By Vineet Bhalla
Popular imagination about school education in India is centred on children studying in either government schools or mainstream private schools, that follow the conventional classroom teaching model. However, increasingly, there has developed a trend among some parents and guardians to follow unconventional elementary education models that militate against the perceived shortages of conventional elementary education, such as its excessive emphasis on rote learning rather than problem solving, and its stifling of creativity in favour of conformity.
While homeschooling is at a very nascent stage, with conservative estimates putting the number children who are homeschooled by their parents in the country somewhere between 500 to 1,000 children, the alternate education movement has existed for several decades in our country—since the pre-independence era.
Why homeschooling?
Home schooling, simply put, is the education of school-aged children at their homes, rather than at a school. Proponents of homeschooling argue that children who are homeschooled are able to learn more, and turn out to be more culturally sophisticated. Home schooled children are able to excel in their natural abilities as their learning is more broad, and not just confined to a school environment.
While there has been no study conducted on how homeschooled children in India go on to do in their lives, studies conducted on homeschooled children abroad have yielded that such children perform substantially better than their conventionally educated counterparts, in areas of development such as verbal fluency, independence, and like skills. It is also noteworthy that the youngest person to ever clear the highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination, Sahal Kaushik, who cleared the examination in 2010, getting rank 33 in the country, and standing first in Delhi at the tender age of 14, was homeschooled.
Barriers to homeschooling created by the RTE Act
Proponents of homeschooling are opposed to sending their wards to formal schools. However, the RTE Act does not recognise a child’s right to education at a site other than a school, fulfilling the recognition norms set by the statute. In that sense, the Act is more like a ‘Right to Free and Compulsory Schooling’, since it is making schooling compulsory for all children in the age group of six to 14 years.
In the Act’s imagination, elementary education, that is to be compulsorily provided to children of the target age-group, can only be imparted by recognised schools. Not only is there no space for homeschooling in such a conception of elementary education, but the type of schooling made compulsory is restrictive, and threatens the existence of certain kinds of schools.
Another problem created by the RTE Act is over external certification of elementary education through homeschooling. Proponents of homeschooling usually avail of the National Institute of Open Schooling’s (NIOS) Open Basic Education (OBE) programme. The OBE programme’s value lies in the fact that it is recognised by the Government of India as equivalent education to formal, primary, and upper primary schooling, for purposes of higher education and employment. However, due to the restrictive notion of elementary education germinated by the RTE Act, the NIOS announced in 2011 that in light of the RTE Act, the OBE programme will discontinue catering to children of six to 14 years of age after 2013.
Shreya Sahai vs. Union of India
That same year, a public interest litigation was filed before the High Court of Delhi by 14-year-old Shreya Sahai, contending that the RTE Act does not recognise any other mode of imparting education except the one through formal schooling, which is in violation of the fundamental rights of children. The petition demanded that homeschooling and alternate education schools be included within the definition of schools, and that NIOS be allowed to continue imparting education to children below 14 years of age.
In the course of the hearings in this matter, the Union MHRD Ministry filed an affidavit stating that there is nothing illegal about homeschooling, and that the RTE Act doesn’t come in the way of homeschooling. However, it also disclosed that the OBE Programme of the NIOS would not cater to children in the age group of six to 14 years, beyond March 2015. The petition was ultimately dismissed by the High Court in 2013, on the grounds that it would not be justified for the Court to direct the Government to amend the RTE Act, “as it is the right of the Government and legislature to amend any Act or any provision of the Act” (which is unfortunate since High Courts are empowered through their power of judicial review to strike down or modify the reading of statutory provisions, if they are found to be unconstitutional).
Since then, the OBE programme has been incrementally extended for six to14-year-old children periodically, first till March 2017, and most recently, till March 2020, “subject to the NIOS showing regular progress on mainstreaming children as per Section 4 of the [RTE Act]”. What is meant by mainstreaming children, as per Section 4 of the RTE Act, however, is unclear and not clarified anywhere by the Union HRD Ministry.
Needed: Certainty about the status of homeschooling
The Union HRD Ministry’s affidavit in the Shreya Sahai matter, affirming the legality of homeschooling, brought some consolation to the budding homeschooling community in India. The affidavit acknowledges, albeit indirectly, children’s right to education of choice. However, for homeschoolers who would need external certification of the kind provided by the NIOS’s OBE programme, such lip service is not enough.
While the OBE programme has been available to them for elementary education, they have faced tremendous uncertainty about the same since the enactment of the RTE Act. Though their worries have been placated through periodic incremental extensions of the programme, it is imperative that the Union HRD Ministry looks beyond such piece-meal measures, and arrives at a more permanent and sustainable solution. One way to do that would be to perpetually and permanently extend the OBE programme to six to 14-year-old children, so that temporary extensions are done away with altogether. Another solid step would be to include homeschooling within the ambit of the RTE Act.
The decision to homeschool is the gallant exercise of choice, made by parents for their wards, to shape their horizons and customise their learning, beyond the confines of the formal schooling system. A statute that seeks to provide for compulsory elementary education for all children in the country must recognise and facilitate such a choice, not turn a blind eye to it.
[This post is an updated version of a part of an essay by the same author, published in 2015 in the Samvaad Handbook, 2015.]
Vineet Bhalla is with the Centre for Civil Society, New Delhi.
This article was originally published on the Centre for Civil Society blog Spontaneous Order, and has been edited to meet Qrius style guidelines.
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