Our Homeschooling Experiment

I titled this talk Our Homeschooling Experiment very deliberately.

First, because it’s ours. This is something that worked for our context, our family, our constraints, our temperament. It may or may not work for you. It may not even appeal to you. My hope is not that you copy what we did, but that our reasoning and our tactics help you look at learning, schooling, and childhood a little more broadly.

Second, because it’s still an experiment. My boys are still learning. They’re still at home. They haven’t gone to college yet. They haven’t taken jobs. They haven’t faced life on their own. I don’t know how this will turn out. So far, I don’t regret it. But I don’t yet have the final results either.

I’ve always had an experimental mindset toward life. This is just one more experiment. I’m sharing the thinking behind it, not a verdict.

One more thing before I go further. I’m an enthusiast of homeschooling, not an evangelist. I’m convinced it makes sense for us. Even before we started, I had researched it. After we started, events like COVID, the rise of Gen AI, and the uncertainty in the job market only reinforced that feeling.

But I’m not dogmatic about it. I don’t believe everyone must homeschool. I don’t think parents who don’t are doing something wrong. I do think everyone should at least give the idea a seat at the table. That’s all.

# The Seeds Were Planted Long Before I Became a Parent

The interesting thing is, the seeds for homeschooling were planted long before I became a dad. Some of them were planted even before I got married.

The first seed came from a talk by Professor Sugata Mitra. He spoke about something called a computer on the wall. This was back in 2007, and the video quality itself tells you how old it is.

The experiment was simple. He put a computer on a wall in a slum area. No instructions. No manuals. Not even a fancy Mac. Just a basic Windows computer. Kids who had never used a computer before started pressing buttons out of curiosity.

Within weeks, they figured out how to browse the internet. They learned to read. They started teaching themselves. This experiment wasn’t done in one place. It was repeated across different parts of India and even Nigeria.

That stayed with me. Kids can self-learn. Curiosity is natural.

The second seed was Sir Ken Robinson’s famous talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity? The title sounds provocative, but he wasn’t anti-school. He was making a deeper point.

He tells the story of a child whose teachers thought something was wrong with her. Her mother took her to a psychologist. The psychologist spoke to the child for a bit, then left her alone in a room with music playing. The moment they stepped out, the child started dancing.

The psychologist told the mother, “There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s a dancer.”

She went on to flourish.

That story hit me. Each child is wired differently. The role of a teacher or a parent isn’t to force everyone into the same mold, but to notice what’s already there and nurture it.

We often bring elephants, deer, lions, and fish into the same classroom and ask all of them to climb a tree. Then we shame them when they can’t.

The third seed came from my own work.

As a CTO, I regularly visit colleges to hire students. This isn’t unusual. Every IT company does this. But almost every company puts fresh graduates into training for one or two years before trusting them with real work.

They’re told they’re not ready. They don’t know the languages the industry needs. They can’t talk to clients. They can’t ask questions.

Now pause and do the math.

On average, parents spend about one lakh per year on school. That’s roughly twelve lakhs by the time schooling is done. Add a college degree, another four or five lakhs. All put together, around twenty lakhs per child.

After spending twenty lakhs, the recruiter says, “Your child isn’t ready. We need to train them again.”

Infosys even has an entire campus in Mysore just for training graduates.

That question wouldn’t leave me alone. If twenty lakhs are being spent anyway, can I train my kids better for that amount? With two kids, forty lakhs?

The answer, for me, was obviously yes.

# What Those Seeds Turned Into

Those experiences distilled into a few convictions.

Kids are curious by nature. They want to understand the world. Why the sun rises. Why cars move. Why a switch makes light glow. Our job isn’t to suppress that curiosity, but to facilitate it. Give them tools. Give them books. Spend time. Engage seriously with their questions.

The second idea came again from Ken Robinson. We’re training kids for careers twenty years from now. Do we have a crystal ball? Probably not.

So the goal shouldn’t be rigid planning. It should be preparation. Be prepared. That’s the Boy Scouts motto.

What we often do instead is cut every child to fit the same Procrustean bed. One syllabus. One answer. One way.

Third, let dancers dance. Don’t force them to sit still just because the system is built that way.

And finally, the ROI question. Is there a better return possible for the same investment?

Those ideas were in me long before I became a parent.

# We Didn’t Start Because We Hated School

When my two boys were born, and later when they started school, homeschooling wasn’t on my mind.

They liked school. They never cried. They were enthusiastic. They did well. Usually in the top few ranks. There was no reason to disrupt anything.

I also didn’t want to take on an unnecessary burden just because an idea sounded interesting.

So we stayed with school.

# COVID Changed the Equation

COVID changed everything.

There’s that meme that went around asking who led digital transformation. CEO, CTO, or COVID-19. Funny, but also true.

Online classes didn’t work for my kids. Their focus dropped. Their ranks started plummeting. My wife started writing their homework.

That’s when homeschooling came back into the conversation.

We discussed it as a family. I explained how it could work. Everyone was skeptical. My wife wasn’t convinced. The kids didn’t understand what it meant.

We talked openly, the way we always do. I’ve always spoken to my kids like adults. I discuss decisions with them. Jobs I accept or reject. Investments. Purchases. I ask their opinions.

I didn’t want to impose homeschooling on them.

My wife researched online. There was plenty of material from the US, but very little from India. Eventually, a friend introduced us to Mahendran, who had homeschooled both his children from the beginning.

I spoke to him for over an hour. I later interviewed him on my podcast. One thing he said reassured us deeply. Homeschooling isn’t a one-way door. At worst, you lose a year. You can always return to school. There’s NIOS. There are options.

This discussion went on for six months. No decision.

April came. New academic year. I asked whether to pay fees. Everyone said no to homeschooling. So I paid.

And then one Sunday, my wife was reading the Bible. She came across Isaiah 48:17: “The Lord will teach you what is best for you and will direct you in the way you should go.”

That verse stood out to her.

By then, she had also done her research. She said, “Let’s do it.”

The next day, she went to the school. By Thursday, we had the certificates. The kids were out.

# What Homeschooling Is Not

Before I explain how we do it, let me be clear about what homeschooling is not, at least for us.

It’s not bringing school textbooks home and replicating school at home.

It’s not being lazy. It’s not lack of discipline.

It’s not cheap. You don’t save money. You spend it differently.

And it’s definitely not hands-off parenting. School already plays a strange ping-pong game where parents outsource education to teachers, and teachers outsource homework back to parents. Homeschooling demands involvement.

# What Our Days Look Like

Our days have structure, but not rigidity.

The boys wake up around six. Morning routines. Then we work out together. Skipping, basic weights, kettlebells. Nothing fancy.

We eat breakfast together. Breakfast is our classroom.

We talk about everything. Politics. Current events. What they plan to do that day. In the evenings, we talk about what actually happened.

After breakfast, they read four chapters of the Bible and write one page on what they understood. Then they read the day’s newspaper editorial. This started when they were very young.

At first, they understood very little. Ukraine would somehow become coconuts. But over the years, patterns emerged. Geography, history, sociology, power, law, minorities, violence. Nothing is off-limits.

I rarely give answers. I help them think and research.

Then music practice. Guitar, keyboard. Trinity grade exams. Tutors come home.

Post-lunch is creation time. Blogs. Videos. Scripts. Even when they were six or seven, they were creating.

Evenings are lighter. Games. Family prayer. Discussions.

That’s the rhythm.

# Learning Outside the House

One of the things we consciously added very early on was industry visits.

Even when we first started homeschooling, I began asking friends if my boys could visit their workplaces. One of my close friends, Sukhwinder, runs a defence testing lab. I asked him if I could bring the boys along.

He was incredibly gracious.

He spent almost two full hours with them. What struck me most was this: he didn’t treat them like kids. He didn’t dumb things down. He didn’t talk condescendingly. He spoke to them like adults.

He walked them through the lab, stopped at every machine, explained what it did, why it existed, and how it fit into the larger system. Naturally, the boys’ initial questions were all over the place. But he had the patience to answer them properly.

The boys loved it.

That visit gave me a lot of encouragement. So I started doing this more deliberately.

We visited a third-party automotive parts warehouse run by another friend. He explained his business, logistics, inventory, margins, and customer relationships.

We went to a dairy farm. My elder son drank milk straight from a cow. That incident alone has stayed with him for years. Even today, he brings it up. We talked about Indian cows versus European cows, breeding, lifespan, economics, and daily operations.

We visited ICICI Bank. The branch manager showed them how currency notes are counted, what each department does, how risk is managed, and how money actually moves.

We went to furniture shops, workshops, and small businesses.

After every visit, there was one rule. They had to create something.

Sometimes it was a video. Sometimes a written piece. Sometimes a script.

That post-lunch creation time I spoke about earlier is often spent processing these visits. They don’t just “see” things. They reflect, synthesize, and explain them back in their own words.

That’s where learning actually settles.

# The Learning Framework I Follow (For Them and For Me)

Underneath all of this, there’s a framework I follow for learning. It’s something I’ve applied in my own life long before homeschooling.

Most adult learning happens in three phases.

The first is consumption. Reading books. Attending talks. Watching courses. Workshops. Seminars.

This gives you exposure, but retention is low. A day after finishing a book, you remember maybe one or two ideas.

The second phase is production. Creating something from what you consumed. Writing a blog post. Making slides. Giving a talk. Recording a video.

When you do this consistently, you’re forced to synthesize ideas from different sources. This alone takes retention much higher.

But the third phase is the most powerful: sharing.

When you put your work out into the world, something interesting happens. People respond. They disagree. They add perspectives you never considered. You learn how to engage respectfully. You learn how to disagree without hostility. You learn how to spot bullies and ignore them.

This not only deepens understanding, it also builds networks.

This framework requires an environment of encouragement.

So I rarely give my boys direct answers. Even when I do, I remind them that the answers they discover themselves will stay with them far longer than answers I hand them.

I let them make mistakes. That’s important. If they don’t make mistakes, they will never create anything that is truly their own.

My role is facilitation.

If they want to learn video editing, the tools are available. DaVinci Resolve. Cameras. Phones.

If they want to blog, WordPress is there.

Photography, writing, music, research. The tools are available.

Homeschooling isn’t cheap. You don’t save money. You redirect it toward curiosity.

All of this keeps curiosity alive and builds a growth mindset rather than a fixed one.

# Reading as a Family and Letting Interests Lead

Another habit we built and still follow is weekly reading sessions.

Almost every Sunday after lunch, we go out somewhere and read for at least an hour. Each of us has our own book or Kindle. No talking. No discussion. Just reading.

Sometimes it’s Sunday lunch. Sometimes it’s an evening coffee or tea. On holidays or retreats, we might read continuously for two or three hours.

Reading is non-negotiable.

Now, this looked very different for my two boys.

My elder son naturally took to reading. Even before homeschooling, I had bought him a series of Grolier books. How things work. How the earth moves. How telephones work. How oil is discovered. He loved them.

My younger son didn’t.

I tried everything I did with the elder one. Nothing worked. He’d read a page and drift off. Or run away.

It was frustrating.

At the time, we were members of the British Council Library in Chandigarh. One day, almost accidentally, my younger son wandered into the automotive section. I never went there myself. Cars and planes never fascinated me.

He picked up an Autocar magazine and sat down reading. Properly reading. Page after page.

I couldn’t believe it.

I asked the librarian for more. He gave us three magazines. My son read all three cover to cover.

That was the moment I understood. He wasn’t “bad at reading”. He just hadn’t found his hook.

Once we fed that interest, books followed. First automotive. Then picture books. Then novels.

This again goes back to what Ken Robinson said. Treat everyone the same, and then wonder why some don’t respond.

Interest first. Habit later.

# Social Interaction Isn’t Missing, It’s Intentional

Another question that often comes up is social interaction.

Honestly, I don’t fully understand why this is such a concern.

This isn’t cave schooling. The kids aren’t locked up at home.

Kids are naturally curious. Even introverts want to engage with people they resonate with.

For us, social interaction happens organically.

They go to church. There are many kids their age. They visit each other’s homes. They attend retreats.

I take them with me to talks and workshops. They interact with CEOs, professionals, and business owners.

They go on industry visits and speak directly with owners and managers.

They attend birthday parties.

One particularly meaningful experience was volunteering. A friend of mine organizes travel for fully blind people and needs volunteers. My elder son volunteered and spent three days supporting a blind traveler. He learned far more from that experience than any classroom lesson could offer.

Socialization isn’t absent. It’s aligned with who they are.

# My Wife’s Role (And Why This Would Fail Without Her)

I speak from my perspective, but this would not work without my wife.

She is deeply involved daily.

She taught mathematics when the boys were younger. She still teaches them Tamil. For a long time, she took them to music classes. She teaches them cooking, especially my younger one, who loves it.

This is not a one-parent project.

# Why This Worked for Us

When Indian Express published our story, many parents reached out. Some even tried homeschooling.

Four out of five stopped.

At first, I didn’t think much about it. Later, when I spoke to them, a pattern emerged.

For many, this was their first contrarian decision.

For me, it wasn’t.

I’ve lived a life of decisions that quietly went against the grain. Dropping my caste name. Not playing status games. Working independently. Structuring work differently. Not optimizing for appearances.

So when someone says, “You’re spoiling your kids’ future,” it doesn’t shake me. I’ve heard similar things before.

Second, I’m a teacher by heart. My parents were teachers. I’ve been teaching since my school days. Teaching feels natural to me.

Third, I don’t care about status signaling. I don’t need to say my child studies in a particular school to feel validated.

Fourth, I run life as experiments. Not certainties. I look at leading and lagging indicators. Quantitative and qualitative metrics.

And finally, faith. A deep belief that things will work out. That belief sustains you when outcomes are still unknown.

All five work together. None work alone.

# Still an Experiment

This is still an experiment.

It’s ongoing. It’s evolving. We adjust. We learn. We course-correct.

I’m not offering a prescription.

I’m sharing our reasoning, our context, and our experience.

That’s all.