Udaipur— You may call them crazy, but they are a happy, multi tasking family that actually had stayed, learned and grown up together. Manish Jain a Harvard graduate and Vidhi who had studied in 9 best of schools in India, had their own inhibitions about the School System. Manish's mother was an allopathy paediatric while Vidhi's father was a bureaucrat. Based on their respective childhood learning experiences, they repent for being schooled an didn't want a similar experience for their offsprings. The couple had so much in common on their concepts on learning & education that before deciding to get married, they agreed they would not send their children to SCHOOL.

Unschooled but unparalleled

Kanku, Manish & Vidhi's daughter is a 21-year old now and who can outshine any meritorious 'schooled' student of her age. Kanku is into fashion & textile designing, loves to make dolls. She has a passion for music, her paintings are awesome. She is an animal lover, has worked in malls, volunteered in orphanages, travelled to many cities in India and abroad. When she speaks, the sentences make error-free & grammatically correct English and Hindi. One would be in awe of her personality as she emerges as a beautiful sensitive human being with lot of compassion for all living creatures around her.

Shikshantar- a life movement

Manish & Vidhi co-founded Shikshantar- a life movement based in Udaipur dedicated to co-creating new version of education and rethinking mainstream development. "The present incarnation of Shikshantar started in 1998 in Udaipur. But we believe that the spirit of Shikshantar is at least 4-5 thousand years old. Eklavya and Nachiketa are two ancient stories which capture the spirit of self-design learning and deschooling ourselves. We started with a core question — what does swaraj mean in our lives and how can we live swaraj?" Manish said in a conversation with The Mooknayak.

Schooling a Carrot & stick mechanism

Manish who was never interested in formal studies took delight in the extra curricular activities in his childhood. "I could not understand why these real-life activities were always thought of as 'extra'. For me, they were the core of my learning and growth and driven by my own intrinsic motivation, curiousity and desire for connection. I also started to see and resist how the education system was based on fear, driven by the carrot and stick, rewards and punishments. The idea of exploring your deeper purpose, passion, and heart connections was totally missing" he says.

It takes a community to raise a child

Vidhi have been working with Families Learning Together & Unschooling initiatives in 'Udaipur as a learning city' a process project for the past 23 years. She says, "We wanted to create a space where people who were aware of deep critiques of factory-schooling could come together and engage in creative ways to dismantle the educational monopoly and to regenerate diverse learning spaces and knowledge systems. We wanted to promote the idea that it was possible for people to learn on their own without the direction and structure of dominant institutions". The couple involved people with indigenous knowledge and built a larger community where participants could learn and love the process of learning, unlike schools where learning seems a burden and tiring process. "Gurus are the real creators of knowledge, schools are just con modifying them and packing into books. If you have to learn farming, go to a farmer" she asserts.

Unschooling communities growing large

Vidhi claims when they began with the Shikshantar movement there were some 50 families who had faith in the de-schooling methodology and didn't sent their kids to school. "But now it has grown leaps and bounds and we are more than a 10 thousand families who are growing and learning together from each other, from our grandparents, artisans, farmers, skilled workers in our neighborhood". The couple claims that they were schooled and hence do not have so much abilities and talents that their daughter Kanku has as an unschooled person. She knows carpentry, has hands-on experience in making herbal products on skin care. She knows farming, and learned the knack of vegetable selling after spending lot of time in the local sabji mandi. "I even know to make Panipuris. I have worked with my friends at their panipuris stall. The art of dough making, frying puris it was so much fun" says Kanku brimming with confidence. The young girl has no iota of regret for not having been send to school for a formal education. "I have missed nothing but gained immensely after learning from the community. They are my family" she says.

Beautiful journey so far

The couple said they had received mixed reactions from close family and relatives on their decision to unschool Kanku. "They were mixed. On some days they are really perplexed. Other days they are angry. And some rare days, they are inspired. They are still afraid about Kanku's future. Some still continue hold on to their conventional notions of money, success, status. We used to get worried earlier but now we have come to appreciate all of these responses" the duo says. At a time when the newspapers are inked with tales of depressions, young ones ending their lives of frustrations and failure in exams, not finding jobs~ people like Manish, Vidhi and Kanku are finding happiness and delight in every little things they do. "It's all about happiness and doing learning things what we actually rejoice. So far the learning process and life journey had been so beautiful" they conclude unanimously.