The Ontological Crisis of Schooling: Situating Migrant Childhoods and Educational Exclusion

Introduction

In this article, I foreground one of the fundamental problems of our formal education system: accommodating the lived realities of childhoods at margins such as that of migrant children. Scholars like Dyer (2014) have argued that ‘geospatially-fixed schooling’—schools that are fixed in place and time—aggravates the educational exclusion of migrant children. Extending such an argument further, my own doctoral field work with migrant children in the city of Bangalore shows that the discord between ‘mobile childhoods’ and ‘immobile schools’ is the fundamental problematic of educational inclusion of migrant children. Traditional ‘sedentarist mindset’ of the formal schooling system is predicated upon the norm of ‘fixed’ and ‘permanent’ residence accommodating children who are able to attend the same school for prolonged period of time. I show that the mismatch between such a system and ‘deviant’ realities of mobile children who ‘arrive and depart at varying times over the school year’ have worsened the marginalisation of migrant lives (Danaher & Kenny, 2009). The present article is part of ethnographic fieldwork which was conducted for 13 months between January 2017 and May 2018 in three different NGO schools for migrant children in east Bangalore. The three NGO sites exhibited varying dynamics of organisational philosophy and learning culture. The narratives presented in this article is drawn majorly from one of the NGOs where primacy was given to conventional modes of disciplining, teaching and learning.

Universal and static attributes of modern schooling system, based on ideals of progress and development, assume critical significance in case of migrant children as they exist in the system continuously being displaced ‘in’ and ‘out’ and thereby ‘missing’ multiple slices of space and time from the ‘natural progression’ that defines the very ontology of schooling.

Educational Access in the City

Contradicting the assumed binaries of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’, the city lacked a supportive environment for the education (Ganguly, 2018) of migrant children belonging to lowest socio-economic strata who faced difficulties even to get physical access to schools. An overwhelming proportion of migrant children did not have physical access to school because they were afraid to navigate the busy roads of the city. The ghettoised contexts of migrants in the city created additional challenges such as isolation and restricted access to main roads at times of heavy rain. Even for those children who managed to get access to an NGO school, regular attendance was a huge challenge. One of the NGO functionaries mentioned that children’s attendance often ‘fell like a house of cards’. Children cited numerous reasons for not being able to attend school regularly. These included engagement in household work and sibling care; absence of transport to school; unavailability of school resources such as a school bag, and lack of support structure at home. Precarious locations in the labour market required migrant families to move between the village and the city and different worksites in search of better livelihood opportunities. Along with such regular ‘irregularity’ in conditions of living and labour, migrants also actively negotiated their complex interaction with the village by being there for festivals and family events. Thus, a combination of factors including contexts of mobility and its arbitrariness; informal conditions of living and labour; and access to and quality of schooling, contributed actively to migrant children’s educational exclusion in the city.

While mobility, material conditions of migrant lives and functional inadequacies of schooling system are significantly highlighted as the primary reasons for migrant children’s educational exclusion, what one fails to see is how the fundamental ontology of formal schooling itself does not accommodate the lived realities of migrant children. This fundamentally obstructs the educational futures of migrant children even when state and NGO initiatives are actively present in the city. The point is reiterated in the next section by exploring how static constructs of schooling shape experiences of migrant children in one of the NGO schools in the city.

Migrant Children’s Learning Crisis

Migrant children who got enroled in NGO schools in the city often had huge learning gaps and one of the reasons for this was their irregular attendance in school. These learning gaps posed specific problems for their educational inclusion. Three interconnected aspects seem to be critically shaping the contours of migrant children’s learning gap and the implications it has for their school enrolment in the city: age (together with corresponding grade and learning level), language and curriculum. These aspects—being statically constructed in the mainstream system of schooling—reinforced the disadvantageous positions of migrant children. Migrant children’s names often remained in the school rolls even after they moved to the city. Apart from the problem of inaccurate data it creates, this meant that many migrant children are simultaneously being in and out of school. Whether migrant children go back to the school in the village or they get enroled in a school in the city, their multiple absences in the school create huge learning gaps which often do not get addressed when they are back in school. They are expected to ‘catch up’ and the ‘static natural progression’ of curriculum cannot be altered for their learning needs. As Dhankar (2017) argues, the ‘unbending’ and ‘ironclad’ class-wise structure of our schooling system, in line with which the entire educational infrastructure, resources and processes are organised, does not ensure meaningful learning. One challenge that NGOs often faced in mainstreaming migrant children was the problem their ‘age’ posed to their school enrolment in the city. Due to huge learning gaps of older children, it was difficult to enrol them in the RTE mandated age-appropriate class. According to their ‘actual’ learning levels, they could be ‘fit in’ only in lower grades than their age mandates. As the headmistress of a government school puts it, ‘they can neither go forward nor backward’.

Moving in and out of the system periodically, migrant children thus had to ‘catch up’ with their ‘normal’ sedentary counterparts. The following words by a teacher in one of the NGO schools (addressing children) reflected this need to ‘catch up’ their lost slice of time, and thus become ‘normal’ children:

Close your eyes. Breathe in and breathe out. Imagine that you are going to a mainstream school, okay? After two months. Tell yourself, ‘I will go to mainstream school, study well and participate in all cultural activities’. There will be many ‘normal’ children coming to that school, those children may be coming from Montessori or after completing LKG, you have to develop in par with them.

You can play outside, that’s fine. But once you come inside the classroom, whatever you want to read, keep on reading—English, Kannada, EVS—whatever you want to read. Don’t waste time. First of all, you have already wasted half of your life. There is no time to rest now. How long will you keep playing like this? Till your old age? You don’t want to study? You don’t want to earn? Who plays like this for 24 hours?

While talking about school enrolment, phrases such as ‘age has gone past’, ‘age is falling behind’ or ‘we have exceeded age’ constantly echoed in children’s spaces. Many children were worried that their learning fell behind their same-age peers and expressed wanting to get ahead. Age was integral to the consciousness of education spaces, where teachers and parents, consciously and unconsciously, endorsed the ontological relationship among age, school class, learning level and curricular progression. This made mainstreaming of migrant children difficult. Since learning gap increased with age, older children had to struggle more. Younger children were in comparatively better position, if they were within ‘manageable’ limits of ‘catching up’. In case of children who had never been to school, the challenge of mainstreaming to age-appropriate class was even more problematic. NGOs are expected to complete non-residential special training within 6 months, after which children are expected to be mainstreamed. But in most cases migrant children had missed many years of schooling and it was impossible to bridge the learning gap within 6 months. When children are mechanically mainstreamed with ‘minimal’ and ‘accelerated’ learning without getting their actual learning gap bridged, they become trapped in the ontological deficit of formal schooling system.

The construct of age in migrant children’s lives also contradicts the taken for granted assumption of co-travelling with the same-aged peer group in modern schooling system. Migrant children enroled in the NGO schools in the city belonged to multiple age groups. The standardised curriculum and pedagogy was unable to accommodate this dynamic peer group engagement of migrant children. In case of migrant children, the peer group was neither static nor uniform, as they engaged with multiple age groups of peers and multiple sets of peer groups.

The construct of age was also closely related to the issue of language, as migrant children from different geographical and language backgrounds were simultaneously present in school classrooms in the city. For example, there was a migrant child (whose mother tongue was Bhojpuri) who went to 1st standard in Delhi when the family migrated to the city from a village in Bihar. The medium of instruction was Hindi in Delhi. When the family moved back to village, the child was enroled again in 1st standard in the village school. Later, when the family moved to Bangalore, the child was again enroled in 1st standard, this time in a Kannada medium government school. Especially for interstate migrant children neither Kannada medium government school nor the English medium private school could address their language-related learning difficulties. Even if children managed to learn a new language in the city, it was not of much use for the child when she went back to village. It is not easy for children to navigate knowledge learnt through different languages. Therefore, learning gap occurred not only in terms of subject knowledge but also in terms of language. Even for migrant children from North Karnataka, the version of Kannada spoken at their homes was very different from the standardised Kannada taught in school. It was comparatively easier for Telegu speaking children than other interstate migrant children to learn Kannada, as Telugu and Kannada had nearly similar scripts. There were exceptions where interstate migrant children learnt Kannada successfully but most of them were mainstreamed in government school from an early age. But in general, the older the child, the more difficult it was for them to learn a new language, especially in the absence of an immersive learning environment. The teachers at the NGO schools were at most bilingual, which was not sufficient enough to meaningfully interact with migrant children who came from multiple states of India. Many children therefore learnt the new language mechanically, as a set of symbols. Some teachers in the government school also attested that interstate migrant children who joined government school were most likely to drop out largely because of language issue, unless they are enroled at a very young age.

Thus, static constructs of age, language and curriculum provided significant challenges in providing meaningful learning experiences for migrant children in the city. This was particularly evident in an NGO where children were constantly given instruction to not ‘waste’ anymore time. They were asked to ‘sit and read’ even when teachers were not in class. They were told that they could not afford to waste time and had to utilise every opportunity to prepare themselves for mainstreaming. But there were many older children in the NGO who had many gap years in schooling and ‘low’ learning levels compared to their ‘age’. Karthik was one such child who studied till 8th standard in his village in Bengal and discontinued schooling after coming to the city. He had 2 years of gap in schooling. His mother worked as a domestic help in nearby apartments and was very much worried about her son’s study. Karthik was very irregular at the NGO School, he only came for 2 or 3 days in a week, and as a result constantly received verbal abuse from teachers. Consider the following narrative for example:

You have done time pass for your whole life, and you are continuing it even now lallu. I don’t want to see older children to do time pass even for one minute. See your attitude. First of all, your age has skipped. On top of that you are not serious. Tell your mother to send you to sell vegetables. If you don’t study that is what you will be doing. Anyways studying is not your cup of tea. Even police won’t catch you if you work, you look like an eighteen-year-old. I will tell this only to your mother next time, ‘make a duplicate certificate for your son, and send him for work’. He doesn’t have any brains for studying, he is interested in only time pass. After few years when children who were in your class will say that they finished 10th standard or 12th standard, then you will feel bad.

When I later spoke to Karthik, he said that all his schooling had been in Bengali medium and he found it difficult to comprehend and learn in Kannada or English. He was not able ‘catch up’ and occupy his ontologically assigned position in the school system by the virtue of its linear and static spatio-temporal constructs such as of age, language and curricular progression.

The Ontological Crisis of Schooling

Those who do not succeed in formal schooling system are deemed to be ‘left behind’ and become ‘waste’ (Morrow, 2013) in India (and elsewhere), where formal schooling is the irrefutable norm of childhood. Migrant children were expected to be moulded to the needs of the school, enter and exit without disturbing the immutable order of the system. And those who fail to catch up with this ‘immutable progression’ remained excluded. Hence migrant children’s educational exclusion is not merely a question of access (whether physical, social or pedagogical) and quality, but a function of the very fundamentals on which modern schooling system is constructed.

Being part of migratory groups, children encounter the problem of ‘missing the bus’ or becoming ‘too old to go’ (Jain et al., 2000). More recently, the Draft National Education Policy (GoI, 2019) highlighted the problem of ‘severe learning crisis’ of Indian education system. There are multiple references to children who ‘fall behind’, ‘maintain flat learning curves for years’ and are unable to ‘catch up’ and ‘emerge’ from the ‘unfortunate blackhole’. The size of the problem (in terms of larger number of students falling behind) and lack of school preparedness, focus on foundational literacy and numeracy, teacher capacity and facilities to improve health and nutrition are cited as the causes for this learning crisis. What is suggested as the solution to mitigate the ‘backlog’ of ‘fallen behind’ children and enable them to ‘catch-up’ is ‘a mission-mode dedication to remediation’ by additional instructional interventions and tracking and monitoring mechanisms. The final document of National Education Policy (GoI, 2020) too highlights rectification of learning crisis of ‘fallen behind’ children as one of the key thrusts of educational change envisioned for the country. Although the issue of ‘falling behind’ is not specific to migrant childhoods alone, it is significantly acute in case of migrant children by the conditions of their mobility and marginality.

What I question here beyond the possibilities of mission mode interventions is the fundamental meaning and assumptions behind such ideas of ‘falling behind’ and ‘catching up’. The assumed congruence between age, grade and learning level is based on normative assumptions about spatiality and temporality of childhood and its developmental course, which take for granted the ontology of our current schooling system in its present form and thereby reinforce the discourse of ‘lost’ childhoods. I argue that it is this dissonance between spatio-temporalities of migrant childhoods and that of our mainstream schooling system that is fundamental to migrant children’s educational exclusion. Unless researchers, practitioners and policymakers engage with this taken for granted ontology of our schooling system, fulfilling migrant children’s right to education will remain an incomplete task.