Beyond the herd |
HOMESCHOOLING my daughter, Sitara, has been a fascinating and difficult experiment. We are still learning, still failing, still adjusting course. Perhaps that is precisely the point. Sitara spent her early years at a community school I run in her birth village, where learning revolved around play: blocks, puzzles, sports, music and art. Later, she started nursery at a school run by The Citizens Foundation in the same village.
She was naturally shy, but school made her even more withdrawn. After spending many afternoons with her, I realised why: she was being taught in Urdu, a language she had never encountered before and one that was not her mother tongue. She would return and say, “The teacher doesn’t talk like us. I don’t know what she says.” Her first experience of formal learning produced alienation rather than connection.
I was unwilling to view education through the narrow lens society usually offers us: grades, exams, milestones and standardised expectations. Children moving together in batches, expected to learn the same thing, in the same way, at the same pace. So I brought her home.
We began in Sindhi, her first language. We used no textbooks, only stories for reading and imagination for........