The Real Value in Worldschooling
…And How We Can Give Our Kids Mind-Opening Experiences From Anywhere
Imagine swapping your usual homeschooling routine for living in a foreign country with your three young kids, for four months.
We didn’t call it worldschooling, but that’s what we did when we packed up our kids, ages 4, 6, and 8 to live in Jaipur, India.
It wasn’t a holiday. It was for work.
And it was our homeschool ‘classroom’ extending to life …in another country.
Our kids were familiar with India. My husband and I worked there and our kids had been before.
All the typical things about a foreign country—food, sights, sounds, environment—were also familiar—ish.
But this was the first long trip we made with kids.
Four months in Jaipur.
A big step from two-week visits where everything is new and you do the typical tourist things—see monuments, eat out, wander, visit museums…
What Schooling and Living in India Was Like
We thought of our four-month stay more in terms of living in India.
Admittedly my focus was on how to maintain our routine, not on all the opportunities our kids would have.
My husband and I had been working in Jaipur for years and I had been visiting India since childhood, so we didn’t perceive India as ‘foreign’ …
…and I didn’t perceive the potential educational value before we arrived.
In reality, this was the perfect moment for us to jump into worldschooling our kids.
But I didn’t see it.
I didn’t grasp the potential for life learning (shock) that we were stepping into.
It's especially surprising given that I was that mom who saw the learning potential in everything we did (and a cultural anthropologist…funny what we don’t see sometimes).
My typical mindset:
Trip to the library? Museum? Zoo? Farmer’s Market?
Short trips to the beach a few hours away?
Learning potential.
The Beach. Think fun conversations about the different kinds of sharks, crabs, sand dollars, collecting seashells, tidepools, and even the erosion of the dunes and how that affects the ecosystem—all easily unfolding through the kids observing, asking questions, debating.
Effortless life learning.
But living in India?
Ironically, I was so busy thinking about our work plans and what books to bring for our kids to keep our ‘school routine’ as normal as possible, it didn’t occur to me that adapting to and learning about daily life in India was going to be a much more incredible learning experience.
I imagined we would try and take the kids to some of the big tourist sites—the famous Rajput forts (Amer Fort, Nahargarh Fort, and Jaigarh Fort), and palaces (Hawa Mahal, Jal Mahal), the Hindu temples (Galta, Birla Mandir).
But life learning while living in a foreign country?
I didn’t foresee the opportunity ahead.
Life Learning in Everyday Adventures
We had rented a furnished apartment. The building had a rooftop garden where we could have lunch and the kids could run around.
There was also a park with a jungle gym a block away.
The corner store sold ice cream.
A mini convenience store had everything from Maggie Noodles (think Indian Ramen) to Spanish olives to school notebooks and 4-gallon-size plastic buckets in assorted colors, all crammed into a space the size of a single-car garage.
At first, everything in our new home was new—exciting. The kids loved it.
Learning …and Life, is in the Details
Our priorities, and what we thought of as ‘educational’ shifted fast.
When you visit a new country for a short trip, you get to be a tourist and see the sites—the big stuff.
When you set up house in a new country, you need to figure out how to ‘do life.’
We focused on daily life—more to the point—how to do daily life living in a 2 bedroom flat in a middle-class neighborhood in Jaipur while running a business and homeschooling three kids.
The basics:
milk delivery in the mornings (arriving by 6 am in small plastic packets),
water delivery in 20-liter plastic Bisleri bottles,
the shop for atta (Indian flour used to make chapatis) in 10 kg (22 lb) bags, rice, and dal.
veggies from the street vendors—nimbu (Indian lemon limes), coriander, tomato, cauliflower, potato, capsicum (bell peppers)
We had decided to cook with local, fresh ingredients rather than traipsing across town to the ‘foreign’ grocery store (This was several years ago at a time when a lot of Western foods were not readily available in Jaipur. Now you can get practically anything through Amazon.in or by ordering it on one of the gazillion food delivery apps).
Our kids knew and liked Indian food—roti, dal, rice, sabzi (veggies) pickle, dahi (yogurt) mithai (sweets)—which made cooking a lot easier. They didn’t have to adjust to the spice or chili or new flavors.
We were learning a new roadmap for how to do life in Jaipur. The kids were fascinated.
I started seeing things through their eyes and started paying more attention to their experience.
It was familiar but different.
Balancing the New with the Familiar
I’d pack lots of books, some of their favorite things so that our kids would be anchored to the familiar while they learned about the new.
At night we read the same stories they knew. It grounded them and bridged the gap between our life in the US and our new, if temporary, life in India.
Four months is a long time for a young kid.
Worldschooling—On a Daily Scale
Many of the differences that impacted our kids most were things I could never have predicted.
It’s obvious now. These were the things that were most relevant to their daily lives.
Paper
Like much of the world, paper in India is A4 size which is different from the US 8.5 x 11” US size. Our new paper didn’t fit into our folders. They learned to fold and cut the tops off to fit the paper in our folders. Then we bought Indian folders.
Tape
When the kids made drawings, we couldn’t tape them to the walls in their bedroom because the ‘cello tape’ would damage the paint. We taped them to the fridge and doorframes instead.
The Park
The jungle gym was metal, like the kind I played on back when I was a kid—in the 1970s.
When the kids wanted to play soccer on the grass at the park, the woman who tended the park, i.e. swept the flower petals and leaves off the walkways with a jute broom, shooed them away yelling ( and yes, I mean yelling) that they’d damage the grass.
When they wanted to play with their toy cars and trucks in the dirt area by the jungle gym—they got told no because dirt is well …dirty and they shouldn’t be doing that.
Monkeys
Sometimes rhesus monkeys were sitting on the jungle gym. And while monkeys look cute—from a distance—they are not a creature you want to get close to.
They’re aggressive. And mischievous.
And big enough to push a small kid down—which one of them did to my younger son. The monkey ran up behind him and gave him a solid push. He (my son) wasn’t hurt. He was amazed more than anything. And loves telling the story to this day.
One day the building owner discovered several broken pots in the rooftop potted plant garden. He assumed it was our kids. Until someone told him it was the band of monkeys. Thinking about having a picnic outside? Plan carefully.
Peacocks
Peacocks are also common across Jaipur, especially in the winter months. We had a beautiful one that hoped onto our balcony railing frequently. We took lots of photos of him until we got used to it.
Cows
Cows are a normal part of Jaipur, and Indian, city life and wander through most neighborhoods. Traffic--think scooters, motorcycles, cars, people, tuk-tuks--moves around them as they meander, or sit. There were a couple of neighborhood cows that liked to hang out in front of our building eating people’s day-old chapatis and resting in the shade of the X trees. Observing, and occasionally feeding them became part of our new life.
Ice cream
We walked down the street to the corner shop. Something we couldn’t do in the US. At home, we had to drive. They had chocolate, but they also had flavors like kulfi, cardamom, kesar pista, and lychee.
Similar, but also different.
Challenges, Solutions, Lessons
Friends
That was a challenge we didn’t have a solution for. Our kids felt isolated. The local kids were all in public school, they didn’t speak much English and homeschooling was a strange concept to them. It was hard to know our kids felt isolated and frustrated when they couldn’t play soccer or see their friends from home.
There was another American family down the street from us who were also homeschooling their two sons. Our kids were around the same age. It was an amazing coincidence. It meant our kids had easy friends. It meant our kids felt a little less isolated, even though still ‘foreign.’
There was also a Sikh family from Dubai with two kids who were doing home lessons living in the same building.
A kid on the block had a birthday party—a big party with a bouncy tent—and invited our kids.
Little by little they connected.
Holidays
Christmas was a challenge. It is not a cultural celebration in Jaipur. The kids missed all our family traditions. We got a small, plastic Christmas tree and decorated all the potted plants on our balcony. We made the best of it. And thought more about the real meaning of Christmas.
Diwali is the most significant cultural celebration in Jaipur, but we arrived just after it ended that year. We did get to enjoy Makar Sankranti, a harvest festival and renewal festival signifying the end of winter and the return of the spring’s light and energy. Also, a day when everyone regardless of age, flies paper kites from every rooftop across the entire city.
Health
The kids got sick more than usual. It’s hard and sometimes scary to have sick kids in a foreign country. And however well I thought I knew India, it was still a big learning curve when I had a sick child with a high fever and had to deal with the hospital system in Jaipur (it ended well).
Our solution to challenges was always to spend time together doing normal things—the park, reading, talking …cooking.
The familiar made the unfamiliar manageable.
Discoveries and New Favorites
The kids also discovered new favorite things that we don’t have much of at home:
they love Indian milk desserts (barfi),
they love fresh coconut juice, the kind that comes in big green coconuts that need to have the top cut off with a large knife and a straw put in to drink
The newness gave us opportunities for conversation:
What is the difference between Indian and American cows?
Why don’t we have monkeys at home?
Why do Indian squirrels look like chipmunks? The story I’ve always been told is that Indian squirrels have three stripes down their backs from when the god, Ram, pet one—leaving behind the imprint of his fingers stroking the squirrel. According to Ramayana, it earned its stripes for assisting the Monkey Army in building the bridge to Lanka.
To this day, the kids tell stories of that trip (*We lived in India on two other occasions during their childhood, for eight and ten months, but that’s another story.). The stories have gotten more elaborate and exaggerated or maybe they were always that way in their minds, just because it was all so different.
How Our ‘Classroom’ Shifted
We ‘did school’ also, on the couch together and around the table.
My husband worked on our business in the mornings while the kids and I did math and reading and writing. Then we switched places in the afternoon.
Having a routine helped the kids feel more grounded in our new life.
Culture and History and Learning exist in the Details AND the Grandness
We read our storybooks so many times the kids got bored.
It was one of the best things that could’ve happened because it prompted us to get a set of Indian comic books written in English. The stories were all from Hindu mythology—stories of Ram and Sita, Ravana stealing Sita away until Hanuman rescued her, baby Krishna who loved butter—and adventure tales.
They were the perfect stories for our kids. And connected them to India through their imagination.
We sought out other tales of the Rajput kings and epic battles.
Learning about Indian mythology and history from kids’ storybooks was our way into another dimension of Indian culture.
Through stories, the Rajput forts and palaces surrounding Jaipur came alive.
The stories about Ram and Krishna and the mythology made things ‘make sense.’
Reflections
Our stay in Jaipur was educational in many more ways than I could’ve imagined.
Our kids learned a new way of living and experienced daily life in a new culture.
They encountered a new normal and adapted to it.
They used the same observational learning that they always had when playing outside in the woods at home or in our garden; they observed and experienced Jaipur culture, at least our version of it, close up and personal.
Our kids also observed a wide range of living conditions.
They were aware of both the wealth and poverty in India.
In the space of an afternoon we might have a business meeting (with our whole family) and tea in a haveli-turned upscale boutique hotel that still retained the grandeur of a royal lifestyle, or in a home with marble floors and elaborate décor.
But our drive to the afternoon tea might include passing families living on the street with their half-clothed young kids, cooking food in a small metal pot set on two bricks over a twig fire on the sidewalk on the side of the road.
These extremes of wealth and poverty exist at home in the US, but are not as visible to us, at least in the context of our daily lives—we don’t encounter them personally.
And I’d hazard a guess that even if we saw them in passing, they would be normalized—we’d be familiar with similar images from media; so much so that the real-life extremes wouldn’t stand out as something to discuss.
When something is normalized in daily life or through media, it becomes less visible. It just is.
But when our kids saw both poverty and wealth in Jaipur, they noticed it. It looked different.
We talked about it. About the human condition. They formed thoughts about it. Tried to understand it.
The Lasting Impact
I thought I would struggle to keep ‘school’ going during our trip. I thought we would try and take the kids on more field trips.
Originally I thought the ‘educational value’ of our stay would be in the big things.
It was in the small things of daily life. In how we all learned to live in Jaipur, India.
We did tour some of the forts and palaces, and eat in some of the haveli restaurants.
And it was grand. And also tiring.
To the kids, half an hour of touring huge monuments was more than enough.
The biggest takeaways?
how well our kids adapted
how much easier and harder it was
how much they learned from the details of daily life
how much even a small shift in environment and perspective gave them a new window on life and opened their world. The effects have stayed with them to this day.
The Real Value in Worldschooling …And How We Can Give Our Kids Mind-Opening Experiences From Anywhere
Our trip was across the world. But it didn’t need to be for our kids to experience a broadening of their perspective.
We can achieve many of the same life learning experiences just by stepping outside our ‘world’ or comfort zone and into a different environment where our kids will see and experience and ‘live in’ a new perspective.
This can happen at the library, farmer’s market, local cultural events, and living museums.
It doesn’t need to be a trip physically around the world.
You can open your kids’ minds and perspectives on life by making their daily lived experiences—broader.
Worldschooling is really about enlarging your kids’ perspective on life.
When we learn to experience life from another perspective, our world expands. We become more empathetic to other people and their lived experiences. We find a deeper grounding in our humanity. Our kids are doing this every time we enlarge their world.
It’s more than an adventure that we’re giving kids when we travel with them, or take them on new adventures or cultural events within our own city, it’s a bigger understanding of the world—and being human.
Happy travels to life-expanding destinations, even in your own hometown!
P.S. *This article is the first in a series about our educational experience in Jaipur, including how we learned about micro-entrepreneurship, artisan crafts, and used dream destination travel projects to learn about India’s many ecosystems.
That's beautiful how well your kids adjusted to a new city/country and all the best with world schooling!