sing, and then, couldn’t even squawk. When it tried to fly, its wings were clipped. Soon the parrot died, with not a sound except for the rustle of books in its stomach.

The same story is painted on the walls of Shikshantar in Udaipur, which calls itself a people’s institute for rethinking education and development. In the mural, trapped in its gilded cage, this parrot, too, forgets how to sing. But unlike in Tagore’s story, the narrative in Shikshantar has been tweaked to accommodate hope. Here, the parrot breaks free instead, snapping, as it were, the shackles of ‘formal schooling’.

Alternative schools and proponents of home schooling have long waged this battle. If Sahal Kaushik was the standard-bearer in 2010 (when the then 14-year-old topped the IIT entrance exam), this year it was 17-year-old Malvika Joshi’s turn to reaffirm faith in alternative schooling. Last August, she earned a place at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology even though she was not deemed eligible for the joint entrance examination of the venerated IITs back home because she did not have a Class 12 qualification.