A global approach to school education and local reality: A case study of community participation in Haryana,India

Gender perspective

To look from the gender perspective, it is important to mention that Haryana is a patriarchal society. As per census 2011, Haryana has recorded its sex ratio as 879 which is less than the national sex ratio (943). ‘Female foeticide, domestic violence, dowry deaths and harassment, caste based oppressions and cultural restrictions on women's access to educational and health opportunities are some of the well documented and commented aspects of gender oppression prevalent in all the socio economic sections of Haryana’ (Vandana, 2004: 263).The government has taken many affirmative actions, such as women having 33% representation in panchyats. Even VEC and School Management Committees (SMC) have representation for females. But these representation policies have hardly any impact on improving the female condition in society. In a comparative study on Haryana and Himachal Pradesh's schooling by Marie Eve Bondroite (PROBE 1999:122), it was found that there is less equality in Haryana among male and female. It was observed that many mothers in Haryana have no idea of the cost of schooling and considered this to be their husbands’ business.

In terms of participation, community participation turns out to be only the participation of men. VEC meeting registers revealed that female members generally remain absent. Another issue that can be an important factor responsible for ‘no female participation’ and also shows the face of patriarchal society is the ‘Veil System’. The veil system is still prevalent in today's society. Females keep themselves under veil in front of their elders. This veil system ensures that females don't speak or participate in front of the elders of the village. These rigid social traditions don't let them gain confidence to participate in public spheres. This culture of grabbing social spaces by the male and lack of confidence among females is cultivated during their schooling. It was found that in the co-educational school, there were different sections for boys and girls in the same class. If there is a need to organize a combined class, teachers have to seek permission of the principals. This was done on the instructions of village panchyats. ⁶ In such gender-based segregation, females don't gain confidence to share public spaces with the male. The field evidences show that given proper opportunity, females can play an important role in solving educational problems of the village. In all the villages, it was found that when parents were invited to form a SMC, mostly mothers came to the school. ⁷ The principal of one surveyed school shared her experience, saying that whenever they call the parents of any child, generally mothers come to the school. ⁸ In spite of social barriers, they try to listen to the complaints from the teacher and understand the issues. Female participation generally was found visible in ensuring the regular attendance of their child in school. There is a need to focus on this potential role of the female. Given the social and cultural barriers, it was noticed that mothers have a comparatively high rate of participation in attending school meetings or visiting schools when they are supposed to deal with a female teacher or it is a girl's school. Male to female interaction still remains an uncommon occurrence.

Caste perspective

Besides gender, caste remains another social impediment obstructing community participation. As with female representation, scheduled caste (SC) representatives also have seats in VECs and SMCs. In a similar manner, their participation also remains rooted in social and cultural traditions of hierarchies. Incidences of social tension between upper and lower castes outside the school premises, are reflected within school functioning also. To cite one incident from the field, in one of the surveyed schools, a cook for the mid-day meal was appointed from lower castes. Although the social profile of the school maintains the majority of students to be lower caste, still parents of upper castes objected to the appointment. These small number of upper caste children did not eat food while the lower caste cook was there. Subsequently that cook was replaced with a new cook from upper caste. It shows the extent of influence of upper caste. ⁹ These incidents certainly negatively affect the participatory process, since the SMCs and VECs could not take action against such deeds in spite of the presence of SC representatives.

Another incident demonstrates the relationship between upper class teacher and lower class students, reflecting the social barriers. Generally teachers ask students to fetch water for the class teacher. When this school was visited for survey, the teacher herself brought water for me, when asked why she didn't ask any student to get the water, her reply carried caste notions. She replied that there were only two students from upper caste and both of them were absent that day, so she couldn't allow these untouchables to touch the water. These social division inside the classroom reflect the outside social conditions. Upper caste teachers generally don't consider the studies of these students necessary. Acharya (1985: 1787) also analyses this aspect

…they feared that universal and compulsory enrolment would deprive them of the easy supply of child labour. In that case, they would be forced to hire in adult people instead of child labour at a higher wage which would cause an increase in their cost of agricultural production. Besides they feared that labour relations would deteriorate if laboring classes were educated. It was generally apprehended that the labouring classes would refuse to submit to the authority of higher strata and would try to assert their rights and privileges once they got a little education.

Teacher–community linkages

The association of the teaching community with the parents/stakeholders is a must criterion for invoking community participation in school development. Though different mechanisms and structures have been introduced to encourage community participation, until the teachers are involved for this purpose, it is impossible to obtain the desired results. However the perception of school authorities towards the stakeholders and their social background has remained a determining factor to enhance and/or impede the community participation process. These schools mostly serve the most marginalized sections of the community (both in terms of caste and class). Interviews with the government teachers reveal that they generally consider that these communities are not interested in education. The parents cannot provide any academic support to their children as they themselves are illiterate. The issue of first-generation learners remains a major challenge for these families. ¹⁰ The parents are criticized that they are not bothered whether their child has finished homework or not. These communities don't have traditions of schooling in their family. The incentives in the form of scholarships, free uniforms, books and no fees, are the only aspects, as mentioned by teachers, where the parents show interest. ¹¹ It is said that the only occasions when the parents visit the school are when there is some delay in distribution of fellowship. Pointing to their occupational limitations, one teacher observed, ‘As the parents of these children are daily wage labourers, they treat government school as free crèches where their children are safe for the whole day with free mid day meal.’ ¹² Generally it was found that the teachers looked down on the parents as they don't consider them interested in education. It is to be noted that the statements of teachers were mostly caste specific. Regarding their perception about utility of community participation, the teachers opined that ‘what participation these people can provide? It would be more helpful if they don't interfere in school's functioning. The parents are mostly illiterate and cannot understand the technicalities of school functioning. Their participation and regular visit to school would create only undue interference in smooth school functioning.’ ¹³ The school authorities generally could not see any value attached to community participation. The interpretations and stands taken by teachers regarding communities and their social backwardness only reveal the social prejudices of these communities shared in the society. As Sunny (2011) observed, how far can we encourage individual teachers, who are also part and parcel of existing social practices and perspectives, to act for change, when the school system itself is not geared for it? Teachers’ views and their reactions are part of the social processes. In this context, Lipman (1997 as cited in Anderson, 1998) found that participatory school restructuring cannot transform the educational experiences of marginalized students unless changes occur at both personal and societal levels. She argues that educators' beliefs and assumptions, as well as relations of power in schools and communities, must be challenged. The government schools are the places where the cultural capital possessed by the stakeholders are not respected or valued. Cultural capital ¹⁴ informs relationships between schooling and family/social structure and this is also seen to shape the teacher's role in negotiating or not negotiating with students with different cultural capital (Sunny, 2011). The above discussed teachers’ perception of community and its relation with cultural capital is further very well noted by Sunny (2011: 29),

… as the common practices of schooling do not accommodate people without cultural capital, their ‘deficiency’ is seen as the reason for not achieving schooling. This turns the problem on its head because the individual is blamed for her social deprivation. But the role of modern schooling should be to enable people who have been historically deprived of cultural capital. It would be expected to shape a space that is not simply physical, but social – that could be enabling, supportive and dialectical. And if such spaces are built, teachers as part of such a system would need to act differently through a different nature of textbook, perspective and practices of dialogue in the classrooms. But in the given socio-historic situations, the teacher herself as a part of the class-caste-gendered practices of society does not act for change.

Another dimension of hierarchy between teacher and community is visible in terms of class differences. The economic status of teacher and a common villager indicate that these sections belong to two different classes. Kingdon (2010), while citing the case of Uttar Pradesh (UP), argues that the ratio of teacher salary to per capita income tells us how affluent the teacher is, with respect to the average person in the country. Further, it also indicates the social distance between the teacher and the taught. PROBE Team report (1999) mentioned that within the rural society, teachers remain relatively privileged in terms of class, caste and gender. Taking class first, government teachers almost inevitably belong to the more affluent sections of the rural society, by virtue of their relatively high salaries and favourable terms of employment. The poor parents face greater difficulty in establishing rapport with the teacher. In this context, Kingdon (2010: 6) argued:

When teachers are so much better-off than the students, they can look down on students with disdain since children in government schools typically come from poorer than average backgrounds in any case, and may come to school shabby, unclean and underfed. This gaping social distance may also partly explain the high teacher absence rate if well-paid teachers feel it ‘beneath them’ to teach such poor children or if it causes them to not take the education of these children seriously. Such social distance represents very unequal relations between teachers and the village citizenry and it may explain – at least in part – why community participation in monitoring education via Village Education Committees and School Education Committees has apparently not been effective in improving school and teacher accountability in India: ‘citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it.

Capacity-building scenario

The decentralization would necessarily mean transfer of responsibilities and powers to the lower level unit and functionaries. The decentralized units such as VEC and SMC have to be capable and efficient to shoulder the new responsibilities. Reflecting on the issue of decentralization, Lauglo (1990, as cited in Govinda, 1997) states that the distribution of authority will be conditioned by the confidence that politicians and officials have in their subordinates. If they are ill-trained and poorly motivated, their superiors will seek to simplify and standardize the tasks, using highly directive supervision. This is the case in many developing countries. This clearly highlights how fundamental is the need to build management capacities if community participation under decentralized management is to become a reality. A piecemeal approach of transferring powers to local leadership without strengthening internal management of institutions may lead to undue interference and subject the schools to undue political pressure from parochial elements in local community (Govinda, 2003b). The training needs to be viewed as purposive strategy with clearly set goals matching the overall objective and requirements of the department.

The ground reality reveals that capacity building is found to be the weakest aspect of the community participation agenda. The whole training process, as underlined by practising educationists, is reduced to one-time workshops and is mired in the lack of conceptualization of training as a pedagogic tool that can enhance learning. Modules produced at the State Council of Educational Research and Training and District Institute of Educational Training are simply applied on an arithmetic proportional basis, depending only on the numbers of schools and teachers to be covered (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2009). To quote Haryana Appraisal Report 2011–2012 (p.135), on the nature of training offered to Block Resource Persons (BRPs) ¹⁶ in 2010–2011, ‘One day long training programme was organized for all ABRCs to enable them about the implementation of SSA. One day training programme is being organized for all ABRCs. Besides, two days long training programme is also planned to organize for about 600 ABRCs on action research.’

An interview with SSA personnel at District Project Implementation Unit (DPIU) at Jind informed that the training programmes are kept as the last priority. It has been further informed that the training programmes are conducted at the end of the financial year to show the utilization of grants in files. These officials could not recall anything about training content except the number of person trained. ¹⁷ It would be very relevant to quote the VEC/VCC training plan from District Annual Work Plan and Budget (AWP&B), to indicate that the major focus is only on estimating the budget and counting the numbers of days for training. To quote the progress in the context of community/VEC training as mentioned in AWP&B for district Jind, ‘VEC members’ training for two days will be organized at cluster level in the month of Jan/Feb 2010. All ABRCs of the distance will be trained at DPIU Jind as Master Trainer for VEC training. 1569 male and 1047 female = 2616 VEC members will be trained. Sanctioned Budget during this year was Rs 1.89 lacs out of which Rs nil are utilized up to 31–12–2009.’ (AWP&B, 2010–2011: 57)

The basic emphasis is on producing numbers of person trained and the amount of resources utilized than focusing on real output. The content of training, the quality issues and collection of feedback of earlier training or the impact of earlier training programmes are not given any importance. Interviews with VEC and SMC members reveal that capacity building training has hardly been of any benefit to them. They were hardly able to recollect any aspect of training. To cite one participant's remarks on training camps, ‘the training camps are of no use in terms of enhancing teaching skills. These are like tea-snack party.’ Thus the capacity building scenario presents a very dismal picture and raises serious questions about the success of community participation programmes.