Co-Learning with Kanku

by Vidhi Jain, Udaipur

There are times when I wonder why I am considered so different because I don’t want to send my daughter Kanku to school. As a mother, I want to spend as much time as I can with my daughter doing things that make sense to us. For me, it is the most natural way to learn: the way my grandmother learnt and the way most village folks have learnt for so many thousand years.

I grew up travelling and jumping from one school to another all over Rajasthan because my father had a transferable job. This was great, because both my brother and I got exposed to more than 8 schools and 10 cities in our 12 years of schooling. They were all kinds of schools — private, convent, central schools — but for me they felt the same as I was always treated like a “VIP” because of my Dad’s position. This had its advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes I hated being pulled out to participate in every competition or event wherein I was invariably declared 1st irrespective of my actual interest or performance. This made me understand the power structure that exists at the early stages of our lives and how it unconsciously affects our relationships with our peer groups. I always felt a weird pressure when I was called to sing a patriotic song in front of the whole school during assembly knowing very well that most of my friends were also dying to get that kind of attention.

The good part was that if wanted to, I could bunk school for days and not get told off by the principal or teachers. There was hardly any pressure to excel in studies from my parents and I remember I took full advantage of it and enjoyed my rather spoilt and sheltered childhood. Travelling and spending time with nature and my grandparents were the highs of this phase of my life. I remember that we also used to get a chance to do things that other children in cities never got to do, like horse-riding, air-gun shooting, bird-watching, and playing lawn tennis.

My parents had decided that while we were in school, we would live with them, but for college we should step out and become independent. This was great for me, as I realized that I was free to understand the world on my own terms. I moved to Delhi and joined my dream college, Miranda House. The best part of my sociology honors in Delhi was the hostel life and friends. My three years of pretty poor academic performance in sociology zipped by because I spent most of my time doing more exciting things like volunteering in SPIC-MACAY, Peoples Environment group, Spastics Society, organizing rock concerts, learning the art of hitchhiking, and making friends. By volunteering in a lot of these activities and spending time in the slums of Delhi and rural Haryana, I realized that schooling and college education never taught me to appreciate the different knowledge systems, cultures and ways of learning that exist without degrees and exams. In the many years of my formal education, I learnt that if you work hard and use your body to earn money you are not learning, but if you sit on a desk and table and use modern technology and books you are learning a lot.

Here again, I felt that I studied only for exams and enjoyed the coolness of being in college. Somehow marks never mattered much to me because I was never looking forward to any serious competitive jobs or careers. I was considered a bit too bindaas and sometimes wondered how all the sociology honors classes meant nothing to me. I could hardly relate to most of the classical sociologists and their theories.

That’s when a little tension started to emerge in my so-far smooth life: what next? There were expectations? JNU? More DU or at least thinking about a Masters or IAS? Knowing myself well, I knew I needed to work with people and communities and understand where I could make my own niche in society. By that time, I had also started loving the idea and glamour of living alone in Delhi.

That’s when I started understanding special needs with one of the pioneering institutions in that field in Delhi. I spent about three years working with children and youth with special needs. I also started travelling to rural parts of the country to understand these more deeply. My experiences showed me that each human being is unique and special; however, forced to fit into the mainstream system, most of us end up as misfits. What struck me the most was that when we start labeling people into categories of abled, disabled, developed, underdeveloped, special, and backward, we already have fixed notions of them which we very rarely question or challenge. I rarely found time to reflect on my own uniqueness, gifts, and dreams.

I remember how I was very close to a young boy, Rishi, in a village in rural Haryana. Rishi had mild cerebral palsy, and dreamt of being a carpenter. He wanted to be a carpenter like his uncle and had all the wonderful setups for it. He had created some simple special aids and improvised some tools so that he could work with them easily. Since there had been intervention by the social welfare department, he was being forced to be part of a mainstream school as a part of the inclusive education program. His parents also found it difficult to get him ready for school everyday, and sent him there with a lot of fear. Everyday was a nightmare for him because he was doing just the opposite of what he wanted to, because he had been labeled ‘special.’

I also worked quite intensively in about 75 villages of rural Rajasthan as a trained professional for inclusive education, as I was on ‘deputation’ to a grassroots organization. In my two years of work, I was supposed to understand the reality villagers lived in and guide them in educating and developing their children with special needs. I was exposed to how foreign-funded projects were implemented by the government and non-government agencies. Most of these projects had the underlying theme of providing welfare, and were driven by a very patronizing mindset. It was scary how the flavour or agenda of funding also kept changing from one issue to another, such as from reproductive health to early child development within just 5 months. Sadly, villagers and villages were looked at only as roll numbers who just needed some empowerment or enrollment.

At the age of 21, I suddenly found myself as a professional qualified to tell villagers how to live their lives. It was actually very bizarre how I became a preacher of modern education and development without really understanding how it had destroyed my own capacity to create and critically analyze and engage with my own communities.

I remember my first few visits to villages in which I was compelling parents to send their children to school without understanding the repercussions of this happening. One of the mothers once told me “You city folks don’t really have anything to lose if you send your children to school. But when we send our children to school, they start devaluing our work, our language, and our way of living. We are not dying to send our children to cities to run after jobs, but that’s all our children dream of after studying till class 5 or 6.”

I was shocked one day when I was at a meeting of big educators, where they were designing the curriculum for “First Generation Learners.” I found it arrogant and repulsive that the people who had been the protectors and friends of nature and cultures were being abused and dehumanized as being nothing. Even spending two or three hours with any of the village women left me amazed at their knowledge of songs, seeds, colours, animals, food, plants, simplicity and conservation … At no time in my fifteen years of schooling and college had I been exposed to anything like that. All I had been taught was that there is only way to learn and live — through the lenses of school and development. This was a point in my life at which I started raising questions as to who is educated? What is education? It was a very confusing phase of my life.

Something thing happened in my life, I met Manish and we shared a dream to start something together, a space for regenerating our passions and community, a movement to challenge the monopoly of schooling and the dominant model of development. We also wanted to live the rest of our lives dreaming and working towards Swaraj, as we were highly inspired by Gandhiji’s vision as laid out in his book, Hind Swaraj. By the end of our first meeting, both Manish and I were dead sure that we would never want to send our children to school.

In 1998, we chose to create Shikshantar in a city rather than a village because we felt it was important to re-think our urban mindsets and lifestyles and to re-learn simple techniques of living and learning in harmony with nature. This was also a great time to think about own passions, dreams and ways of learning. We realized that our very urban upbringings were a big disqualification for us, and that we needed to think of ways by which we could engage more with nature. I realized that I personally knew a lot about birds and wildlife, which I considered nature, while knowing little about the source and nature of what I was eating and drinking. I found that I had been blind to how I had been consuming nature and giving nothing back to it. We met and were inspired by many Gandhians like Dayalji Soni and Narayanbhai Desai who talked about Nai Taleem.

There is an African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child. Through Shikshantar, we have tried to build such a “village” for Kanku and ourselves. I believe that community is the key to unschooling and self-designed learning. We have a lot of visitors from all over the world coming to Shikshantar. We also have made many friends all over India through Shikshantar whom we have visited and formed deep connections with.

For us, the biggest and best reason why we chose to unschool ourselves was because we felt the need to break free from modern forms of competition, fragmentation and commodification. We believe that if there is any real learning, it is happens outside schools. With my family, I wanted to explore real and authentic spaces for learning that exist in our communities. Is there any better way to learn farming then from a farmer? What better way to learn hair cutting than from a nai (barber)? And for all these forms of learning we are not dependent on any degrees and certificates. We also believe in intergenerational learning where children are not just isolated to their own peer groups, but rather, interact freely across generations. Isn’t that the way people have learnt for generations?

Most importantly, we believe that each human being is born with the capacity to self-design their own learning and meaning-making process. They do not need experts always telling them what to do, what to learn, or how to learn.

In march 2002 when the gynecologist helped me deliver Kanku, she touched my feet and said, “Anyone capable of giving birth is nothing but God!’ I realized that my real learning began that day. Manish and I as parents decided that we would take our own learning systems into our own hands.

After Kanku was born, I realized how uneducated and ill-equipped I was to bring this little miracle into the world. I was ignorant about food, healing, waste management, entertainment and basically all the basics of life. Until now I had been learning and cramming things just for myself and my interests. This was a great opportunity to think beyond my own comfort-zone and unleash my fears…or rather unlearn some of the most basic assumptions of living.

When we moved to Udaipur, one of our biggest blessings was the presence of Manish’s grandparents. The day they came into our lives I started looking at life, seva (service), and wisdom differently. I realized that one has to stay away from school to become wise like “Jia,” our grandmother. I wondered what bigger blessing there could be for Kanku and us than our unschooled grandmother living and inspiring us every moment. She was one of the most sensitive, caring and intelligent women I have ever come across. She demystified most of my schooled notions of sustainability and upbringing. For her, every little particle of food or drop of water mattered. Growing up and caring for Jia and Bausa, our grandfather, was one of the most sensitizing processes of our life. Kanku had by the age of five learned lots of lessons on nursing, loving, and crying together with them.

We also realized that we were missing something very crucial in our learning paths — the dignity of labor and learning through shram — as people in villages have been living for generations. We had valuable discussions about how hard work and manual labour were totally absent from our education system. We internalized the need to instill this in our day-to-day life, and adapted farming, cleaning, cooking as natural ways of learning. Kanku loves to go and volunteer at an animal shelter looking after injured and sick animals. She also likes to volunteer at a nearby chaat shop, helping to make and serve chaat to customers.

While growing up with Kanku, we have seen how much she learns through her senses and how sensitive she is to every little thing in our environment. She cares about trees and other living beings. If anyone bursts a fire cracker, she will cry for hours for all the birds, trees and creatures that are getting harmed by them.

One of the best ways of bonding for us have been frequent visits to villages and farms. Kanku is a different person in villages and I am amazed by how easily she adapts to the lifestyle. I personally find it a little challenging during the first few days, but Kanku has an amazing gift of respecting different ways of doing things. Animals and colours have a special place in Kanku’s life, and she gets attracted to them all the time.

We went through a long phase of rejecting toys and gadgets. Every kind of toy was discarded in its first few hours as she was always interested in doing things that grown-ups do. She proved to us that modernization has created an artificial fragmentation between the adult world of learning and the child’s world of learning. Kanku, like most other children, was more interested in using real things in real-life situations like knives, jhadoos, tools and make-up.

We learnt a similar lesson about socialization and making friends. Kanku is comfortable making friends of all ages and sizes. It is great knowing that she is not afraid of talking or spending time with older people or toddlers, unlike most school-going children. While it does make me feel proud to see her confidence and comfort-level, it also unleashes a lot of fears and anxieties in me, as I am constantly thinking about too many young men around her and the potential dangers of that. As a mother, I always panic if Kanku spends too much time away from me.

I am also a somewhat scared of Kanku spending too much time in front of the idiot box. We as a family decided to cut the television cord about 7 years ago and are till date very happy with that decision. The challenge is Kanku being exposed to too much TV at her friends’ homes; that becomes a non-stop, difficult-to-control thing. I feel that TV shows aren’t as impactful as the commercials. As a part of our unschooling process, we are also thinking of ways to create our own forms of alternate community media. Kanku has been trying to experiment a lot with filmmaking, photography, and art with Manish, as he is passionate about these too.

A challenge and source of stress for our parents is “How can Kanku not know how to read and write at the age of 12?” Ironically, that is one of things that Manish and I are least bothered about. We know that this will come naturally and we need not put pressure on her for that. And what if she learns how to read and write at the age of 15 or later? She is learning so many more things that are meaningful to her. We are certain that her undying quest for learning sewing, make-up, cooking, dancing, loving animals, filmmaking, trekking are going to be the doorway for her to learn so many more skills like reading and writing.

Also, people are worried about how she will get into university. For this, we have created a new model of higher education called Swaraj University. We do not believe that Kanku needs to go into the competitive game of fighting for a degree and job. Our dream for her is simply that she will one day be able to start something that she really believes in and enjoys doing.

Having a child is one of the greatest gifts of our lives. It is an opportunity for each of us to continuously question our own lifestyles and lead a more profound and meaningful existence. It is a chance for us to regain many of the things we had lost due to our schooling and years of serving the Machine. More than trying to teach Kanku, we have tried to be in a relationship of co-learning with her. Because of this, she has taught us much more about life than any of our schools or universities did.

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Listen to Vidhi Jain’s TEDx talk.