Saturday, June 27, 2015

Re: [IAC#RG] Need help securing the rights of homeschoolers

In1925 J.Krishnamurty in association with Dr Annie Besant had started an excellent  school for young children both boys and girls from Montessori classes A and B and then regular classes from class 1 to class  6 in Allahabad. I was  in that school for 8 years from the age of 2 and half to the age of 10 and half. Both music and physical training was compulsory.I can confidently state that whatever I am today is due to the 8 years of my childhood spent in that school where all teachers including the Pricincipal were ladies with the exception of the music teacher.None of the teachers ever even scolded a child.I wish all schools for the children in the country could be like it.

Sent from my iPad

On 26-Jun-2015, at 5:48 pm, Gaur J K <gaurjk@hotmail.com> wrote:

26/6/15
To Vidyut
No, you are not being paranoid but sounding more like J. Krishnamurthy when you questioned the concept of Authority-whether it is Parental Authority,or State Authority or religious Authority which leads to conditioning of mind.He had also given considerable thought to the education of children or young mind. He also felt that there is a need of fundamental change in the educational system.
He had also started a few schools in  South, Central and North India.One is near Pune.
Under this discussion various issues are getting mixed up- Compulsory education by the Govt.,Qualtiy education in public/private schools, Informal system of education and the home schooling. 
It also gets connected to Physical disability of children and their right to education and development.
More on this in a later post.
JKGaur


Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2015 11:24:54 +0530
From: wide.aware@gmail.com
To: indiaresists@lists.riseup.net
Subject: Re: [IAC#RG] Need help securing the rights of homeschoolers

It also has a larger environmental and economic impact. The less you are able to reuse things, the more you spend on buying specific things for specific purposes and the more garbage you generate. But if you are taught from early childhood that what is RIGHT comes from authority and if you differ, you are wrong, then you will buy products that are created and certified for specific uses instead of using what you already have. So, your old clothes will end up in some landfill while you purchase tissue papers and dusters and mops.

Do you know anyone anymore who binds left over pages from notebooks to reuse? Go to rural India. You will. And not just because of poverty, but because of sheer lack of exposure to "right" products for every purpose, a poor schooling system and enough opportunities to engage with diverse challenges that have no "right" answers provided. Jugaad thrives where reach of education system is poor in quantity/quality. That is how school kids rig up solar pumps there. Ever thought of that?

The education system is alarmingly lacking in the ingredients that make a mind perform at peak and thus, imposing it even on those with access to better possibilities does not just the children harm, but our overall intellectual abilities as well.

Vidyut

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On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Vidyut <wide.aware@gmail.com> wrote:
It is important to recognize here that child rearing is not about feeding and clothing them alone. Those are support duties. A person is what they think, what they do. You are not what you eat, wear and whether you got fed on time. Your worth is a product of your thinking and presence. When education takes over installing state approved thoughts and state approved thoughts alone into a child, it is in effect brainwashing. It is also not in national interest to narrow the diversity of thoughts in the population - it limits the collective creative ability. Though of course it is politically profitable to condition generation after generation into believing authorized answers to be right.

People are not islands. People influence each other. The diversity a person brings influences the world around him through his interactions. Thoughts spread. In the long run, the longer we have a world where state sanctioned syllabus is the fundamental accomplishment, the worse we will lose our diversity. Our arts, traditions, "jugaadu" tendencies, entrepreneurs, knowledge on a wide variety of life essential occupations not covered by a syllabus or course. We will increasingly be the world's back office without an original thought, but excellent at doing as told. The education system simply does not recognize the value of originality!

And I am not being paranoid. We already see it in the population. Narrow bands of thinking, lack of belief in own ability to do anything technical that you are not qualified for. More use of disposable products, less reuse or adapting of products - look at how our parents used things around the household and how we do it. We have actually started believing that cotton wrapped around the end of a matchstick is harmful for our ears and we NEED cotton wrapped around a plastic stick in a factory in order to not destroy our ears. We believe that women cannot use cloth sanitary napkins and be healthy - they MUST use those created specifically for the purpose and with plastic lining, etc. I know someone who purchased a magnifying glass while he had a broken binocular and several SLR lenses at home - was far more powerful than the thingy he purchased because it was not a magnifying glass and he didn't think of it. How much time does it take to look through a lens and check if it is useful? (just some examples out of thousands)

Diversity of knowledge in the population cannot be enriched by teaching everyone the same thing for ten years. At least the ones who don't wish to should be allowed to choose their way, not just to enrich their own lives, but keep diversity alive as well.

Is this an intellectual vision worth having for a country?

Vidyut

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On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Vidyut <wide.aware@gmail.com> wrote:
Sarbajit, I'm not talking of entirely left alone as in state should ignore education of children. However, there is a need to recognize various forms of education and allow parents and children to choose while there is no evidence of abuse and it is clear that the interest of the child is paramount. The current definition of education is not just extremely narrow, it ends up imposing a lot of useless things and demands a great sacrifice from children and parents for sheer lack of prioritizing the well being of children and fixating on standardization to the point of imposing standardization of a sub-standard system.

The Right To Education Act is turning into a Compulsory Assembly line Child Rearing Act. The exclusion of alternative schooling and homeschooling has nothing to do with the rights of children to education and everything to do with controlling what children know and how they know it by the state. I fail to see how if censoring news is a violation of our fundamental rights, censoring education to a narrow state defined band is not.

Vidyut

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On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 9:14 AM, Sarbajit Roy <sroy.mb@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi

1) Are you chasiing the "right to be left alone" which includes the right to child rearing (google site:indiankanoon.org for this).

" It   follows   that   the   "privacy"   of   a   person,   or   in   other   words   his   "private  information",   encompasses  the  personal  intimacies  of  the  home,  the  family,  marriage,   motherhood,   procreation,   child   rearing   and   of   the   like   nature. "

2) Home schooling could work for Rabindranath Tagore because of a vast supportive joint family system where the women were highly.educated (perhaps over-educated for the times). Read Chitra Deb's book on the women of the Tagore family (it has my name somewhere in the family trees)

Sarbajit


On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 4:14 PM, Vidyut <wide.aware@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree about the independent authority. In my view, it should come under the women and children welfare ministry. If homeschooled children can be registered as homeschoolers and for a fee, perhaps community monitoring or individual visits by observers would help ensure that homeschooling doesn't provide a smokescreen for child labour or abuse - for example, though it is too new in India for such misuse at this point (there are other excuses used that are more known and common, in other words). Or some other solution. However, such a solution must not impose a syllabus or tests - that defeats many of the reasons people homeschool. Life learning is not easy to quantify and test the way you can with a text book with specific questions and answers. Besides, homeschoolers learn very differently from school - the range of subjects is more diverse and there is no subject that is "compulsorily covered". Also homeschooled children tend to gravitate toward very advanced learning on the subjects they are interested in - as you see from the young ages of those who went for the IIT-JEE exams. There is no way to devise a standard test that could measure homeschooling performance with any reliability. Perhaps a more qualititative assessment - for example submissions of examples of whatever learning is going on - videos, photos of creations, copies of written work, etc. This will need a lot more debate than one person's view on the matter.

Emotional and social development is not a worry at all with homeschooling, in my view, though some parents have expressed concerns about their children not having homeschooled company to play with (many homeschoolers don't like the aggression of schooled children). However, to the best of my knowledge, I have yet to see a homeschooled child who cannot socialize excellently with the world. If you stop to think for a minute, when you take isolated sitting in class out of the picture, even that time is spent immersed in real world contact for homeschoolers. They learn in the real world, and as such, most homeschoolers are genuinely puzzled by why anyone would imagine they cannot function in the world they inhabit exclusively. As the parent of a homeschooling 16 year old put it once, "I don't know why people think socializing doesn't happen. All we do is socialize! Even when we are learning something else!"

Here is a description of a Homeschooling Conference I attended with my disabled son. I think it captures the social wisdom of homeschooled children very well.

Vidyut

Vidyut

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On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Vidyut <wide.aware@gmail.com> wrote:
With due regard, JK Gaur, Tomar, Indira Gandhi or Smriti Irani are not homeschoolers. I fail to see how you can demonize a learning choice over the actions of those who never made it. They reflect the enslavement of school conditioning where self-worth is measured in numbers and papers and a lack feels threatening enough to fake having them.

Why not measure the worth of homeschooling with the actions of homeschoolers instead of products of the school system? Ignorance? While we tend to value everything the children do, here are some that ought to impress the worst slave of the education system as well.

Rabindranath Tagore was homeschooled. Sahal Kaushik, who topped IIT-JEE at the age of 14 in 2010 is homeschooled. Satyam Kumar, homeschooled son of a farmer cracked it at 12. Angad Daryani, who created India's first 3D printer is homeschooled. Shreya Sahai who fought and lost a case to get recognition for homeschooling at the age of 15 is homeschooled. Julian Assange, who founded Wikileaks is homeschooled. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Lewis Caroll, Robert Frost, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Florence Nightingale and many many more inventors, artists, philosophers, reformers and more were homeschooled. Here is a list of homeschooled scientists. The site also contains other famous homeschooled people. Many Indian arts have survived because of homeschooling traditions from Sangeet gharanas and dance forms to elaborate silk weaves and musical instrument making. I have yet to meet a homeschooled child over 10 who wasn't doing anything interesting - that adults would find interesting and useful. This is far more than I can say about schooled graduates who spend 15 years chasing paper and still have no idea what they want to do. An average homeschoolers coference has everything from filmmakers to skateboarders and inventors to urban farmers. Probably not good enough for your standards. 

So you will pretend homeschooling is to blame for products of schooling with inferiority complexes over paper degress like Tomar or Irani or Tawde or Indira Gandhi or whoever. Because all you know outside the respect for schooling system is lack of respect for the garbage from the schooling system. Your examples have nothing to do with homeschooling. Yet you use them to deny rights of children who wish to do something worthwhile with their childhoods instead of your pet form of assembly line child raising.

There is considerable evidence that homeschooling is far better than school for emotional development at the very least.

Here are some more sources (different from previous email) if you are interested in being informed instead of simply demonizing something because you have decided it is bad.





Here are some of my views copy pasted from another place about the harms of school. As an unschooling parent who has not just been to school, but was a star student all through, and then led a diverse life including corporate training where much of the work is undoing the damage from school, these are my dead honest thoughts. They may be a bit extreme for those who believe in school, but at least they aren't blaming schoolers for acts of homeschoolers or vice versa:

Schools

  1. You might want to remember when any genius ever said, oh, I'm a genius because school taught me all the important things. That's right, never. Its usually, mom, supportive family, special mentor, country, god, etc.A school is a facility to install softwares of a list of subjects on unformatted children and certify the output, so that they may be put to appropriate use on becoming adults. In other words, kids are glorified hard drives.
  2. Schools kill learning. Destroy ability to learn. Learning is a process of differentiation.This is red, this is blue. It is the discovery of the difference that I learn. A math problem can be figured out usefully by doing this and not this. Clearly, the process of being wrong is as important as the process of being right. If you cannot be wrong, you have validated nothing. You have only recorded what was told.
  3. If you don't memorize railway timetables or helpline numbers, there is absolutely no reason to memorize biological species or latitude and longitude coordinates of a city.Schools are a criminal waste of the most learningful years of a child's life.
  4. Think of the brain as a computer's RAM. It caches information, but it is information it needs handy for instant application. Cluttering the cache limits its utility. We get children to memorize tomes and tomes of history, scientific classifications, geographical information, mathematical methods, and what not. Like any good cache, it flushes after the exams, or at worst, after education is complete. A school creates a fake need for storing information.
  5. What about English? A child can learn to read and write entirely from its interests.Video game rules, titles of cartoon films, story books, etc give way to chatting with girlfriends, reading up experiments…. whatever. When they have an interest that needs reading, they figure it out. If they don't need it, there is no need, is there? If you write like Wren and Martin, you need to search for jobs in nineteenth century England. This is the language of the world. You find it on blogs, newspapers, instruction manuals, application forms and appointment letters.
  6. Language is about communication. And knowledge is about function. My excellent English grew through reading story books. I was absolutely addicted to story books. I used to hide them inside text books and read them in class. Lost count of how many got confiscated. I dare say I made a significant contribution to the school's library. I used to read story books while waiting for exams to start. If I didn't waste time on school, my English would have been even better.
  7. What about Maths? Prof Lockhart does a fantastic job of demolishing the myth of maths as taught in schools, and Joyce finishes the job for anyone who thinks a genius has different standards and they are more ordinary. Do read both. BTW, a calculator is cheaper than school fees. Here's one by Ben Goldacre on the scientific ethics of schools and adults –Kids who spot bullshit, and the adults who get upset about it
  8. Now for the uncomfortable parts. School does kids harm. It has done you harm. It has done society harm. It has done me harm. The reason is that schools measure the worth of people. They respect or insult based on measures they decide and do damage, because they teach that human beings are less worthy if they don't know something. They fail to comprehend or instill respect for the vast scope of genius existing in the world. They install inferiority complexes, superiority complexes, and an inability to recognize genuine knowledge growing wild. It diminishes people.
  9. Schools create artificial perceptions of narrow, age defined social comfort zones.People who hear this for the first time think I'm being unreasonable. They think kids preferother children their own age. If this were true, pre-school kids wouldn't be tagging behind elder siblings in hero worship. It is an instinct to look at experienced members and learn. It is unnatural to avoid diversity. Pay attention – I am not saying relationships of same age are unnatural, I am saying it is unnatural not to venture outside those ages. Our society is fragmenting, as generations are unable to relate easily with each other. The few families with healthy relationships make it. The rest is a saga of all the generations finding the other generations inconvenient at best and intolerable more often.
  10. Schools create a culture of isolation. That would seem surprising considering how there are so many children, and you remember having friends…. but you can socialize and be alone without the ability to form meaningful relationships. Schools police interpersonal relations to an astonishingly harmful degree. It is natural for two people with a common problem to join forces in solving it. In real life, we call it team working. In school, the challenges are called examinations, and collaboration is called cheating. There is shame, stigma and a strong emphasis on NOT giving or accepting assistance and solving problems on your own. Then, you go to work, and suddenly the school ideas are the ones creating most of your trouble. You can't ask for help, you can't accept help, because you are "worth less" if you do that.You agree to teamwork, but still communicate final versions. Silo culture. There are now increasing cases of depression, suicides and loneliness in school children.
  11. Schools are a market. A big, profitable market, where the consumers have no rights.
  12. The education system is INEFFICIENT. In a world where efficiency and speed are important, the size of education only increases, becomes more and more schizophrenic and irrelevant to reality. Increasingly, the products of this education system are worthless in real life. <== READ! They find it difficult to see opportunity in a city like Mumbai (<== READ!), where my illiterate maid earns Rs.12,000/- a month. Basically, our education system is still geared to produce clerks in the British Raj.
  13. Schools teach very few of the life important skills, and little that is useful for non-white collar jobs. A train driver earns a good income, but kids are not exposed to it as an opportunity. They are herded toward academic brilliance as though it were an Olympic sport and functionality were not important.
  14. I don't even want to talk about all the class stereotypes this creates. Intelligent, respectworthy people score well in exams.This has been disproved so many times, its irrational. But what do you expect in a country where people become teachers because they couldn't get better jobs?
  15. The education doesn't create a foundation going beyond the known or fighting the horizon and breaking through. The idea is to do what is already established, excellently. A child is innovative by nature. A doer, experimenter, natural scientist. It is a creative lobotomy to force them to become like this.
I am sorry if this post appears excessively ranting, but with our children's rights at stake, it really is not funny when ignorant people demonize us for the actions of the school system.

Vidyut

Vidyut

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On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 1:36 PM, Gaur J K <gaurjk@hotmail.com> wrote:
24/6/15

Academic excellence should not be the sole criterion for determining a good school. Physical,social and emotional development is equally important for a child int he age group of 6 to 14. How will home schooling take care of these aspects. 
Secondly there has to be an independent authority to judge the competence of the  HomeSchool children at some stage.
Some NGOs have considered taking the PIL route for quality education but have decided against it.
Tomar is not the first to make a false claim. Indira Gandhi was in Oxford but did not complete the degree but claimed to be an alumnus.There are some other names as well, the latest being Smriti Irani. Education confers social repectability and employability. That is why it is a flourishing racket.
Education is also becoming a racket- some industrial houses have jumped into it in the garb of CSR
and grabing large parcels of land in the name of quality education from primary to postgraduage level.
Regds JKGaur

Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 10:46:35 +0530
From: gvgrao33@gmail.com
To: indiaresists@lists.riseup.net
Subject: Re: [IAC#RG] Need help securing the rights of homeschoolers


The quintessence of the views expressed by my learned friends is that we should send children to school that also to a recongnised school and not depend on home schooling but it is doubtful whether good schools are available within reasonable distance otherwise any transport made available by school authorities.
On Jun 15, 2015 8:36 AM, "R. Dua" <r.dua1234@gmail.com> wrote:

Point understood Vidyut ji.
We all want good ppl to be at the helm of affairs.And childhood is the right time to guide them.
Regards.

On 14 Jun 2015 20:38, "Vidyut" <wide.aware@gmail.com> wrote:
Also, I don't get the reference to Jeetendra Tomar. To the best of my knowledge, Tomar is a product of a system that values those itty bitty degrees, which is why he had to steal what he didn't have. This is not the act of a homeschooler that you are using to dismiss homeschooling.

Vidyut

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On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 3:24 PM, R. Dua <r.dua1234@gmail.com> wrote:

One appreciates the social workers good intention.
But as we are seeing Delhi's ex law minister..wats his name, jitender tomar of aap, trying his best to build an a escape route thru various univ's in n out widout any success.
A regular education has no parallel at any level or grade.
Else we will be having high sounding empty vessels all over the place.
We are thankful to authorities for bringing this forward.
Regards to all.

On 8 Jun 2015 07:55, "Sarbajit Roy" <sroy.mb@gmail.com> wrote:
PIL as proposed will not fly

A legal solution to your problem is to take the religious route for MINORITIES .
Art 30(1) and obtain a certificate saying you are an Esperanto speaker / Anusthanic Brahmo Samajists etc. enabling you to run your own school

BTW: It seems the RTE Act acknowledges homeschooling


On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 12:12 AM, Vidyut <wide.aware@gmail.com> wrote:
The RTE does not allow homeschooling. The education system we have is frankly pathetic and does little to nothing to provide a useful foundation for life. We are still into memorizing and testing recall in an age of pen drives. Spending hours calculating square roots when every mobile has a calculator and we have more mobiles than toilets. On the other hand, things we'd imagine are life essentials - how is your electricity bill calculated and how to pay it or even what your rights are as a child and what can you do if your rights are violated is something you never learn in school.

TEN years of basic education does not make students competent for basic jobs and they must cater to the education inflation craze to be able to make a living. Ten years is a lot of time. We don't see a two hour film without checking reviews to see if it is worth it, yet think nothing of occupying ten of the most eventful years of a child's life with school.

What is it that the schooling system teaches and that we need in life that takes ten years to learn? 

Alternative schools and homeschooling parents attempt to make education more relevant and useful to children. Study after study has shown homeschooling in particular in far more favorable light than schooling systems.

India has a small but growing community of homeschoolers who are constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop as the noose tightens around their necks.

Most of us are determined that we'd rather face jail ourselves than send our beloved children into one. Yet we are left with little choice than to keep our heads down and continue our "illegal" activity (recently removing a child from school was also termed 'criminal'!) and hope that we never end up facing the law over it.

It also hinders the children's rights in many ways. Many events or competitions accept student entries through their schools and homeschoolers not having a school name to put in the form can become ineligible to participate. Scholarships that could dramatically enhance a child's scope (homeschooling isn't cheap) cannot be applied for without the name of the school where the child is learning.

Worse, there are places where officials from the education system keep visiting families to insist that the children be sent to school. Alarming reports of government notices to parents not sending children to school.

Would it be possible to file a PIL stating that while the RTE is an excellent MINIMUM to offer children, it is hardly the ideal education a child can receive and parents or organizations attempting to raise the bar should not be prevented and forced to accept the mediocre?

Advice would be much useful, as we are a small and scattered community with little experience with rights struggles and we have vulnerable children we want to do right to. So there is some fear of being in the government/judiciary's notice with our child's name on record as violating the RTE.

Vidyut

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