Editorial

Few would doubt that education in contemporary India is facing challenges of an unprecedented magnitude. Official data show that the social demand for schooling is being met increasingly by the private sector, with the share of enrolment in government schools showing a steady decline over the past two decades. The ‘private’ in school education, unlike the private schools of earlier times, encompasses a shadowy spectrum of diverse schooling ‘choices’, ranging from international schools for the elites to low-cost private schools for the poor, all driven by market imperatives, and signifying overall the naturalisation of social class divisions and educational opportunity. There is little evidence to suggest that the staggering deficits of the public education system—untrained teachers, poorly resourced schools, low learning levels—are compensated in the burgeoning private school sector, and yet the manufactured common sense that all that is public is doomed to fail guides the decisions of poor parents, anxious to secure a future for their children that is better than their own. With development priorities being increasingly guided by the demands of global markets and local business elites, social disparities in education are likely to only increase over time. Counting among the state’s misadventures, a bullet train that at current costs exceeds the state expenditure on education (and health) by three times, the future of children in India is clearly in jeopardy.

At the core of these ever-expanding quandaries lies a question that is essentially ideological: What are the aims of education in a liberal democracy? Struggles for the right to live with dignity are being played out in the domain of education, as we see from the scattered campaigns by students from different rural communities across India demanding public education facilities, and agitations by underpaid contract teachers in various states for fair remuneration. Key curricular goals for an engaged citizenship include critical engagement with realities and questioning received knowledge. The current social and political milieu involving enforced submission to political diktats and suppression of all debate and dissent militates against these goals. What does the future hold for those who are entering the schooling system, especially from marginalised social communities? What of their agency in social transformation? Are we moving in the direction of a totalitarian education whose goal, as Hannah Arendt (1973, p. 468) cautioned, ‘has never been to instil convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any’? As researchers of education, we are bearing witness to a paradigmatic shift in the relationship of the state to education. This shapes the questions we ask today.

T. K. Oommen’s article, based on his keynote address at the seventh conference of the Comparative Education Society of India in 2016, discusses several critical issues related to education, social inequality and the challenges of the post-globalisation period. He revisits several crucial debates related to micro and macro aspects of contemporary school education. The alienation of students from marginalised sections entering the formal school education system is linked to learning in a language far removed from their experience. Oommen asserts that denying the use of the mother tongue, or home language, is an invitation to intellectual ‘sterility’ and that the uniform imposition of Hindi is a ‘hermeneutic injustice’. Linked to this is the alienation that children from marginalised backgrounds face when confronted by a curriculum that is based on the Hindu, male, upper-caste or upper-class and urban worldview. Oommen expresses concern about the steady erosion of difference, diversity and pluralism in textbooks. Discussing the implications of these for the wider phenomena of religious nationalism and linguistic chauvinism, he pleads for contextualisation in the social sciences, rather than universalisation or indigenisation of knowledge which could feed into these agendas. In the final section, Oommen revisits the historical linkages between state, ideology and education in different contexts, arguing that education in the ‘Global Age’ mandates the joint responsibility of three institutional complexes—the state, the market and civil society—in producing citizens, consumers and communitarians. The balance of these three institutional complexes and the identities they produce is what is needed in the post-global scenario, especially in a context of right-wing, anti-poor state policy and the untrammelled hegemony of the market.

The second article in this issue, by Vidya K. S., is on the Teach for India (TFI) programme, a public–private partnership launched in 2009 in municipal schools in Pune and Mumbai, and related to the Teach for All /Teach for America initiatives. Under these programmes, young college graduates and professionals are offered fellowships to teach in poorly resourced government schools and in low-cost private schools in cities. The TFI programme has since expanded to several Indian cities and is much sought after by students, particularly those belonging to the English-speaking, upper middle classes from elite colleges. Vidya locates the TFI programme within wider shifts associated with neoliberal policy reforms in education that have occurred across the world in the post-globalisation period. The emergence of New Public Management, with its focus on market structures and processes that impose categories of productivity, efficiency and financial decentralisation to ‘solve’ problems of education, has been constitutive of these shifts. An outcome of these approaches has been the focus on contractual appointments and de-professionalisation of teaching. Using Social Network Analysis, Vidya traces the various global as well as local actors—financial organisations, corporations, foundations and NGOs—involved in the TFA/TFI programmes. The article helps us to understand the complex circulation of policy ideas from the United States and the United Kingdom into discourses that ‘support and steer’ the state towards privatised, social enterprise solutions to educational problems. The article is interesting not only methodologically, but also because it brings to the fore some of the key players, highlights the role of commercial interests and identifies the motives for supporting the initiative in different forms across the world, as well as the particular shape it is taking in the Indian context.

In Padhai ka Mahaul (environment of learning), Sriti Ganguly deconstructs the layered meanings that poor urban communities attach to the idea of a ‘good learning environment’ for their children. The article focuses on a Balmiki community living in a slum settlement in Delhi, where the contexts of socio-spatial segregation and social, economic and educational marginalisation in the urban space both shape and are shaped by education. Mahaul, sangat (peer group) and samaj (social group/society) are terms used interchangeably by parents to connote a negative influence on their children’s learning. Ganguly brings alive the import of these categories through a thick description of the area. Her discussion of the shifting contexts within which a sense of distinction is sought through education, and is seen to contribute to a good mahaul, demonstrates how even the most impoverished urban locality cannot be seen as a space of closure as far as education is concerned. Complex dynamics are involved here: even the most minimal improvements over time are seen as contributing to a better mahaul; conversely, a bad mahaul results in close monitoring by parents of their children’s social interactions in the neighbourhood. Such analytical insights make this article a significant contribution to the scholarship on urban education in the contemporary Indian context.

The Classics with Commentary section in this issue discusses the work of the sociologist Max Weber, primarily focusing on his three most influential works, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chinese Literati and Science as Vocation. Weber examined religion and politics in his time and the role of education in shaping the social dynamics of these realms. Differing from Marx, for whom class is determined by one’s relation to capital and labour, Weber focused on both economic position and status and prestige in determining social class, and located the role of education in reproducing the differential social power of status groups in society. The Commentary discusses Weber’s contribution to this understanding, summarising his key arguments in these classic texts. The discussion on Weber’s ideas of the university, where he theorises its links with the state and the bureaucracy, and cautions against the loss of academic autonomy when these institutions assert their dominance, is particularly prescient in our times. The Commentary points to the relevance of Weber’s ideas, particularly those of status honour and credentialism, to contemporary analyses of education under advanced capitalism.

The book reviews in this issue include two on girls and education in India. Krishna Kumar’s book, Chooree Bazar Mein Ladkee, is a cultural analysis of the lives and trajectories of young girls, as well as their struggles in attaining personhood and dignity. Education, Poverty and Gender: Schooling Muslim Girls in India by Latika Gupta examines the interlinkages of neighbourhood, religion and gender in shaping Muslim girls’ identity. In a different vein, a sourcebook, Teaching–Learning Resources for School Education, edited by Disha Nawani, is also reviewed in this issue. The book spans a wide range of pedagogic areas, different media and theoretical reflections on the uses of TLMs.

The end page, ‘The World in the Classroom’, by Samina Mishra, a documentary filmmaker, writer and teacher, re-instils hope in the possibilities of education for change. In an insightful essay on film as a pedagogic resource in the classroom, Mishra narrates her experience of teaching film studies in a Delhi school. She describes her experience of using the medium of film to facilitate students’ critical engagement with their own immediate worlds, and also to understand the worlds of others whose lives and experiences are different from their own.