‘Let’s hear how students feel …’: Representations of schooling on news television in India

FTN

Sagarika Ghose opened her programme by introducing video-recorded questions by two students from the prestigious Campion School in Mumbai. These first two questions to the Minister focused on one of the features of the Act highlighted by Ghose in her introduction, namely, the abolition of all examinations except the school-leaving examination and the substitution of letter grades for numerical marks. The concerns voiced by these two students focused on the impact of these reforms on high-achieving students and would become a recurrent theme in student questions. Student 1 emphasised the time and effort that children devote to school – a recurrent theme in subsequent comments:

Hi, I am Devanshu Gulati and I would like to ask the honorable Minister that if Board exams are replaced then what will be an alternative method of testing the knowledge and the skill that students have accumulated over ten years of studying? (Student 1, male)

Student 2 highlighted the high-stakes nature of school-leaving examinations by drawing connections between achievement and subsequent choices for further study and employment. Science subjects have historically always required the highest marks and enjoyed the most prestige in popular constructions of academic ability:

I would like to ask Mr. Sibal a question. If the honorable minister plans on removing the board exams and the percentage system, how will we know where do we lie? Won’t the under achievers and over achievers come under the same category? How will we know which subject to take whether arts, commerce or science? And which career option to choose? (Student 2, male)

Of the 15 students on FTN (including the first four questioners), 10 spoke to these concerns. Student 3 asked the Minister whether students could be expected to do well in Class 12 exams without the ‘pressure of exams’ throughout their schooling. Sibal and three other panelists, including ironically both private school principals, immediately signalled their disapproval of this question by criticising high-stakes standardised testing. However, this concerted avoidance of student concerns did not deter four other students from trying to explain to the Minister how the substitution of grades for marks would disadvantage high-achieving students. Student 5 was introduced by the Anchor as Aditya Vignesh from DAV Boys Secondary School, another prestigious private school from the southern Indian city of Chennai. This boy reminded the adults about the reality of parental pressure on children to become and remain ‘the first ranker’. This theme was echoed by another male student 9 who also talked about parental pressure for academic achievement.

Student 8 (also male ³ ) proposed an alternative scale for the grading system, which would illuminate the differences in student achievement. While these differences are numerically miniscule, 1 mark or 0.5 of a mark can stand in the way of admission to high-status colleges and universities. Student 6 was the most succinct on this theme:

What do we do with the real, real, real toppers seriously because … the grading will generalize the students … there will be no difference? (Student 6, male ⁴ )

A female student reminded the audience about the fundamental disconnects between secondary and higher education. Her comment exposed the limits of the rhetoric of creativity and choice that feature prominently in the comments of the Minister. She pointed out that without reforms in college admission procedures, secondary students were unlikely to be able to take advantage of the purportedly child-friendly curricular reforms in the Act:

You were talking about hobbies and harboring creativity and everything but I am a class XII student with applied art as one of my electives and I am not allowed to include it in my best of four. So isn’t that discouraging people from taking up subjects like applied arts? (Student 13, female ⁵ )

These comments provide insights into some of the subjectivities and lived realities that constitute Indian childhoods. These students have internalised adult and broader societal messages about ideal and less-than-ideal children that centre on academic achievement or the lack thereof. Students 5 and 9 represented parents as the source of unrelenting pressure to secure the highest marks and, relatedly, highly remunerative employment. This orientation towards intense competition and high achievement can be traced back to colonial rationalities of schooling, which were dominated by concerns for employability and relatedly social mobility for a lucky few. As Sarangapani (2003) reminds us, the history of schooling in post-colonial developing countries does not include ‘myths or ideals (such as the Victorian faith in the liberating role of education)’ (p. 252).

It is in this discursive context that children are viewed as and view themselves as ‘becomings’ where their value will be determined by their future achievements. Thus, the children who argue against the reforms of the examination system are exercising political agency based on a sophisticated and situated understanding of their positioning and interests as high academic achievers. These children’s understanding of how schooling mediates one’s positioning in the power structure is far more complex than the depoliticised and individualised ways in which the Minister and the media present their ideal of a ‘bright student’ and ‘well-educated person’. In particular, the format of the FTN programme creates a binary between traditional understandings of high achievement (based on marks and ranks) and the supposedly new ways the state requires Indian children and their families to view themselves, as exemplified in the quote below:

I’ll give you another example, all of Europe you have what is called the International Baccalaureate. Now the International Baccalaureate is also in India, in Kerala and some other schools … You think the people who pass out of ⁶ International Baccalaureate are any less endowed than students who do class X? So I think that’s a myth. Issue is not how well you do in exams, issue is how well educated you are. What kind of sensitive citizen are you going to be as you move into society? You see, this is not about exams, this is about India. (Sibal in response to Student 3)

The remaining three students on FTN earned the Minister’s emphatic approval because they explicitly positioned themselves as supportive of his initiatives to reduce the stress engineered by continuous testing and examination. They used a variety of communication strategies to state their position. The first student drew on personal experience:

Mr. Sibal, I completely agree with you and I feel that, I also took the International Baccalaureate exams and I feel that although the course was really rigorous I felt that I was on par with everyone else and it gave equal opportunity to fellow students you know to excel, and so I completely agree. (Student 5)

The second student used humour to which the Minister and the audience responded with laughter and applause:

Sir if you don’t mind taking a look at this wonderful video that’s playing, do you see any child who is happy after solving a sum, does he say that ‘Yippy! I solved a sum!’ [Audience laughter and applause]. So I think that we should decrease the course. (Student 9)

The third student framed an appeal to the Minister in response to which the Minister castigated parents who supported the traditional system of continuous examination as impediments to the future well-being of the nation:

In summary, this analysis has identified how children can construct ‘power relations on their own grounds, using specific tactics to maintain political dynamics that underpin their own positions and interests’ (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 26). One of the ways in which they do this is by talking about how they view themselves – as ‘beings’, in the here and now – and the issues that are of most significant to them. Student 9 claims the right to be happy – now – while other children similarly claim time for themselves, the opportunity to be creative and so forth. Minister Sibal represents children as symbols of the future well-being of the nation to the almost complete exclusion of the lived realities of the children in front of him. However, the children are also aware and able to engage in the politics of symbols where Sibal represents not only the authority but also the responsibilities of the state. The multiple ways in which children purposefully and competently ‘shape and rehearse certain kinds of subjectivities and agencies’ (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 27) in order to take their place as full members of their societies are also apparent in the other programme WTP.

WTP

On WTP, the children’s participation provide further insights into the relational ways in which children make meaning about themselves, their schooling and society as a whole. As previously mentioned, the Anchor was primarily concerned with the question of ‘integration’ or the entry of disadvantaged students into elite private schools through the 25% reservation policy. ⁸ Four out of the six students on this programme spoke to this theme. The first student to be invited to question Mr. Sibal named the problems of peer bullying and harassment that are likely to occur with the implementation of the reservation policy:

Sibal responded to Student 1 by stating that he was unwilling to ‘legislate on these things’ which could be addressed by a ‘sensitive’ school management. Later, the Anchor reminded the adult audience members who voiced similar concerns that it was not possible to ‘legislate attitudes’. However, the problem of harassment reappeared in the testimonials of all three ‘integration’ students who talked about the different kinds of discrimination they encountered because of their poverty. While Dutt and Sibal endeavoured to reduce their stories to testimonials of academic merit and successful social integration, each of these students challenged these simplistic representations of their lived experience of class difference in elite schools.

The first student, Sagar, described the material deficits that he had to overcome in order to be successful in the academic and social domains of his school. He acquired fluency in English as well as a cell phone; however, these acquisitions were not sufficient to protect him from bullying because of his background of poverty. However, after listening to Sagar, Sibal continued to insist that closing the class divide was as simple as a friendship between a man who owned a Mercedes and another who owned a scooter:

The next ‘integration’ student, Naveen Yadav, also talked about the ways in which his background of relative poverty shaped his experiences at school. He chose not to talk about his relationship with peers but he did make it clear that he and his parents could not participate in the social activities of the school. Naveen also emphasised that access to elite schooling (through the merit-based scholarship) would have made little difference in his life without access to high-quality higher education. In his case, he was only able to go to a reputable university because his school (Springdale) paid the fees. However, while Naveen’s integration story focused on the insurmountable barriers of poverty, Dutt and Sibal focused on his perseverance and resilience:

The third and last ‘integration’ student, Yogesh (who received the least minutes of speaking time of the three), also chose not to address the preferred topic of integration. Instead, he emphasised that poverty did not equate with lack of academic ability and that given the opportunity poor children were every bit as capable of making a significant contribution to their country. Using his own success as an example, he argued that education is a ‘need’ for poor children and that private schools should reserve seats for them at all class levels, not just Class 1. Yogesh is the only student to explicitly reproduce the dominant discourse of children as the future of the nation. At the same time, he challenges the dominant formulation that places the responsibility for being contributing citizens on individuals. His comment highlighted the role of the state in removing barriers to education for poor children to which Sibal responded with a familiar refrain of not ‘forcing’/legislating admissions policies for private schools:

Other than Yogesh, few of the students explicitly aligned themselves with dominant nationalist discourses of childhood which produce children as objects and possessions of the Indian nation. While this study does not have the scope to explain this pattern in any depth, it is useful to note that emergent literature on the new middle-classes notes a strong disinclination to engage the state except when necessary to protect class interests (Baviskar and Ray, 2011; Fernandes, 2006). This is a key point of distinction between the traditional and emerging middle-classes along with an unapologetic preference for conspicuous consumption on the part of the latter. However, the egalitarian impulses of even the former group have rarely objected to the stratified education system and the underlying hierarchical logic that sorts and ranks social difference in punitive ways. Instead, the gains in egalitarianism have come from persistent struggle by marginalised groups. It is a discourse of difference that works to legitimise and reproduce the privileges of the extent ruling classes (in schools and beyond) by constructing the poor and marginalised as inherently lacking or deficient. Thus, the lack of academic success among the poor and socially disadvantaged is attributed to deficits in the individual, the family and interestingly, public education. In short, schools play a key role in the ways in which elites ‘define themselves against an imagined other, whom they deem less worthy and capable, and without whom they could not declare their own distinctions’ (Howard and Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2010: 4).

The remainder of my discussion provides situated insights about how children constructed the imagined Other, specifically poor children and government school teachers. A relational discourse based on binary and hierarchical thinking and notions of less-than and better-than permeates these constructions of the Other. Student 2 explicitly acknowledged his privileged positionality as a child who has been ‘spoon-fed’. In other words, a child who can take access to quality education for granted. This boy also framed social inequality as a cultural problem by naming a political culture in which basic social entitlements are not guaranteed by the state but subject to purchasing capacity. In other words, it is access to formalised political power and not inherent ability that determines individual success or failure:

One of my questions was, how do we know that the money is actually going to get there? Now I hate to say it, but there is a lot of corruption in this country, right. [Laughs from audience]. And money does go into the pockets … Because I agree these kids need the education you know more than most of us do. We are born with it, spoon-fed. But they aren’t. (Student 2, male)

The other two students echoed the more common us-them binary which maintains the social stratification and fragmentation that characterises India today. Student 3 echoed these broader socio-cultural discourses which reaffirm formal Western-style schooling as necessary for the socialisation and for the integration of disadvantaged children:

Student 5 rehearsed the same discourse of deficit which is applied not just to individuals and groups but the public sector as a whole by many Indians located in aspiring and traditional middle-class. The decline in status of the occupation of teaching has intensified with the privatisation of education and is intrinsically linked to the global assault on public education by neoliberal financial institutions (Kumar, 2006; PROBE Team, 1999). Student 5 repeated the popular refrain about teachers in government schools as incompetent and indeed unemployable anywhere except in the public education system:

Sir, you talked about taking teachers who are actually unemployed right now, who are BA’s and MA’s, who have passed out (graduated) of colleges but are right now unemployed, Sir, why does the government have to take the worst of the lot? [Laughs from the audience]. I mean those people are unemployed … (Student 5, male)

On both television programmes, we see and hear children acknowledge and engage with adult- and state-constructed discourses about childhood, schooling and society. However, the normative dimension to the ways in which children make relational meaning about themselves and communicate with authority figures does not mean an absence of political struggle (Kallio and Häkli, 2011). On WTP, the testimonials of the ‘integration’ students capture how children co-construct their selfhoods and affirm their lived realities to speak back to imposed positions of ‘student’ and ‘national subject’ in complex ways. The comments of the other three students also represent the ways in which these relatively privileged children construct and position themselves in relation to their lived and imagined worlds. All three name power differences in their society (having to do with political power, cultural capital and occupational status) which have embodied and material impact on their own lives as well as those of disadvantaged children. Thus, a relational reading of politics and political identities, such as the one in this article, supports more expansive and complex understandings of politics in childhood.