The Third Battle: The World Beyond Our Doorstep.
We had won the battle inside our home. Swati was with me, and our parents' trust stood firmly behind us. But this victory won within our own four walls came to a halt the moment we stepped past the threshold, face to face with a brand-new question.
The question was simple, but we had no answer for it: "We've decided, yes... but how do we actually do this now?"
Choosing not to send Pratham to school, and to let his learning continue the natural way that decision had been easy to make. Living it was the hard part. Because now we were the teachers, and before we could teach, it was our turn to learn all over again.
We began the way anyone would on the familiar path. We built a school-like timetable: this hour for study, this one for play, this one for reading. For a few days, we even followed it sincerely.
But within days an uneasy realization set in: we had simply picked up school and set it back down inside our home. The only thing that had changed were the walls. So what exactly were we doing differently? And more importantly was what we were doing even right? At that moment, we didn't have a confident answer to that either.
And the world outside was ready and waiting, a list of questions in hand. Neighbors, people in the society, would ask
"Pratham doesn't go to school? Then how will he get any socialization?"
"How will you teach him everything?"
"Won't he fall behind the other children?"
Every question came from a place of love. And every question gently shook the decision we had made.
And then something happened that no one had planned for COVID-19 and the lockdown.
Overnight, every child's school folded into the four walls of home. What until then had been happening only in our house suddenly became the reality of every household. And here, something curious happened. The very people who had asked us yesterday, "How will you teach your children at home?" were now asking, "How do you manage all of this at home? Tell us too."
The questions that had once tested us were now the questions people brought to our door, hoping for answers. That world beyond our doorstep, the one that had been watching us with suspicion was now standing at our doorstep itself.
This is where the real change began.
In this stretch, we became parents all over again. Pratham was no longer alone at home. Jija was here now. And here's the lovely part: everything we had learned for Pratham by fumbling and making mistakes made the path far smoother for Jija. The stones we had stumbled over on Pratham's road, we quietly cleared from Jija's. Both of them now had the same thing in abundance, time to live their childhood to the fullest.
Pratham was slowly growing up. When he turned six, we felt it was time for him to read and write. But the person who taught him had to think the way we did, too. So we interviewed a few teachers, and invited one whose thinking aligned with ours, a teacher we called Tai, to help Pratham learn to read and write in Marathi.
By then, with Marathi constantly in the air at home, he had already learned to speak it beautifully. Countless audio stories had given him a deep, instinctive bond with the language. So letters weren't a beginning for him; they were simply giving shape to a language that had already taken root.
And that biggest question of all is socialization? We didn't dismiss it. We took it seriously. So at least once a month, we took both children to different events and gatherings, where they could see for themselves what children their own age and older were doing, and how they carried themselves.
The result showed slowly. Today, when they meet a new family or new children, within minutes Pratham and Jija know how to talk, play and blend in without us having to step in at all. Socialization, we learned, isn't about sitting in a classroom inside four walls; it's about being able to mix easily with people and that, they learned from the world itself.
And so the real journey of our "self-learning" began. The world beyond our doorstep was no longer the enemy; it had become a part of our journey.
Exactly which experiments we tried along this road, what we attempted, where we stumbled and where we learned
Let's take a glimpse of that in the next blog.