Description

In 2014, fewer than 4,000 Indian families homeschooled their children. By 2024, that number was over 90,000 — and rising sharply. Among them are doctors, IIT graduates, IAS officers, and a notable number of school teachers. Why are India’s most invested middle-class families quietly walking away from the very school system they once fought to get into?

In this important, evidence-rich book, educational psychologist Dr. Reema Banerjee follows fifty Indian families — across Bangalore, Pune, Goa, Kerala, the Nilgiris, and small-town Madhya Pradesh — who have, in different ways, opted their children out of conventional schooling. Some are full unschoolers. Some run village-style learning collectives. Some are part of new alternative-school networks. All of them have asked the question the rest of urban India is too anxious to ask out loud: *what exactly is school for?*

Banerjee weaves these family portraits with a clear-eyed analysis of the actual outcomes of India’s mainstream system — the mental health epidemic among 14- to 18-year-olds, the collapse of meaningful learning behind board-exam coaching, the way our schools have quietly become factories of obedience for an economy that no longer rewards it.

*Unschooling India* is not a polemic. It is a serious, compassionate, deeply reported book for any Indian parent who has ever stood at the school gate and felt, in their stomach, that something was wrong.

The most important Indian education book of the decade.