Children’s reconstruction of psychological knowledge: An ethnographic study of life skills education programmes in India

Abstract

Despite calls for examining children’s lives relationally, dominant accounts view childhood as biologically, culturally or economically determined. Based on ethnographic observations of children’s life skills education programmes in Bangalore, this article shows how poor and marginalised children reposition themselves as ‘better educated’ and successful compared to peers, while a global network of professionals position them as ‘at-risk’, seeking to intervene in their lives. This article draws attention to how children can be seen as ‘strategically opportunising actors’, who creatively seek to make meaning of their lives despite structural and discursive constraints placed upon them.

Keywords

At-risk cultural knowledge life skills psycho-education

Introduction

Childhood, it is argued, is one of the most intensely regulated periods of human existence (James and Prout, 1997; Mayall, 2013; Rose, 1999). Scientific literature produced within fields such as developmental psychology and neurobiology have served to decontextualise children’s everyday lives and experiences and convert it into universally measurable accounts of development (Burman, 2001). A whole host of institutions, including compulsory schooling, have developed accordingly to regulate childhood and, more importantly, categorise and mark individual lives as ‘normal’, ‘abnormal’, ‘successful’ or ‘at-risk’ (James and Prout, 1997; Rose, 1999). These dominant discourses around childhood orient our attention away from the present in which children respond actively as agents, and direct it towards the past and the future, pushing us to examine what went wrong (with our socialisation) or what should be the outcomes of such socialisation (James and Prout, 1997). They fail to be cognizant to ‘cultures which children construct for and between themselves’, thereby relegating children’s lived experiences to the margins of social enquiry (James and Prout, 1997: 27).

While calls for a new sociology of childhood has been ongoing at least in the last three decades, this shift in thinking about childhood has been much slower in coming (James and Prout, 1997; Nieuwenhuys, 2009). This can partly be attributed to the large professional body of knowledge that has shaped both professional and lay ideas about childhood as irrational, immature and dependent (Burman, 2007; Mayall, 2013). In addition, children’s participation within social life and social enquiry is always-already mediated by institutions and opportunities that are largely adult defined, thus limiting the ways in which children can express themselves (James and Prout, 1997; Nieuwenhuys, 2009). Yet recovering children’s agencies from within these structural and discursive constraints placed upon them is a valuable exercise, for children, as social agents, are central to the ‘recursive ordering of social practices’ (Giddens, 1984: 3) and provide critical links to understanding how social institutions and practices continue and transform. This article examines children’s experiences and responses to a psycho-education programme and discusses how they respond to professional discourses that position them ‘at risk’ for failure due to the ‘culture of poverty’ that they come from. Based on an ethnography of life skills education (LSE) programmes in Bangalore (Karnataka), India, I show how such programmes seek to responsibilise children from poor and disadvantaged communities to overcome structural disadvantage and adopt an entrepreneurial attitude to risk. In turn, children reinterpret these professional discourses as cultural knowledge through which they can become ‘better educated’. In doing so, they also point to the elite cultures from which technical interventions of psychology are drawn. I discuss these insights from the study further in the following sections, after first presenting a brief account of LSE, its history and spread across varied social contexts, and this study and the programmes observed in Bangalore, India.

LSE and the psychologisation of structural problems of everyday living

Currently, life skills is a term loosely associated with several kinds of skills, ranging from computer literacy, financial skills, spoken English, to self-help and personality skills. The term life skills functions as what Urciuoli (2008) calls a ‘strategically deployed shifter’ – that is a term that is ‘denotationally indeterminate’, but draws its power and meaning based on who deploys the referent, for what audience, in what contexts and to what ends. Attempts to genealogically trace the history of life skills programmes (LSPs) show its earliest usage within psychology, at a time when the discipline was undergoing a revolution in the 1970s–1980s. Faced with criticism for being irrelevant to address the social problems of the times, there were calls from within the discipline to democratise psychological practice, by giving psychological skills away, in order to enable individuals to have greater control over their own lives (Larson, 1984).¹ One of the earliest LSP can be traced to psychologist Winthrop Adkins (1984), in the United States, who developed a programme to make individuals ‘self-reliant, self-directing, [and] employable’, in response to the government’s national agenda for the War on Poverty.² Adkins specifically defined life skills as ‘the behaviour-based psychological learning that people required in order to cope with “predictable developmental tasks,” such as employment’ (Maithreyi, 2018: 255).

These developments within professional and academic discourses of psychology, in the 1980s, signalled two new trends – first, wherein larger structural problems such as unemployment and poverty were reconceptualised as individual and personal problems of development, similar to other developmental tasks such as learning to walk or talk; second, they contributed to the reconceptualisation of certain therapeutic practices of behaviour modification as ‘skills’, implying both their educational nature and their applicability to all, rather than to a specific population identified as requiring therapy for some form of psychological condition (Maithreyi, 2015). Post-1980s, the development of a large ‘evidence-base’ on LSE contributed to successfully establishing it as an important form of psycho-educational intervention that was not just ‘curative’, but more importantly preventive. A whole body of scientific literature established LSE as the ‘gold standard’ in the prevention of everyday social problems ranging from alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, HIV/AIDs to road safety and peace education (Gorman, 2005).³ Life Skills Training, repositioned as LSE currently, has been included within school curriculum through advocacy efforts of developmental organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), across several countries of the world (Maithreyi and Seshadri, 2013).⁴ By the 1990s, LSE was also included as part of the Education for All (EFA) goals (1990), based on growing professional psychological discourses that argued for the inclusion of skills to ‘think, feel, act’ within schools, warning against the growing sense of alienation among youth (Bruner, 1996; Coppock, 2011). Against such calls from within psychology, LSE has come to be recognised as ways for national governments to ‘reform traditional education systems, which appear to be out of step with the realities of modern social and economic life’ (WHO, 1999: 2).

The WHO defines life skills as a set of psychosocial ‘abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life’ and has identified a set of 10 skills, for survival, coping, learning, work, play, relating to others and developing one’s self (Maithreyi, 2018).⁵ As part of the frameworks such as EFA, circulated by these different international development agencies, LSE has entered and found place within several national curricula, including India’s National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCF; National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), 2005). In addition, it has also become an important funding agenda of several aid and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which are currently deploying their own LSPs for children, adolescents and youth (Maithreyi, 2015).

Despite the growing international networks and funds for LSE programmes and visible increase in the number and types of LSPs available today, there is little sociological literature examining this phenomenon or its implications for target populations (usually children from poor and marginalised families). Literature on life skills mainly comes from psychology, which promotes life skills as ‘those skills that enable individuals to succeed in the different environments in which they live such as school, home and in their neighborhoods’ (Danish et al., 2004: 40; italics mine). However, this literature fails to examine what skills are valued as ‘life skills’, and how they allude to elite, middle-class values and cultures that serve to mark children from disadvantaged backgrounds as ‘failures’ for not internalising structural disadvantages and succeeding against all odds. In the following sections, I discuss these observations in more detail, based on narratives of middle-class trainers, teachers and organisers of the LSPs who viewed poor and disadvantaged children from government and other low-cost schools in Bangalore as lacking the ‘life skills’ to succeed, and thus intervened within school with these programmes. I then contrast these views with children’s accounts of the programme that demonstrates not only the cultural content of regulation embedded within these programmes, but also how children play an active role in interpreting and making meaning of their lives.

Methodology

This article draws from a year-long, intensive ethnographic study of LSPs run by non-governmental and private organisations in government and other low-cost schools in Bangalore, India. While LSE had been included within India’s NCF 2005,⁶ state-run LSPs were brought to a halt across several states by 2007, due to public protests over the teaching of ‘sex education’ in schools (Bahuguna, 2007).⁷

Even as discussions by the Karnataka state government to restart the LSPs in high schools were underway during 2012–2013,⁸ the period in which I conducted my study, several ‘non-state’ LSE providers (including NGOs, private companies and middle-class citizens) were already conducting programmes within government and other low-cost schools visited. According to heads of these LSE organisations, such as Devesh Arya (Chief Executive Officer of Imagine Possibilities, an NGO in Bangalore),⁹ life skills were seen as critical especially to children from poor and disadvantaged communities, studying in these schools, as it would help them ‘escape the cycle of poverty’ that they were stuck in. Speaking of the need for these skills for children from these government and low-cost private schools, the Chief Operating Officer of Imagine Possibilities (IP), Garima Acharya, further added:

Even if they get a job, they don’t know how to conduct themselves at a job or manage conflicts at work … The critical missing element for young people from difficult backgrounds is life skills. You and me daily use life skills to manage conflicts … For children from difficult backgrounds, they address these challenges by substituting themselves with alcohol, crime, drugs or just being poor. (Personal communication, 29 July, 2012)

Others such as Rajesh Sridhar of Viveka Youth Brigade (VYB, another NGO) explained it as a form of ‘social vaccination’, against the ‘culture of poverty’ that predisposed these children to certain ‘risk’ behaviours such as alcoholism and violence. Pavan Raghunath, the programme manager of VYB, further explained that these LSPs sought to inculcate values that are naturally taught to ‘our’ children (i.e. children from middle-class homes) and that are responsible for ‘our’ success.

Based on these initial interactions with LSE providers that already revealed the distinction being made between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the remainder of the fieldwork was focused on understanding how these differences were discursively consolidated through the LSPs and how disadvantaged children responded to these interventions. Ethnographic fieldwork undertaken not just included observations of life skills classes within schools, but also consisted of extensive time spent within three organisations providing LSE in Bangalore, formal and informal discussions conducted with their staff and textual analysis of their material (i.e. curricula, brochures and pamphlets, and even websites), to identify how only poor and disadvantaged children were seen ‘at-risk’, while middle-class children, in contrast, were described as successful. Private companies, such as Media for Change Limited (MFCL), one of the few organisations providing LSPs to children from low-income groups and the middle class, even put up these differences on their website, stating that their LSP was,

Enabling children from weaker economic background to develop into responsible social beings with a sense of community and competence to respond to their personal, social, and cultural needs. (Italics mine)

In contrast, the MFCL website described the programmes conducted within elite, private schools as ‘support systems’, to help children within these schools deal with the ‘fragmented value system (that was) too antiquated to suit the needs of children in the Information Age’. Thus, while children from poor and disadvantaged communities were seen to be personally lacking and LSE was seen as critical to transform them into responsible social beings, middle-class children were seen requiring life skills to cope with the environment that was seen to be putting them at stress.

Discussions with teachers within these government and other low-cost schools revealed similar distinctions based on class; thus, in addition to these informants, I also conducted interviews with children from these schools and also made visits to their homes to understand the programmes from the perspective of these poor and disadvantaged communities. Ethnographic data thus gathered were recursively analysed and coded. Recognising the ‘textual forms’ of power (DeVault and McCoy, 2006) enabled and circulated via the ‘life skills’ discourse and practice, Discourse Analytic framework was adopted for the study, which enabled me to uncover the ‘empirical linkages among local settings of everyday life, organisations, and translocal processes of administration and governance’ (p. 15). The insights from the analysis are discussed further in the following sections.

LSE classrooms, constructions of ‘risks’ and ‘success’ and reflections on class

A visible feature of the LSPs was the atmosphere of warmth, fun and games through which a pedagogic concern with the ‘self’ was introduced. Based on social and experiential learning philosophies, skills such as self-awareness, critical thinking, decision making and effective communication – all of which require self-introspection – were to be presented through games, songs, art, theatre-based activities and group discussions, which were meant to offer children and youth opportunities to actively gain experience, and process and structure experiences in order to be able to ‘resist the coercive forces of social pressures’ (Pan American Health Organization, 2000).

In translation however, within government and other low-cost schools in the Indian context, the games and activities across the programmes observed seemed to focus little on the development of skills themselves. Rather, programmes took on the ethos of the formal schooling system in India, characterised by a ‘textbook culture’ in which the disempowered teacher has little control over the curriculum or syllabus laid out by experts elsewhere, but remains the final authority over children and their bodies, and over the transaction of the textbook (Clarke, 2003; Jeffrey, 2005; Kumar, 2004b; Sarangapani, 2011; Sriprakash, 2012; Vasavi, 2006, 2015) Like formal schooling, LSE classes were understood as imparting good sense into children (in Kannada, ‘oLLe budhi helkoduvudu’) based on expectations for behaviours laid elsewhere. That is, programmes focused less on developing what Skemp (1979) identifies as ‘knowing to’ knowledge, through children’s active participation in interpreting their experiences within the classroom, and rather sought to provide ‘scripts’ for behaviours that fit in with expectations of schools or middle-class organisers of these programmes. Classroom transactions thus involved ‘visibilising’ and calling attention to certain behaviours that teachers considered to be inappropriate, which could then be corrected through instruction or advice. Thus, games and activities within the LSE classroom were conducted as an end in themselves, ‘positioned as a technical method’ (Sriprakash, 2012: 3), rather than as integral to the development of self-understanding or knowledge.

Right from the introductory sessions on ‘what is life skills?’, facilitators like Yamuna (of VYB) drew attention to children’s behaviours rather than their skills. Explaining life skills as ‘how to behave with elders and teachers’, ‘how to behave in class’, ‘how to be clean’, ‘how to be disciplined’, as completing the academic tasks set within classrooms (e.g. learning tables), to a class of eighth grade students from a government school in Bangalore South, Yamuna summarised the meaning of life skills as ‘nothing but good behaviours to be a good student or good human being’. Through such accounts, not only did Yamuna present the idea of skills as behaviours, but also attached a moral connotation to them, and established behaviours that were contrary to the ones described as undesirable, thereby also implying their association with ‘risks’.

Other facilitators, such as Gautam (of IP), similarly introduced these desirable behaviours in the course of games or activities conducted during the span of the academic year (across which the LSE classes stretched). For example, after playing the ‘Yes game’ (meant to teach problem-solving skills) with a group of fifth grade students from a government-aided minority school in East Bangalore,¹⁰ where one child, who has been asked to step out of the room, must find an object hidden by the rest of the class through clues provided by them,¹¹ Gautam concluded:

In the ‘yes game, if you tell the child searching for the object the wrong route he can’t reach the goal. In the same way only if we follow our parents and teachers we will be able to reach our goals. We have to listens to elders and teachers. Otherwise you will go off on the wrong path. (Personal communication, 17 February, 2012)

Through such interpretations of behaviour during the course of a game, Gautam and others not only provided the ‘script’ for how children must behave, but also established the ‘risks’ of not adopting such behaviours (i.e. of the dangers of ‘going off on the wrong path’ and not being able to reach goals).

Thus, establishment of what constituted as ‘risk behaviours’ and ‘behaviours for success’ was an integral part of the LSE classroom. However, the programmes did not just establish behaviours that constituted ‘risks’ and ‘successes’, but also established which populations were at ‘risk’ and which populations were automatically assured ‘success’, as was seen from the statements given on MFCL’s website and made by others like Pavan Ragunath (presented above). These differences were further justified by facilitators, like Yamuna, who sought to explain to me about why disadvantaged children from government schools required these programmes (given below):

… government school children require life skills more because they don’t know anything, have no discipline, won’t wear uniforms; … they come like free persons. They are the rebel kind. They don’t know that they need to wish the teacher. Government schools don’t teach them how to behave or about interpersonal ‘talking’ (sic) skills. They come from slums so we need to educate them. In private schools, they are already taught so many things … There may be family problems like parents not looking after well (in private schools), but these kind of problems are not there. (Personal communication, 31 March, 2012)

Backing these arguments, middle-class teachers of these schools, like Sindhupriya, at the government-aided minority school in East Bangalore, further added:

Private school children are also facing problems, but not much because of their family backgrounds. First, these children [from disadvantaged backgrounds] need to learn manners, how to give respect, how to lead life, like which [sic] is good or bad. In private schools parents will take care. Here, most parents are going for work, like house maids, coolies. So they have no time to teach. (Personal communication, 2 August, 2012)

A closer examination of what such discipline and manners meant showed that the programmes, in essence, set expectations on children to conform to certain middle-class standards of ‘respectability’ (Ainley and Corbett, 1994), and ‘responsibilised’ them to carry on despite the context of structural disadvantage that they came from. While most facilitators spent at least some portion of the classroom time instructing or advising children on complying with school demands, such as coming to school regularly, completing work assigned by school, listening to their teachers and being obedient, and doing well on exams, some such as Vrinda (a facilitator from MFCL) also explicitly placed expectations regarding appearances and attitudes. For example, during one session for ninth grade students in a government school in North Bangalore, she reprimanded the class for not knowing their responsibilities. Lecturing children on the lack of reciprocity on their part to acknowledge the effort she had taken to come a long distance to teach them important skills, she pointed out to them that they could have shown their gratitude to her by at least coming to class cleanly dressed, by spending just rupees five on a bar of soap. Continuing to reprimand them for their behaviour, Vrinda drew the following figure on board:

Source: Maithreyi (2015).

Drawing attention to the figure, she stated that children who made fun in class, teased others and created trouble would become ‘zero’ in life, while those who stayed quiet, minded their business and finished their homework would be ‘heroes’ in life. What was evident here was not just how children were taught to identify certain behaviours of their own as constituting ‘risk’ or leading to ‘success’. In fact, what this and other sessions revealed was how larger structural barriers faced by children within these schools in relation to everyday living and education were glossed over, and risks and successes were individualised to personal conduct and choices.

While most children within these schools belonged to migrant and working-class families, confronting the precariousness of urban living (Velaskar, 2010), and lacked access to basic amenities such as clean drinking water, programmes unmindfully placed expectations on them, such as that of coming to school cleanly dressed. Visits to children’s homes revealed the difficult conditions of living faced by them, such as having to cope with cramped single-room households, which often spilled into the streets. Families used communal spaces outside their homes for purposes such as cooking, washing clothes or even having a bath, due to the lack of space or provisions (such as bathrooms) within their homes. Many of the children also reported using spaces outside the home, such as abandoned sites or parked vehicles such as auto-rickshaws to study or undertake schoolwork, as routines within the house had to be coordinated with other members, due to the lack of space. Children relied on these external spaces at different points in the day when other members of the family wanted to watch television (which could be distracting), or wanted to go to bed (which required lights within the single-room house to be switched off).

In addition, what also affected their ability to invest in school work was the economic precariousness of their households that necessitated that children go to work before or after school, as newspaper delivery boys, flower vendors, cooks or car-cleaners, or just help out with domestic chores such as cooking, cleaning or looking after younger siblings, while others in the family worked long hours. The extent of economic precariousness of these families became powerfully evident when children narrated instances such as having skipped school for over a month due to the lack of money available at home to take a bus to school, after a sibling had fallen ill, with any additional money available within the family having to be directed towards his medical expenses.

While children’s own accounts revealed these difficult conditions against which they persisted within schools, the literature on education in India has shown how these government schools (free for all children up to the elementary level) have become the last resort for those from the most marginalised contexts (Batra, 2013; Chavan, 2009; De et al., 2002–2003; Dyer, 2009; Mooij, 2008; Velaskar, 2010). However, despite the educational access fostered within these schools by affirmative action by the state (such as the passage of the Right to Education Act, 2009), the combination of the long and complex historical disadvantages faced by marginalised groups such as Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and minority communities, resulting in the lack of the ‘right’ cultural capital available to participate within education (Kumar, 1988, 2004a), as well as a result of the lack of accountability within the government school system itself (Vasavi, 2015), has led to poor educational outcomes for these groups, affecting continuation, the ability to pass the 10th grade board exams, access to further education after and consequently affecting employment opportunities, which has also led to continuing intergenerational poverty (Ray and Majumder, 2010).

Despite these circumstances to which children belonged, LSPs and teachers continued to place expectations on children to avoid ‘risks’ of failure and poverty, by becoming responsible for their own ‘success’. Drawing on the value-neutral language of ‘skills’ along with the professional psychological language of individual development, teachers and staff of LSPs ‘misrecognised’ (Bourdieu, 1986) their own success as a result of ‘merit’, while constructing children from these disadvantaged backgrounds as individually lacking in this ‘merit’, which they however sought to develop through LSE. This allowed programmes and teachers to establish what Ainley and Corbett (1994) have called an ‘unsentimental approach to individual potential, combined with the social standards of respectability and niceties of a “bourgeoisie drawing room”’ (as cited in Maithreyi (2015: 150)), placing onus on individuals,

… to make good use of their time’, ‘to get on with other people’, ‘to present themselves well’, ‘to be responsible’, ‘to stay solvent’ and ‘to cope in most normal circumstances’… [when] ‘normal circumstances’ are those of poverty, homelessness, domestic instability and high local youth unemployment. (Ainley and Corbett, 1994: 367)

However, while programmes and middle-class adults such as the teachers and trainers placed these expectations upon children, children themselves interpreted these programmes very differently. Rather than succumbing to the responsibilities that were placed on them, children took away lessons that allowed them to reposition themselves as ‘better educated’, while characterising the knowledge of their trainers as bourgeoisie knowledge learnt within their cultural context, rather than as individual merit. I discuss these interpretations made by the children in the next section in more detail, before presenting a conceptual discussion on children as ‘strategically opportunising’ actors.

Children’s perspectives on the LSPs: LSE as cultural knowledge

Attempts to understand what children learnt and took away from these classrooms almost always led to responses such as ‘it was fun’, or ‘we played games’. Such responses proffered by children seemed to have little to do with the behaviour changes expected of them. Even direct questions regarding ‘what is life skills?’ only threw up answers such as ‘skills to lead life’ (in Kannada, ‘jeevanige bēkaada anshagaLu’) or ‘good for the future’ – which were a repeat of adult discourses on life skills that I heard from facilitators and teachers within classrooms and at school. Attempts to understand from children about whether they had an idea of how these skills may be useful to the future, or why they were good at all, only led to silences, or children brushed these questions away.

While these reactions by children may partly be attributed to the incomplete nature of the trainings (which were meant to continue through high school), or even children’s age or lack of experience, older children, who had entered college or work, also expressed similar opinions about the programmes. Interviews with alumni of the LSPs (i.e. those that had finished grade 10, which marks the end of schooling in India) also showed how they viewed it very differently from that of the middle-class adults facilitating and conducting these programmes.

For example, Valli, an alumni of the government-aided minority school in East Bangalore, who worked as a tele-caller for Vodafone from her single-room home with no electricity, argued that that these programmes had no relevance to their work and lives, and stated, ‘We did it then and it is over. No use now’ (personal communication, 14 March, 2013). While Valli argued that she had taken nothing from the programme, she did recall the games and activities undertaken during the classes that had exposed her to new forms of cultural knowledge in the form of stories, songs and activities that she had never attempted before. Like Valli, other children interviewed, both in school and those that had passed out, spoke of the activities and games, and even bits of jargon that they had learnt through the course of the programme, such as the full form of WHO, spelling of ‘psychology’ or terms such as ‘spewers’ and ‘copers’ used by facilitators to describe their behaviour. These new learnings, including activities like drawing, painting, acting and sports that they were attempting for the first time as part of these courses, were presented as new opportunities to become ‘better educated’ and gain certain kinds of material and immaterial rewards. Students like Sunil (from the government-aided minority school in Bangalore) explained how the art learnt during the course of life skills lessons offered them a chance to compete in local art competitions that not only allowed him to gain prestige and recognition in the community, but also material benefits such as provisions for free medical check-ups on winning the competition. Others like Soundarya (also from the same school) spoke of the theatre improvisation activity she had learnt in the life skills classes, calling it a skit, and described how she had performed it within her home and community and had received praise for it. Similarly, football skills, art, stories, games and bits of technical jargon in English learnt as part of the programmes were all discussed by children in relation to the opportunities it provided them to appear as ‘better educated’ in front of their families, community and peers, who had not received similar opportunities to gain these skills. Children further linked the new learning to new identities that they were able to adopt as mentors or teachers to other children in the community, with whom they shared new knowledge and thus gained a greater social standing.

Children’s accounts thus revealed two points: first, an understanding of the programmes and their knowledge as ‘cultural content’ that most members of their own families and community did not have opportunities to access, rather than as technical knowledge of experts, such as psychologists or teachers, or even inborn ‘merit’ of the middle class; second, it revealed what it meant to be ‘educated’, and the new social identity that they created for themselves as responsible pedagogues and ‘mentors’ who could then use these opportunities of being better educated to teach and train younger members of their own community, in contrast with the discourses of the middle class who positioned them as deficient, irresponsible and ‘at-risk’. In addition, it also showed children as active participants within social life, ‘strategically opportunising’ in ways that simultaneously contributed to the transformation and reproduction of their lives. I discuss this last point further, in the next section, examining how the idea of ‘strategic opportunising’ can offer a theory of social change.

Theorising children’s participation in social life through the process of ‘strategic opportunising’

I use the term ‘strategic opportunising’ to draw attention to ‘the ways in which actors strategically and opportunistically respond to the current life situations that they find themselves in’ (Maithreyi, 2015). In using the term strategic, I attempt to highlight the ways in which actors play an active role in making meaning and in responding to their social and discursive contexts; using the term opportunistic, I seek to highlight the myopic nature of these responses, resulting from the limited perspectives that actors can have over their selves and contexts, emerging from their individual standpoints. Social actors, I argue, respond to the very contexts that discursively shape them, by selectively reinterpreting these discourses and contexts, based on the limited understanding of the present and future available to them, in creating new identities and social positions for themselves. However, owing to the limited knowledge and standpoint upon which these actions and transformations are undertaken, I argue that these acts neither wholly lead to emancipation, nor become wholly self-defeating and reproductive as put forth by cultural resistance theorists (Willis, 1977). Like Giddens (1984), I present social actors as centrally involved in the production and reproduction of social systems. However, I also point to the limits of such action and meaning-making, resulting from the positions they occupy within structural and discursive contexts which provide them with specific standpoints that limit their abilities to cognise possibilities for complete transformation. Yet, the processes of ‘strategic opportunising’ undertaken by various social actors lead to a multiplicity of agglomerating micro-processes through which social change becomes possible, yet impossible to predetermine.

Children’s responses to the programmes – of taking seriously only those bits of the programme that they considered ‘cultural knowledge’ to be better educated, while paying lip-service to the right understanding of the programme as desired by middle-class adults, appeared strategic: in that it allowed children to avoid getting into trouble at school by expressing a knowledge of ‘good behaviours’ that teachers desired without necessarily adopting these behaviours, while simultaneously allowing them to redefine themselves as responsible, capable and even adult-like beings in relation to other children in their communities. Bits of the programmes appropriated by the children (e.g. art skills, or the ability to say a few words in English) even served to get them certain material rewards in the short term. However, adopting such a response to the programmes from their limited standpoints, children were also unable to see how they were adopting the very idea of ‘merit’ that the middle-class trainers and teachers identified as lacking in the children for success. That is, while children like Valli dismissed the programmes as having no value in the present, they also drew on some of the tacit knowledge provided by these programmes (such as limited English-speaking skills and polite communication) in gaining the kinds of pink-collar jobs that they viewed as better and that became available to her only through the adoption of middle-class mannerisms of social decorum. Despite working with similar casualised work conditions and pay as her mother, a domestic help, Valli, nevertheless considered her pink-caller job a definite advancement in social status. Inadvertently then, Valli and others like her seemed to be accepting the discourses and expectations of individual responsibility for personal transformations as the necessary condition for social mobility rather than changes to the structural conditions of living, education and employment. It is through these mixed responses of acceptance and resistance, emerging from specific positions of actors such as Valli, to the discourses and structures that shaped and conditioned them, that I argue that possibilities for reproduction and transformation become possible.

Conclusion

In this article, I aimed to demonstrate the possibility and need to view children as agents, capable of constructing their own realities. I argued that as social actors children play an important role in the continuation and transformation of social life. Drawing on ethnographic data examining children’s responses to LSPs, I showed how children from poor and marginalised families counter global discourses that constitute their selves as ‘at-risk’ and resist the attempt to ‘responsibilise’ them against ‘risk’ through LSE. Furthermore, arguing that as social actors children are both strategic and opportunistic, I also demonstrate how children are not only implicated in the production and reproduction of their own identities, but also in the reproduction as well as reconceptualisation of the larger social and discursive contexts, disciplinary power and class relations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank Prof. A.R. Vasavi, Dr Arathi Sriprakash and the reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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