Abstract
Indian scholars have not paid sufficient attention to children’s worlds and their experiences. So, for people who are concerned with discerning how children cope with conditions of their lives shaped by socio-economic structures and state interventions, Reva Yunus’ study should be on the reading list. It grapples with the issues of schooling of children in communities where caste–class mind-sets and networks are reproduced generation after generation. As per the author, in addition to these issues the government school suffers from dominant development narratives. In this context, ‘labour-class’ children work alongside attending school. Some of the questions Yunus seems to be asking are: Why are they ‘working’? What are the spatial and behavioural patterns in terms of work that they do? How do poverty and caste patriarchy affect children’s experience of schooling? How are the teacher–student relationships in the school? What are children’s experience of the teachers’ perception of them? Yunus looks inside school to see if the social dynamics of the space contribute to the student dropouts and lack of interest in formal schooling. She shows students’ lives in continuum of their recent family histories, leading to current challenges and world views that in turn manifest in all aspects of childhood, with schooling being the focus of the study.
The book is the result of an eight-month-long ethnography of the eight eighth grade classroom of a state-run school in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. The children included in the study belong to families who have migrated to an urban area from villages in recent or distant past. The methods include ethnographic observations inside the classroom, conversations with teachers, interviews with approximately 60 children, questionnaires about the families’ social and financial background, visits to children’s homes and interviews of 19 parents chosen as a representative group.
The book consists of seven chapters. The first two chapters contain the theoretical underpinning of the study. Her empirical study reflects her concerns about the state’s role with respect to the legitimisation of educational inequalities. Yunus’ literature, mostly constitutive of empirical studies, spans multiple disciplines to create her framework based on the intersectionality of class, caste and gender. She claims that the usage of the term ‘labour class’ lies at the intersection of class and caste by hiding stereotypes and beliefs rooted in caste hierarchy. Although the applied intersectional framework, helps to understand how the larger societal patterns are reproduced inside the school, it does not enable us in seeing the school as a formal organisation. Excessively bureaucratic organisations are known to have no place for people’s difficult life conditions and complex emotional lives. It sees them as cogs in a machine which affects interpersonal relationships and individual motivations. Schools too are formal organisations run by a modern state existing alongside lives of children and teachers, which are structured by local socio-economic conditions and networks. There is a missed opportunity of seeing the conflict generated by the two worlds that children, in this case, simultaneously inhabit: the world of the formal school and the world of the informal institutions of home and work. One remembers Paul Willis’ (1977) classical study Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, among others, and feels its absence in the book, which while studying the micro- and macro-narratives of ‘labour-class’ children’s lives also problematised the very structure of the school education system and the pressures it put on the student–teacher relationships.
In the third and the fourth chapters, Yunus provides detailed descriptions of lives of children beyond schools. The readers get glimpses into the life histories of the families who are struggling to make ends meet in the informal labour market. She maps the families’ recent histories and current situations to place the children in context. One also finds cases where the children migrate to the city alone, having to deal with both subsistence and schooling. Spaces are gendered, and it appears in the meanings of the terms ‘ghar’ (home) and ‘bahar’ (outside). Boys have higher spatial mobility and freedom as a consequence of doing paid labour and making local sociopolitical networks. This is in contrast to girls’ unpaid reproductive labour that stays invisible inside the ‘ghar’, mirroring the skewed gendered work situation in the country. Yunus’ conversations with children show that the girls and boys have different reasons to show up in schools, which are not always aligned with the official reasons for schooling. The author urges to understand the behaviour of children inside the school as a consequence of their place in the broader structure of economy and state governance, each of which have different manifestations in the everyday lives of people culturally shaped by caste and gender hierarchies.
The fifth and sixth chapters highlight prominent themes in teacher–student relationships. Yunus first unpacks the meanings of ‘sarkari’ as constructed by the teachers. Material deprivations and inefficiency of ‘sarkari’ schools are seen as their natural state by the frustrated teachers. They are found to associate the same meanings with children while calling them ‘sarkari children’, that is, perceiving them to be naturally deficient in learning. Teachers also develop negative judgements regarding children’s willingness to learn based on their perception of children’s ‘labour-class’ culture. Teachers are found to function as agents of a welfare state favouring the undeserving. Children’s accounts like ‘… they shouldn’t make us feel like they’re doing us a favour. Now … everyone is from a poor family. They make us feel like they are doing us a favour, spending two thousand, ‘daily, daily’ … there are other schools … this isn’t the only school, you know!’ (p. 124) shows their keen perception of this behaviour and resentment against the condescending attitude of teachers. Through the author’s fieldnotes and children’s conversation snippets, one starts getting a hint at what might be contributing to the bad experience inside the school. Yunus finds that classroom talks of teachers are pregnant with stereotypes and annoyance directed towards children. Through her observations and interviews, she challenges and contradicts the ‘deficit views’ of teachers by bringing evidences of parents’ and children’s efforts.
The final chapter brings together the arguments and findings of the whole study. Yunus summarises them in two strands: children’s lives in a family and that in the classroom. She argues that separation between the two is cause of concern both at the macro and the micro levels. Yunus emphasises that development narratives, like ‘girl effect’, incorrectly perceive schooling as a solution to the crisis of poverty. She states that if nothing is changed in an economy that flourishes on unpaid or ill-paid labour of children, success of schooling is a misplaced expectation to start with. The teachers find it within their rights and duties to teach children the moral code of conduct about cleanliness and sexuality as well. She suggests that schools as institutions have the potential to weaken the traditional caste and gender boundaries; however, they end up representing ‘institutionalisation of upper-caste and middle-class worldviews in (post)colonial India’ (p. 154). Yunus finds that teachers’ negative associations with the reference ‘sarkari’ children and ‘lack of understanding of living in poverty’ (p. 151) contribute to creating conditions that push children out of school.
The book offers insights into how children experience poverty and schooling. The ethnographic method helps in creating a vivid imagination of children’s interpretation of situations, relationships and negotiations they do on a daily basis to survive and pursue their interests. Yunus prioritises people’s versions of their life situations, which allows the emergence of complexities and deviations. Variations in children’s accounts and observations of teachers’ behaviours serve as important reminders that everyday life does not always follow the logic of a clear pattern.
Having said that, although the scope of the study is limited to children’s experiences, the very possibility of the complexity of teachers’ own worlds, professional grievances and dissatisfaction along with their private lives beyond the school is not accounted for. One sees them only briefly as individuals with different temperaments and codes of conduct. They also appear as people left unsupported and unappreciated in a system that expects them to be their employees rather than teachers to the children. But they are not granted the same ontological gaze as the children are.
The ethnographic observations and analysis could have been made richer had children’s experience not been fuzzily blanketed together using administrative categories (Others, Other Backward Classes, Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe [ST]) throughout the book. Using caste to mean the ‘varna system’, which Yunus goes by, provides neither the theoretical nuance of the concept nor the actual practice of it by people. Without this clarity, the state categories appear opaque. In addition, the concepts of caste and ‘labour class’ by definition end up excluding tribal cultures and religion from its framework, even though the ST and Muslim children’s accounts are used in the study. One is left to imagine if the specific cultural backgrounds of tribal and Muslim children contribute anything to the experiences of family life and schooling as has been generally claimed. How do teachers perceive them? Do the school and classroom end up marginalising them further and differently?
Overall, the study seems to be sympathetic to the ‘labour class’, the working-class children, and provides ample details of their lives for readers to take note of the inequalities and systemic marginalisation faced by them. This is no doubt an important scholarship work. There are also suggestions for both policymaking in general and teacher education in particular, based on her analysis, which is rarely found in such scholarship.
