A Disclaimer

Prema and Nithya came and met us some time ago with their young children. This post is a response to Nithya telling me that she got depressed reading some of my blog posts because we seem to be superparents and superkids always DOING the right things. Her specific complaint was about our family watching the solar eclipse together as mentioned in a previous post. Nithya was convinced that she would not have the energy to organize their family looking at the eclipse together like we did.

And this I thought gave me the perfect setting to write this...

Disclaimer:

1. Our children are older than six. And this blog is about our experiences homeschooling them. If your children are not six yet, please don't get exhilarated or unhappy about anything written here. What you read here is probably not directly relevant to you.

2. I did not have to spend energy convincing or coercing my children to watch the solar eclipse. All of us were equally excited by it. Please remember that this broad commonality of purpose that is one of the miracles that we have noticed over our 4 year homeschooling experience did not happen overnight. It has come as a wonderful gift slowly over the years, unheralded and unsought. And I believe that this or other unsought gifts will come to all who are willing to take the plunge into the unknown. Just don't expect it to appear within 30 minutes like a Dominos Pizza.

3. Our homeschooling experience is 99% about long boring days, about a general air of tension in the house, about angry moments and smacked bottoms and in many other ways lots of material too boring to be talked about on this blog. We consider homeschooling to be a long term practice and we recognize that any long term practice is made up of a few peaks interspersed with many many plateaus.

4. We wanted to live a more conscious life, we needed more time together, time to think and act in a manner that was not dictated by EMIs or school or office schedules. This was our central requirement and my working from home and the children not going to school were the means to meeting this requirement. So homeschooling in our case is like an indicator or a symptom of our life choices and as such not the main focus of our lives. (I know that I need to do some explaining here and I intend to do that in a more leisurely manner in my next post).

5. All of us (and especially Kanti and me) work very very hard. (Although to the unsympathetic eye it may look remarkably like lazing around) We strongly believe that this commitment to hard work on the part of the parents is the pre-qualification to become a homeschooler.

---End of disclaimer---

Thank you Nithya for making me think about all this. I hope this public answer helps you to forgive us our superhumanbeingness.

The Rule of Ten

I think that Kanti and I discovered the 'Rule of Ten' when Aditi was two or three years old. The way we defined it, it states that-

Where one unit of effort is required (by your estimation) to get a desired outcome with your child, you have to unquestioningly, unconditionally put in ten!

I thought this important enough to communicate to my friend when he became a first time father and so I took the time to write it out in a long funny/serious email to him. (Arvind Chhabra my friend grew up in Punjab, studied with me in Bengal, worked in Bangalore, married an American and now lives in New York. He speaks fluent Bengali and his English still has a south Indian twang to it. In short- he is as mixed up as me) And reading the email again just now I thought it worth putting up on this blog. It is a long email with a single sentence message but you may enjoy reading all of it. I know that I very much enjoyed writing it!

(If you do not speak Hindi and know some Punjabi you may not 'get' the mail below and I advice you to stop reading here and find some other way of wasting your time)

And if you are a Punjabi likely to take offense at the tone of the email I have only one thing to say to you...

'Oi, tu jaanta nahi mein kaun hoon?'

...As I grew up in Delhi I used to hear this as a preface to most fights. And dear, possibly angry, Punjabi reader, the very next sentence you will hear from me will be...

'Oi tu mujhe maarne ayega tho mein yahan se full speed bhaag jaunga.'

Peace, brothers and sisters! Anyway, without further ado here is...

-----------------------------
Arun's email to Arvind:
-----------------------------

Oi pappe (literally!!!),

Great news! Amy and Arvind we take great pleasure on this occasion to welcome you to the world of parents and congratulate you on taking the first step towards being the parents of a hundred children!!! As you know, we are only two steps ahead of you and we know that moving forward together, we will soon reach that wonderful goal.

Given below...

(Just for you at a heavily discounted, once-only, special price of just $9.999, to be paid later in person when we meet)

...is the distilled wisdom of more than 10 years of full time research by Kanti and me.

-----------------------------
If you agree to pay $9.999 as mentioned above please read further otherwise destroy this email. Or my laayer will do some 'gaal-kittha-si' with your laayer. OK?
-----------------------------

General Disclaimers:
1. The author sometime lapses into pnjbi when affected by strng emotions. These lpses are usually mnifested by dropped vowels and additional 'h'es. Such lpses should under kind cnsidration be maafkaroed.
2. The author takes no responsibility of translating all these wonderful jokes into english for Amy. The author's personal viewpoint is that if the world doesn't speak pnjbi we have many muscular pnjbi men and even more muscular pnjbi women who know how to communicate real pnjbi in all languages.

Aim:
Create/devlop good bachhhhe (children).

Definitions:
Good children-> Pleayure to be with + fill you with enrgy -> Basically in pnjbi=Patiala pegs
Bad children -> No pleayure to be with + drain your enrgy -> Basically in pnjbi=golgappe ka paani

Apparatus:
One ordinary or garden vriety of child. (More than one is exponentially better, but usually diffcult to get at short notice)

Procedure:
The thumb rule (for angootha chhhaps) to follow in this all important procedure is-
eik-ka-dus
Which means that-
Where one unit of effort is required (by your estimation) to get a desired outcome with your child, you have to unquestioningly, unconditionally put in ten. No bargaining and no laziness here please!

Observations:
If
your child is irritating you OR boring you OR is a pain to be around with
then
look within- The slution is with you
goto slution
endif

If
you feel guilty of neglecting your child
then
you have been giving < eik-ka-eik and you deserve all the pain your child is giving you
elseif
you feel that you are putting fight but no results are showing
then
You have been giving only = eik-ka-eik and this is where most people get stuck
endif

slution
give >= eik-ka-dus and notice immediate changes...

Result:
Good bachhhhe te good baaps. oi waat?

Oi mei kyia balle balle,
With lots of love to Amy and you and with blessings and 'oi mei sadh ke jaawa's to baby Taj,
From Dinkar, Srikant, Aditi, Kanti and Arun

------------------
Arvinds reply:
------------------

Oi Pappe,
This email is wrth eik-ka-dus so you dsrve, $99.99 for this advice and effort. Changa pher.
- Chhabra

What the solar eclipse taught us

The solar eclipse of 22 July 2009 was the longest total solar eclipse during the 21st century, not to be surpassed until June 2132. It lasted a maximum of 6 minutes and 39 seconds off the coast of Southeast Asia, causing tourist interest in eastern China, Japan, India and Nepal.

- From the Wikipedia

All of us were very excited about the eclipse and we wanted to catch it 'live' as it happened. (We have no TV so no 'action replay' option) So we went to Nehru Planetarium and bought the special 'glasses' that would let us watch the eclipse without becoming the first fully blind homeschooling family in the world. The glasses were actually some sort of very dark plastic set in cardboard frames and cost 25 Rupees each. We bought one for each of us because none of us wanted to share the glasses and miss any of the action.

The time for the eclipse in Delhi was between 5:30 and 7:30 in the morning and the children (even 7 year old Dinkar who usually sleeps till 8:30) were all up and ready by 5 in the morning. Where we live, the roofs are connected together without any walls in between so we were thinking that the whole place would be swarming with children and their parents in a Holi or Diwali kind of festival atmosphere. It was cloudy at 5:30 and when we reached the terrace all ready for the crowd and the great experience with our special cardboard glasses we found... Yes you are right, no other children there. The only other people we could see on our terrace and on the vast sea of terraces in our neighborhood were ONE middle aged couple looking at the sky through a big Xray film.

We waited on top till almost 7:00 braving the heat and the flies and watched through the glasses as the sun played hide and seek with us through the clouds. But at around 6:30, the time for the maximum eclipse in Delhi, for about 30 seconds or so, we saw with our naked eyes, and shared amongst ourselves, the miracle of the crescent sun. And Aditi took this picture as a keepsake.

  Yes, I know, YOU went with your children and saw the eclipse but why were all the rest of the children in Delhi not on the roofs? Why didn't every school in Delhi buy the 25 Rupee glasses and make it compulsory for each student to buy it at 50 Rupees from the class teacher? Why didn't they make it compulsory for each student to be on the roof or on the road and for each student/parent to write a 250 word essay on 'The longest eclipse that I will ever see in my life'?

I think the partial answer may lie in a conversation I am almost sure I overheard:

Mother 1: Did you see the eclipse?
Mother 2: Yes. Wasn't it spectacular?
Mother 1: Which channel did you see it on? I saw it on NDTV. I think they are great.
Mother 2: Oh! I saw it on BBC. I don't trust the Indian channels. They are capable of showing us the previous eclipse and saying that it is this one you know.
Mother 2: (sympathetically) Yes, I know. You can't trust the media at all. By the way, you know 'X' is learning about it in school, so he wanted to go on the roof. Finally I had to tell him that his hair will all fall out if it gets exposed to the cosmic rays of the eclipse. That stopped him! He is very attached to his hair.
Mother 1: (Smiles) Good. I didn't let 'Y' and 'Z' go up either. It says in the newspaper that many people have gone fully blind by looking at the sun during the last eclipse.

X, Y and Z, as you may have been taught in school, are unknown variables in Algebra. In fact they are so much unknown that their mothers 1 and 2 are nearly at their wits ends about their unknownness.

Mothers 1 and 2 are post graduates, have lived abroad, dress fashionably, live on the top floors of their apartment blocks and between them have 3 children below the age of 10. Walking up to the roof with their children wouldn't have been very much more effort than pressing the remote buttons on their TVs...

...But then post graduate degrees by themselves do not necessarily make you less superstitious and high levels of intelligence do not necessarily lead to wisdom.

Why we want to grow our own food

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society - Jiddu Krishnamurti

We are shifting to the outskirts of Bangalore and plan to experiment with growing our own food. A friend who is accustomed to our weird behavior and sudden shifts of focus wanted to know why. He was very much in favor of the shift away from the city and a lifestyle closer to nature but his question really was why we wanted to take the livelihoods away from the poor farmers.

Well friend, the short answer is-

Our life as we live it now is fragmented and dysfunctional and reducing our dependence on a dysfunctional system in whatever way we possibly can seems to be the way to make it whole. Growing our own food and living in a semi-urban environment seems to be a way to reduce our dependence on the current, dominant, anachronistic, flawed economic/financial system of the world.

The long answer follows-

(Please remember that what follows is valid for people like you and me working in 9 to 5 jobs in cities and not for the large majority in this country who work without an 'appointment letter' )

Examples of dysfunctionality in our current lifestyles:
1. A working couple I know spends fifty thousand Rupees every month just on their cars. (EMI, drivers salary, maintenance, petrol etc). They also spend a lot of their time traveling in these cars in bad traffic. So they have to work to earn money to pay for their cars and a car is a basic requirement to go to work to earn money to pay for their cars.
2. We have no EMI, no car, I work from home and the activities of our children happens in our colony. We are together a lot and don't get stressed driving through traffic jams. But I am forced to work to earn money to pay the rent on our house and a house is a basic requirement to do work to earn the money that I have to pay as rent.
3. We came back from a trip to Agra and got off at Okhla station instead of the larger New Delhi station. This was at 10 in the morning- office time. We were in the AC chair car but hundreds of office-goers crowding into the two or three unreserved compartments also got off with us. This whole crowd carefully crossed the railway line which is one of the busiest in India. Then on the road outside where we thought we would get an auto to take us home we found this...

... A huge traffic jam. We walked till Nehru Place, a distance of 2 kilometers or so through the mud and garbage on the roadside before getting into an Auto on a relatively empty road. The scary thing I felt was that the people traveling by train were only doing so because they had not yet got a car. They too aspired to be stuck in the traffic with their AC's on.

Why do you and I tolerate it:
1. We are cut off from the consequences of our actions. The way we live our life doesn't seem to be directly creating any problem. (A person working in a tobacco company doesn't think that the salary he takes home causes cancer. Like you and me he is just doing a job)
2. We are cut off from the real meaning behind our monetary transactions. (When we buy bread for 20 rupees we only record the money transaction and not the fact that behind all human food stands nature and ultimately the shining sun. We mistakenly assume that getting the 20 Rupees is what we need to do to get us food)
3. After working very hard for a long time we finally became qualified to easily do well in the dysfunctional system and we were given the tools and the strong latent desires to help perpetuate the dysfunctionality. As we begin to acquire what we have dreamed of it becomes very difficult to let go of the system even when we see things going horribly wrong. We cannot usually even admit that things ARE going wrong
4. We know of no other alternatives that are less dysfunctional. The only alternative appears to be to join Ramakrishna mission or other such missions and become a monk or to become a Nanga (pardon the pun) sadhu in the Himalayas

What can you and I do:
1. Take our children out of school :-)
2. Grow our own food. Prof Dabholkar a pioneer of intensive natural farming had demonstrated how a quarter of an acre of land is enough to grow enough to fully feed a family of five. In his book 'Plenty for All' there were also photos of people who have done experiments in growing their food on their city terraces

3. Reduce our dependence on a salary. And if you say that you are not anymore dependent on a salary for your comfortable living then what are you doing still stuck in a traffic jam?
4. A friend who works for a software company grows most of his food on a 10000 sqft patch of land they have. His wife and son spend a lot of time on the farm and he joins in on the weekends. Farming is not a full time job so they also run an informal village school. He was telling me that except for his travel to and fro from office in his car, his living expense is 1500 Rupees per month.

Conclusion:
Now, in my long educational journey I didn't spend even one hour learning how food (that I cannot live without!) grows and ripens. It is only recently that I noticed what miraculous things seeds are and how easy it is to sprout them into new life. If there is a way to remove the dysfunctionality of our lives, I think that falling back on mother nature and getting in touch with the miraculous mystery at the center of the living seed may not be a bad place to start searching.

Anyway, we are going to give it a shot. If it works, you can come and join us. And if it doesnt, it would be easy for me to find you in your traffic jam. :-)

References and resources:
1. Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation- A blog post by Dmitry Orlov the author of 'Reinventing Collapse' which talks about everything covered in this post (and much more)
2. Zeitgeist addendum- A low budget 2 hour underground movie that takes a look at the ills that plague society and suggests some radical solutions
3. The story of stuff- A very well made 20 minute animated film on the consumerist society
4. Natueco farming- A scientific and more efficient reapplication of natural farming techniques

Shared holidays

Sathish and Sangeetha and their two lovely children Shalom and Ishaan recently introduced us to the joys of walking in nature. They travelled from Bangalore to Delhi, stayed with us for a day and all of us (4 adults and 5 homeschooled children) went to pay our respects to the beauty of the Kumaon Himalayas. The place was called Munsiyari and it was a 13 hour jeep ride from Kathgodam, the rail head which we got to after an overnight train journey from Delhi. On the beautiful, pine-forested, surprisingly good but steep and curvy roads up we had to make many stops to get the children unsick. Our stay and the walking trips into the mountains around town were organized by an eco-tourism NGO that works with the villagers there. We stayed in quaint small houses in a village on the outskirts of town. Like this 50 year old traditional house. Munsiyari is the end of the road. Literally! It is the place from where people start walking towards the Tibet and Nepal borders and the place from which the few tourists, who brave the 13 hours in the jeep, start their treks towards the Milam glacier. None of our city distractions worked here. No credit card, no ATM card, no cell phone (Only BSNL connectivity) and no Internet. So in the 12 full days we spent here- all of us- pizza loving kids and sedentary adults- all of us got used to eating aaloo in its many forms and to walking till our shoes wore off. Every day a local guide would take us up through the forests around our village- a little higher and to a little more spectacular place- acclimatising us till we were surprised at ourselves and at our presumption, at our easy new familiarity with slippery and cold and wet mountain heights . We also spent two days camping up at 10000 feet where we realized the inherent superiority of women and children. The people who trekked up to 12500 feet, the highest point in the neighborhood, were the two mothers and two of the older kids. The men were down with altitude sickness and by the time Sathish and I recovered it was time to walk back to the village. But I see now that the Himalayas have hijacked my post. What i wanted to talk about was the idea of two families with homeschooled children taking a holiday together to get to know each other better and to learn from their combined experience. But then maybe the photos have already told you more than I could have in my usual tongue-tied manner. So let me wind this up with a- Thank you Sathish and Sangeetha for making this trip happen. Thank you for introducing us to the fears and pleasures of communing with nature in the raw form. All of us here are eagerly looking forward to the next outing.

Unconditional something

The children were excited about their trip to Kerala. They were going to meet their friends in Thrissur after 8 months. They wanted me to come too but I had to finish some work and couldn't go with them so they went with their mother. Whenever the children called from Kerala and asked me when I would come my reply would be that I would come as soon as my work finishes and when they asked when that would be I usually told them that the work was a mountain and I was only a small mouse making a small hole in its very bottom. Well after the first few days in Kerala, Aditi and Srikant (13 and 9 respectively) stopped asking. Only 7 year old Dinkar persisted, calling up every day or so to give me the latest news and to ask me when I would come. 14th April was Vishu and my brother and sister and our family were all converging to my parents place in Kerala. Everybody except me! So I decided to surprise them all by dropping in unannounced for the Vishu lunch. I caught an early morning flight and after a full nine hours in various modes of transport (Taxi, plane, auto, bus, camel, elephant... Oh sorry no camel and elephant:-)) I found myself outside the boundary wall of our house in Kerala. I called up Dinkar on my cellphone. And as this is climax of this story let me switch to drama-mode to make it, well you know, more dramatic: 

Me: Hello Dinkar how are you?  

Dinkar: Fine.  

Me: Have you had the Vishu lunch already?  

Dinkar: Not yet. They are setting all the banana leaves for it. 

Me: What are you doing?  

Dinkar: Playing with my new car that Saniatta gave me today.  

Me: Oh! What car is that?  

Dinkar: It is a Volkswagen Taureg.  

Me: Show me!  

Dinkar: (Short silence and then...) How?  

Me: Just walk out to the gate and just show me no.  

Dinkar: Oh! (Sound of phone getting hurriedly cut)  

Srikant: (To Dinkar running out from the house towards the gate) Where are you going?  

Dinkar: (Not stopping running) Naana is standing outside the gate! Come quickly! 

Srikant convinced by the urgency in the voice joins in the race and they reach the gate together to find me standing crouched behind the wall. I don't know why but I think there is some big important point hiding here that I cant put my finger on. Is it the fact that Dinkar had no doubt in his mind that his father was standing outside? And anyway what has all this got to do with homeschooling and the fact that Dinkar has never been inside a school. I can't tell! But I still think there is some important... (Quickly illustrated by Dinkar)

Homeschooling Report Card: 2008-2009

Summary:
1. After 3 years of homeschooling, two of our children have done well in standardized online tests (Asset-online) for Maths, English and Science. Asset is designed to test concepts and is therefore textbook independent. This means that these tests cannot be 'prepared' for like school exams. Our children finished their syllabus and then just sat for the exam with no other preparation.
2. Their doing well implies that they 'got' most of what the textbooks were trying to 'teach'.
3. They spent less than 13% of the time that school-going children spend on academics to go through the entire syllabus for that year. Their 'school-time' was only an hour or two of any one subject a day and with long gaps for travel and other such non-academic interests.
4. The entire process of studying and getting tested was joyful to the children.

  * The Asset-online website says that more than 3000 students take each test and the percentile value reflects how many students did worse than you. So 97 percentile means you did better than 97% of the students who took that particular test.

** The Asset Online Maths test that Srikant took had pre 2005 content. (All NCERT textbooks were revised after 2005 to make the subjects simpler and more relevant to the student's daily life) This means that his scores in a test of what he actually studied would be much higher. How much higher? I don’t know and what is more, I don’t care either. :-)

Endnote:
My claims all along, that our children were learning much more than what was contained in their school books and that I was very happy with their progress and that I was not interested in testing them on just their ‘school-time’ was always angrily argued about by the numerous well-wishers of our children. So this report card is the public answer to squash these concerns. Well well-wishers, time to take YOUR children out of school now. What?

:-)

HomeSchooling starter notes

Recently a friend said that they are taking their 6 year old out of her school this year and what advice and resources could we provide to help in their journey. Set me thinking!

My first response was- Wow that's great! Just go ahead and do it.

What more could I say? It seemed a bit like:-
Someone who doesn't read too much asking R K Narayan: "Sir, what is your latest book about?"
R K Narayan: "Well, it's a story that took eighty thousand words to tell. So it is somewhat difficult to explain in a few sentences."

On second thought, however, I saw the merit of thinking through and making our list as a starting point for the face-to-face with our friends. So we sat down last night, the wife and I and made a random list of things that we would want to tell someone starting out homeschooling in India. Issues and advice and insights that helped us in our own journey.

This is what the list looks like when I added some structure to the randomness:

Unwind and unlearn: It is good for your new homeschooling family to 'unlearn' all you have ever 'learned' about 'learning'. (This may seem paradoxical but going ahead you will find that paradoxes and contradictions will become the road-signs in the no-road territory you have decided to walk on. Another paradox:-)) Take a month/ six months/ one year or whatever time you can afford off to do this. This process of unlearning is very important because the standard social structures, schooling being one of them, are embedded so deeply in our psyche that we ARE the structures. It is good in the beginning, therefore, to not have any agenda but to become less tense and just watch things as they unfold. There is a chance that you may learn a lot from this exercise but you will DEFINITELY 'unlearn' a lot. So it may be a good idea in the beginning to perhaps meanderingly, slowly, follow your child's interests wherever they take you.

Work hard: Managing constant change in unfamiliar terrain is a lot of hard work and very tiring. Be prepared for this. Also remember that in this case even what to work on is not very clear and needs to be discovered first. It is only in the era of mass schooling that hard work has come to mean sitting at a desk or on the computer and DOING something. Do not feel guilty about doing NOTHING but watching and waiting and thinking.

Be stubborn: The results will take time to show. Till they do, 99% of your immediate world will loudly object to what you are doing. In time, when the results are plain for everyone to see, 98% of them will still object. Growing up away from the mainstream is a difficult thing. The mainstream is not evil. It evolves too. Become aware that you are the leading edge of that evolution. Be stubborn about this!

Set up alternative structure: When you break one basic structure you need to start work on setting up an alternative structure that you consider better. Many homeschoolers wont agree but the point is that 'no-learning-structure' is also a structure. Start thinking about and working on version 1.0 of your alternative structure. Use your unlearning time to unhurriedly work on this problem.

Research resources: If you want a school curriculum for 1st standard to 8th standard the CBSE curriculum and the NCERT books that go with it are a wonderful wonderful resource bank. The text books were revised after the National Curriculum Framework document of 2005 talked about making learning more fun for the children. If you are taking your child out of an ICSE school you will be way ahead on the CBSE Age-Curriculum curve and can afford to take it easy without any curriculum for as long as one year. (If you are into unschooling then all this curriculum talk maybe getting you edgy but bear with me. A lot of people are caught up in curricula and suchlike things and just like you and me they need help too :-)) For more information on homeschooling in India check out the alternative education India site here and join the yahoo group of Indian homeschoolers here. You may also like to go through the posts under the label HS FAQ on this blog.

Read: I could have added this under some other heading. But Arvind Gupta deserves at least a new heading if not a whole blog post just for himself. If you don't know who he is, please find out about him here. His site has ALL the books and video links that you need to equip yourself as a homeschooling parent. You will need to read and read till you find the things that resonate with you. There are books here that have the potential to change your established worldview instantly which brings us to the next heading...

Evolve worldview: The Wiktionary defines worldview as-

1. One's personal view of the world and how one interprets it.
2. The totality of one's beliefs about reality.
3. A general philosophy or view of life.

Worldviews change and evolve over our lifetimes. Often due to apparently random events that happen to us. By choosing homeschooling you have just signed on the dotted line of the non-random route to evolving your worldview :-). So start reading and discussing and thinking and passionately working on the evolution of your worldview.

Coalesce a sangha: For the homeschooling parent a peer group that approximately talks the same language is extremely extremely important. Its the rubber dingy in an angry sea. No less! And for the homeschooled child another homeschooled child is reassurance that her parents are not the only weirdos on the planet :-)

Understand the process of learning: This is talked about in a lot of detail in another post here. Let me just add that it is important that you observe and understand for yourself how the learning process actually works. Don't listen to the experts and don't listen to me the non-expert. Rely only on your own observation and experience and insight. You may then discover that you need to throw out all your previous ideas about it. This is what John Holt has to say from 'Teach your own', his book on homeschooling (But don't listen to him either:-))- I can sum up in five to seven words what I eventually learned as a teacher. The seven- word version is: Learning is not the product of teaching. The five-word version is: Teaching does not make learning.

Recognize homeostasis: This is the tendency of complex systems (from the circulatory system to whole human beings to whole societies) to resist sudden change. It is a basic self preservation mechanism and it is blind to the difference between ''good' change and 'bad' change. Why is it relevant here? Well, when you embrace radical change you usually discover after it seems to be successfully implemented that the entire initiative loses its energy suddenly and appears like a bad decision that you begin to regret. Become aware that this is probably the drawing room of homeostasis auntie and you are having tea with her. And the point of writing it out in such detail here is that in such cases your awareness IS therapy.

Work on self development: This is an opportunity to come out of your comfort zone. Search for and implement in your lives long-term practices that transform your body, mind and spirit. Educating yourself or growing consciously is the biggest contribution you can make to your child's development. There can be nothing better for real education than a family working together to grow and develop and realize its collective potential. Some of the clear areas where you can immediately start working on your growth are:

1. Awareness: Become more aware of every waking moment. You cannot afford to miss any of the gifts that the universe showers on you for swimming against the tide.
2. Love and service: Grow outwards to include more of the universe in your loving embrace. (Moving forward from your taste buds to your comfort to your family to the nation to the world to the universe)
3. Gentleness: Even if you are stressed out and irritated and sleeping less please remember to increase the gentleness with which you handle your children. You can go to a pub to drown your sorrows but they have no escape from you.
4. Patience: Be aware that lasting change is a slow process. There would be some peaks but many more plateaus. Continuously affirm to yourself that you are in it for the long haul. Cultivate deep patience.

And lastly...
Don't get frightened: by this long post:-). You are on to a good thing. Have fun!

So already-homeschooling friends- we cant think of anything else to say here. Please comment on this post and tell us what we missed. I will update and correct the post as I start getting your feedback.

The educational institution of the future: A fantasy

Add another adult facilitator or so and add not more than a couple of children and there you have the prototype for the school of the future. 

What fun! 

It is foolish from our fast changing perspective today to predict the contours of a future even a few years ahead in time. But we have to begin the discussion somewhere. So listed out below is a random, incomplete look at the practical details of a school of the future.

• No school has more than 10 students
• There are no teachers (Only facilitators who speak only when they are spoken to :-))
• The facilitators direct the efforts of the students when they can or pass them on to other facilitators who can guide them
• Anybody above the age of 14/15 and who has been a student of this type of school from their first school days is considered qualified to become a facilitator (Till we get the first batch of such facilitators any industrial era trained person who has a high school certificate can become a facilitator)
• All schools run in their local communities in a house or community area not more than a ten minute walk for any child
• The minimum infrastructure in a school is an internet ready computer
• The thousands of school buildings and their administrators that mushroomed across the world for the industrial era become sports and other similar educational infrastructure providers
• The education of the future focuses on body, mind and spirit development (Includes things like sports, yoga, CBSE text books, meditation etc)
• The education of the future also focuses on social and cultural development (Includes interpersonal growth, music, social service activities etc)