Unschooling in India: Couple Trades Singapore for Hills

The growing conversation around unschooling in India has a new focal point: Aditya and Garima, a couple who walked away from high-paying corporate jobs in Singapore to raise their son, Vedas, in a remote village in Uttarakhand's hills. Instead of enrolling him in a conventional school, they chose unschooling — letting him learn through nature, everyday experiences and curiosity rather than classrooms, timetables and textbooks. For many professionals, a lucrative career in Singapore represents a dream realised: financial security, global exposure and a comfortable lifestyle. But for Aditya and Garima, the corporate grind was burning them out, and the arrival of their first child became a turning point. They quit their jobs, packed their bags and traded the city-state's pace for mist, birdcalls and mountain air. Their story, documented on their Instagram page Life of Maai and reported by Education Times, has struck a chord with parents questioning whether conventional schooling is the only route to a good life. It raises a disarmingly simple question: what if education extended far beyond classrooms and textbooks? ## Unschooling in India: why the couple walked away from Singapore Aditya, who was born in Shimla, had long felt the pull of his roots, and both parents wanted their child to grow up around nature rather than around routines — a philosophy at the heart of unschooling in India. Their decision was not merely about leaving a busy city; it was about rethinking what childhood should look like and how much of it should be shaped by schedules, examinations and competition. The couple's unschooling Uttarakhand journey began with a deliberate slowdown. Days in the hills are organised around the rhythms of village life — forests, farms and the changing seasons — rather than bells and periods. Learning, in their philosophy, happens when adults step back and trust children to lead. ## What a schoolless childhood looks like in the hills Vedas, now six, has never attended a conventional school. There are no uniforms, no prescribed syllabus and no report cards. He learns to spell from road signs, to count from everyday numbers, and to identify herbs in the forest — the kind of practical, curiosity-led learning that advocates of unschooling in India describe as the movement's core. Their unschooling Uttarakhand experiment has also taken the family beyond the hills, including a year spent in Jaipur among fellow unschoolers, finding community with other Indian families who have chosen similar paths. Supporters argue that this model builds problem-solving skills, creativity and self-direction — qualities they say regimented schooling can dull. ## Unschooling in India: a movement gathering quiet momentum The couple are far from alone. Across the country, a small but growing number of families are experimenting with homeschooling in India and with unschooling in India itself — dispensing with formal curricula altogether and letting children's interests set the agenda. Social media has amplified these stories, turning personal experiments into national conversations about parenting. Advocates of homeschooling in India point to the legal space for the choice and to a growing ecosystem of alternative learning communities, from Himalayan homesteads to urban unschooling collectives. For the movement of unschooling in India, visibility has become its most powerful recruiting tool. ## Can unschooling in India answer its critics? Sceptics remain unconvinced. They ask what happens when an unschooled child wants to become a doctor or an engineer — professions that demand formal qualifications — and whether child-led learning can deliver the rigour that competitive examinations require. Others note that the Singapore couple Uttarakhand story rests on a privilege few can afford: the financial cushion to walk away from salaried work. The couple's answer, captured in their widely shared line that the biggest wealth is not money, is that they are optimising for something else entirely: time, attention and a childhood unhurried by the race for marks. It is a question at the centre of unschooling in India — what do parents truly want education to achieve? Whether or not one agrees with the choice, the Singapore couple Uttarakhand experiment has forced thousands of families to confront it. For now, Vedas's classroom remains the forest, the village and the open road — and the debate over unschooling in India, fuelled by stories like theirs, shows no sign of quieting.