Abstract
The year 2016 has been a year of contentions and contestations in the Indian education scene. It has been marked by deep and intense struggles and discourses around three important axes—policy, institutions and groups. In terms of policy, we have witnessed the submission of the report by the committee set up for the formulation of New Education Policy (known as T. S. R. Subramanian Committee), which made some sweeping recommendations for reforms. However, interestingly, stalemate prevailed thereafter as the government neither accepted nor rejected the report, and instead placed certain portions of the draft report in the public domain to seek ‘inputs’ from the public at large. This meant that the entire exercise undertaken by T. S. R. Subramanian Committee stretching for over several months, drawing upon the feedback from multiple stakeholders such as the states, institutions, think tanks, intellectuals and the general public, is made more or less redundant. By all this, one thing seems clear that the arrival of a ‘new’ national policy of education is/will be delayed!
However, it is important to highlight the overall approach and vision of the new policy that is to see the light. The most striking feature of the T. S. R. Subramanian Committee report is that it espouses a vision of education and society that is rooted in both the past heritage and the futuristic economic and social demands. In fact, the preamble of the draft report emphasises the fact that education shall ‘amalgamate globalisation with localisation’, by which it means enabling ‘children and youth to become world citizens, with their roots deeply embedded in Indian culture and traditions’. This vision is crucial as it sets the tone for realising core objectives that may get enshrined in the new policy document, namely values, awareness, knowledge and skills.
The framing of the overall thrust and vision of the New Education Policy formulations appears to be caught between two extreme periods of time. One vision is based on the past and the ideas of culture and heritage, whereas the other on what the nation wants to be, say, in the twenty-first century—a more futuristic approach seeking to integrate the nation with the world at large. These extreme visions interestingly converge in the overall approach of the draft of the Subramanian Committee report, which is in fact a convergence of two beliefs of the current political and ruling establishment—conservatism and neoliberalism. This is a deadly combination that has generated in the past, and will continue to do so in future too, passionate discourses among various sections around concerns of social discord and inequalities. It is important that the new policy not only overcomes these concerns but also makes specific efforts towards addressing them through policy provisions which facilitate equality, communal harmony and civic engagement.
The second axis along which there have been intense contestations in the Indian education system is with respect to the institutions—schools as well as universities. In the domain of school education, there has been a trend of closure of government schools in the name of rationalisation of teacher–pupil ratios and mergers for improving quality, particularly at the elementary level. This has resulted in the shutting down of several thousands of schools across the country, most significantly in states such as Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, etc., which has affected access to basic schooling of the most backward and marginalised groups—tribes, Dalits, girls and other minorities. It is a strange paradox that while on the one hand the Right to Education (RTE) Act 2009 ensures and guarantees schooling for all children, the same RTE Act is used by the State as a weapon to close the so-called ‘unviable’ or ‘small’ schools in the name of economic feasibility and effective governance. Surprisingly, the Subramanian Committee justifies school closures using similar logic and calls for setting up of what it calls ‘composite’ schools, another term for ‘school mergers’. The idea of what the RTE Act calls a ‘neighbourhood school’ is thus under serious threat. The gains that the country had witnessed in the post-DPEP (District Primary Education Programme) era in terms of enrolments may soon evaporate, and the issues of access may return in the educational discourses as more and more marginalised children are deprived of even basic and primary schooling.
In the domain of higher education, the past year has been quite turbulent. Issues of threats to institutional autonomy and freedom, and increasing stranglehold of bureaucratisation have consumed much of the energies of students and teachers across various campuses. In fact, some of these issues continue to plague many of the best-known centrally funded universities and institutions. However, it is indeed surprising that the provincial/state-level universities, the so-called institutions of national importance such as the IITs and IIMs, the private universities and colleges have remained more or less silent spectators on these debates and discourses. Incidentally, most of those institutions which have become sites of intense ideological and political contestations are well known for their academic credentials and reputation within the country and abroad too. The Ministry of Human Resource Development designated universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Hyderabad—the two universities where there has been much turbulence—as the top two universities in the country in the year 2016. It remains to be seen how these young, excellent and unique universities overcome such unsettling times in the days to come and how they continue to retain their pre-eminence in Indian higher education.
Third, various social groups have made education the site of their struggles in the past one year. Though this in itself is not new, the groups that have been raising these issues are new. These groups made reservation in educational institutions as the central issue of contention for their popular movements. Interestingly, most of these groups comprise rich, landed and politically dominant intermediary peasant castes, which are either asking to be included in the reservation in admissions to government universities and employment, or are asking for the system to be abolished. Castes such as Patidars in Gujarat, Kapus in Andhra Pradesh and Marathas in Maharashtra are a few examples of groups that are making such demands. Besides, the flames ignited by the suicide of Rohith Vemula in the University of Hyderabad continue to stir the discourses of broader issues such as the inclusion of Dalits in educational spaces and societal realms. Manifestations of such ignition may be seen in the assertion of the Dalits in Gujarat and elsewhere.
Contemporary Education Dialogue (CED) will continue to focus on such discourses. It will seek to bring to the fore the contemporary contestations, rigorous empirical research and engaging theoretical arguments that scholars of education are concerned with. We will seek to set new standards of academic publishing in the field of education.
In this issue, we have four articles which focus on diverse themes. The article by Caroline Long, Mellony Graven, Yusuf Sayed and Erna Lampen deals with the issue of teacher agency in the South African context—a context that had internalised racial domination, injustice and inequality for many years and had at the same time developed resistance to such a condition which eventually freed the society from apartheid. It is against this backdrop that the authors examine the issue of widening social inequality since the start of political democracy in 1994. More specifically, they explore the notion of professional teacher agency in the light of teaching, both as a profession and vocation, which is constrained by experience. What is interesting about this article is that it seeks to situate such a teacher experience in the structure of the society.
The article by Dhruv Raina meticulously weaves the story of evolution of the first-generation IITs and the role played by collaborating foreign nations in ‘making’ these institutions work, particularly in the intense Cold War era. The discourse captures clearly the politics of higher education from what the author calls a ‘revised’ social theoretic perspective. The author argues that the globalisation of higher technological education is evident within the realm of technological or engineering science education, across the Cold War divide.
Another article in this issue highlights the prospective teachers’ ideas of ‘optics’. The author, Gurjeet Kaur, throws light on the cognitive challenges, curricular representations and conceptual comprehension of optical phenomena among the pre-service teacher trainees. The most striking aspect of this article is its rich content analysis of the text books and reflections by the teachers-to-be. Ruchira Das presents in her article the dilemmas and discourses among the migrant Santals living in the urban spaces of Kolkata pertaining to the use of indigenous script as a medium for/of education. She presents the inter-generational variations among the city Santals as to how their children must be provided instruction in the educational domain.
Lastly, we have a short note as the ‘End Page’ article. In this, Sreejith Murali gives a candid description of an individual who serves the children of a shanty town of Mumbai by giving tuition classes to enable them to achieve academic success. This is a story of an individual whose efforts are shaping and transforming the lives of young children by encouraging them to compete and be successful.
The editors of the journal would like to extend an invitation to the researchers of education to write theoretically sound and empirically rich articles for publication. On its part, the journal promises to maintain high levels of quality and professionalism in the years to come.