Abstract
The rhetoric of education for social change and a just social order that held sway for several decades in postcolonial India, although it never quite translated into serious action, is much muted today. With a change in course after the early 1990s, there has been an alarming shift towards greater privatisation of the sector and market oriented courses. Education is increasingly being projected in terms of its economic credentials and its power to move the economy and the country into the twenty-first century. During the tenure of the BJP led government, in power since 2014, two major documents on education have been put out in the public domain. The first was the Subramaniam Committee Report of 2016, and, prior to the formulation of a new national policy on education, we have the Draft National Education Policy, 2019.
Highlighting the ‘interconnectedness of education’, the Draft Policy, 2019, makes grand proposals for reforms to ensure that ‘it touches the life of each and every citizen’. It proposes increased spending, more autonomy and a push for the liberal arts at all levels of education. Meanwhile, public education in the country is in a state of disintegration and disarray, financial allocation for education remains abysmally low and targeted universities and faculty remain under attack. Following the announcement of the abrogation of Article 370 and a restructuration of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, since 5 August 2019, educational institutions across Kashmir have not been able to function and the valley remains under a virtual lockdown. The state of the Indian economy is causing serious concern, the agricultural sector is in a crisis and unemployment is on the rise. In the midst of this extremely disturbing political and economic scenario, it is difficult to have any faith in the proposals put forward by this document.
The education system in India remains extremely polarised with well-established systems of dominance and hierarchy. The class divide in education is not only represented by access but also by a stratified system of provision at the school level that makes a mockery of principles of equality and social justice. Caste discrimination remains entrenched and the under representation of Adivasis, Muslims, OBCs and other groups is well documented. Under the global initiative of ‘Education for All’, there has been a massive increase in access, especially at the elementary level, along with conformity to a global capitalist agenda. Access to schooling for hitherto excluded groups has enabled a whole new generation of students from traditionally oppressed castes and communities as well as large sections of the poor to enter the system with tremendous hope and enthusiasm, and belief in the promises that education holds out. Support for these new entrants is scarce and as they attempt to negotiate an extremely biased system and its many unwritten rules, the large majority find themselves baffled and beaten by the process.
The articles in this volume touch upon these problems in one way or another and highlight the failures of a system that continues to remain the only hope of social mobility and a better future for millions of students in the country.
Shalini Punjabi’s paper on ‘Shadow Education’ gets to the heart of the crisis in school education and points to several important areas of concern. Although the term ‘shadow education’ is used in several contexts, the paper characterises it as ‘informal and paid academic learning that takes place outside formal school system availed for public exams and competitive entrance tests. The metaphor of shadow is used because much tutoring mimics the mainstream school system’. The paper focusses specifically on coaching institutions that prepare students for the very popular entrance exam for entry into the most prestigious and keenly sought after technical institutions in India—the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Although this genre of coaching institutes are the most visible and high profile face of what has become a major industry, the shadow education system works on many levels, from private tutoring for school examinations to tuition centres for different courses and different levels of examinations, including the extremely competitive entrance examinations described in this paper.
In the early decades after independence when education was the preserve of the elite, children were assured an entry, if not into the most coveted engineering and medical courses, at least to colleges and universities. Private tutoring, although prevalent, was not as pervasive and was limited to helping students cope with the more technical subjects—usually mathematics and the sciences. With the entry of less affluent and highly oppressed and marginalised groups into the system, tutoring has taken on new dimensions and all quality and manner of private coaching has become the norm. What the coaching institutes provide goes beyond the mandate of the school curriculum, and the focus is on a very specific training rather than on a broad-based ‘education’. The nature and the cost of the coaching limits its access to the more affluent groups and in collusion with institutions of higher education, their entrance criteria and a complex sleight of hand, manages to exclude the majority of the socially and educationally underprivileged groups.
The findings of the study are disturbing and confirm the unsettling fact that, as access to basic education is increasing and more marginalised populations are able to enter the system, an entire structure of informal institution is being established to train students for examination success, that allows the school system to claim equality in provision but creates other less visible forms of exclusion. For seriously aspiring candidates, these institutions are gradually beginning to substitute for the learning that formal school curriculum prescribes. Today, an industry of coaching institutes (increasingly more structured and formalised) has mushroomed across the country and taken over sizeable localities or even entire towns such as Kota in Rajasthan. According to a report of 2015 cited in the article, the revenues of the coaching institutions were estimated at approximately at US$4 billion per year.
Although touted as a serious alternative to the ‘declining’ formal education system, telling comments made by parents and students reveal the damaging implications of economic and political structures and compulsions on the very idea of education. Interviews with parents, students and faculty make reference to a hierarchy in the sector, the ‘big name’ that certain institutions carry, and how they attract the ‘cream’ which is defined as ‘those who can cope with both school and coaching and doing well at both places’. The institutes provide students with tricks and techniques for solving exam problems and prioritise high grades over knowledge content. The curriculum proposed by the NCERT and taught in schools is seen as inadequate for future prospects and this instrumental view of education is so pervasive that remarks such as ‘a lot of time is wasted in school’, ‘if you don’t get a good rank, you are not a chooser’ and ‘for competition, school is not enough’ are blatantly expressed. (See data in Shalini’s article.)
Two of the books reviewed in this issue are closely related to the questions raised by Shalini’s paper and should add to an understanding of the concerns addressed above. ‘School Education in India: Market, State and Quality’, edited by Jain et al. and reviewed by Karthik Venkat, makes a valuable contribution to the conceptual and empirical issues concerning the commercialisation of school education in India and the entry of markets into the education sector. In India, as in many other poor and developing countries, this is happening at an alarming pace and needs to be understood in the context of the state’s withdrawal from the social sectors. The volume seeks to examine the ‘critical connection between the market, the neo-liberal state and the idea of quality education’. A managerial model of education, a global definition of ‘quality’ and growing clamour for assessments and evaluation of outputs, while ignoring quality of provision is putting severe pressure on the public education system and paving the way for increased privatisation, often at great cost especially for the poor.
Avijit Pathak’s ‘Ten Lectures on Education’, reviewed by Preeti Mishra, is a compilation of his discussions with students in the course of teaching sociology of education. The chapters deal with major sociological perspectives on education and the discussion spans a vast range of topics from the nature of formal educational institutions, the curriculum and selection of knowledge and discipline within institutions to the issues of moral and social obligations of education, and the filtering power of institutions. What Avijit Pathak refers to, as the ‘enlightenment’ potential of education, seems to carry little weight for children or for parents, as Shalini’s article reveals, as competition for entry into higher education becomes more intense and the opportunities for employment more limited. The book also discusses the increasing tendency to reduce education to an instrument for serving market needs and advocates integration of skills and other technical expertise within a larger, more holistic and intellectual educational experience.
The projection of examination success as originating from individual effort and merit alone, allows structural barriers that reproduce inequalities to be overlooked. Ashti Salman’s paper takes a closer look at the reasons for secondary school dropout among Muslim men in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in Delhi. In spite of a fairly obvious desire to be educated, a high regard for schooling and an expression of regret at having to leave school, these men have not been able to complete their school education. So deeply internalised is the narrative of meritocracy, that they blame themselves and their own lack of initiative and capability while stating that access to employment is a major determining factor for the high dropout rates. Prior research has established that Muslim men are less likely to find employment on the basis of educational credentials than other groups and therefore are more likely to discontinue their education when and where an alternative for employment becomes available. This is clearly evident in this study although it has not been sufficiently explored.
The fact that education is shaped by the same politico-economic forces that shape economic policy and all that follows from it, including employment opportunities, is least understood by those who occupy the fringes, both in the social as well as the educational sphere. Expecting to enter a level playing field, they are continually outwitted by the many subtle ways of exclusion. As long as these exploitative structures remain in place, education has little power to transform social or economic realities. There will always be enough room for markets to exploit such spaces and flourish, whether it is in the form of private schools, both for the rich and the poor, or in the intersecting spaces of the coaching and tutorial institutions.
Tripti Bassi’s paper describes a slightly more optimistic scenario of an educational institution affiliated to a religious denomination that offers a less materialist ideology of schooling but remains popular. The less optimistic interpretation would be that in a region where resistance to the education of girls is still rampant, the religious affiliation of the school provides a more acceptable model and at the least allows the girls access to education. The student community, according to her findings is also predominantly from a lower socio-economic class and not surprisingly, has limited choices.
She traces the evolution of an important institution in the history of women’s education—the Sikh Kanya Vidyalaya in Ferozepur, established in 1892 by the Ferozepur Singh Sabha. Although the attempt of these institutions was to introduce a modern education while preserving patriarchal and other socially accepted norms, the access to a public forum and new ideas and knowledge that girls are exposed to has often played out in unintended and unexpected ways, and unintentionally given women the means of negotiating gender biased norms and has provided access to generation of girls who may never have had the opportunity of being educated.
The third review by Ananya Pathak is of a book by Anandita Mukhopadhyay that analyses the gendered aspects of identity construction through an interesting analysis of children’s literature by eminent Bengali writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis is situated in the context of a period when a Bengali identity was being constructed amidst the tensions in the encounter with an unfamiliar and at that moment extremely powerful European culture, British colonialism, modernity and education.
The extremely disturbing piece that exposes the violence and humiliations that the education system can perpetrate and which children from marginalised groups are routinely subjected to (although not always in this extreme form) is the Endpage by Shreya. It describes the agony and death of a young Adivasi woman who hanged herself after being subjected to the humiliation of a strip search by a ‘flying squad’ (routine inspection teams meant to supervise examinations and to prevent cheating) during the course of the 10th class school examination. The young woman had travelled 15 kilometres in order to cross a hurdle that would provide her an opportunity of continuing her education. The fact that she belonged to Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) is significant because the powerlessness of her social status enabled the team to humiliate her and other children with impunity. It also allowed an enquiry conducted into the incident—as a result of public outrage—to exonerate the team, despite testimonies of several students confirming the strip search. Although tragic, the case is one among others that has received more attention but no resolution, and given the increasing violence against Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and women in Indian society it should not surprise us that it is being reflected in educational institutions and within the very spaces that are meant to protect our children.
Contemporary Education Dialogue is pleased to announce a new section ‘Teachers, Teaching and Teacher Education’ which will regularly appear in each issue of the journal. This section will be published from July 2020 issue of CED in collaboration with the initiative for Excellence in Teacher Education of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. The initiative is supported by the Tata Trusts. This section aims to nurture scholarship on the practice and practitioner of Education with methodologies and theoretical frameworks that further cultural, political, sociological, developmental and historical understanding. We invite the Education community and our readers to contribute to this section of the journal.
This issue also sees changes in our editorial team. Professor Srinivasa Rao is leaving the editorial team to take care of other academic responsibilities. Professor Disha Nawani is moving from the role of Review Editor to that of an Executive Editor to take his place. Professor Rao’s contributions to Contemporary Education Dialogue are gratefully acknowledged. We thank him for the vigour and insights he brought to this journal.
One important strength of Contemporary Education Dialogue has been the involvement of many leading scholars of Education and allied fields in its Editorial Board. Along with our editors, board members have been great facilitators in maintaining scholarly excellence of the journal. We are extremely grateful to them for their contribution towards rigorous peer reviews and also their advice on the overall development of the journal.
We are delighted to announce that we have been able to successfully add a number of accomplished scholars to our Editorial Board as well as persuaded some esteemed colleagues to stay with us for some more years. We are very grateful to those members who have served their term and now leave the Board with our appreciation. And, we welcome our new members, who with their academic rigour will help us to publish original research papers within the field of Education. We also thank those members of the Board who have kindly accepted our request to stay on for some more years.
The new Editorial Board has an international reach and represents some of the finest academic institutions in the field of Education. The editors look forward to working with our new Editorial Board in the coming years.