Books

THE POLITICS OF GENDER, COMMUNITY AND MODERNITY: Essays on Education in India by Nita Kumar. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007.

SCHOOL EDUCATION, PLURALISM AND MARGINALITY: Comparative Perspectives edited by Christine Sleeter, Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, Arvind K. Mishra and Sanjay Kumar. Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi, 2012.

THE world of education has had a dual relationship with the transition to modernity. It gets transformed by modernity and in the process of being transformed it also develops as an instrument of change. Thus it gains and loses independence at the same time. The two roles – being a recipient of change and an agent of change – happen almost simultaneously. Modern nation states far too heavily rely on education for creating homogenized, modern national societies. Education thus comes to be vested with unprecedented roles and responsibilities under modern conditions.

It is basically this set of issues that the two books under review are primarily concerned with. There is much that is common in the two works. Their vantage points are of course different. Nita Kumar’s approach is historical and she surveys a long temporal stretch of over two centuries while retaining her focus on India. The second book is more sociological in approach and covers a large area. It has essays on education from societies as diverse as USA, UK, South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and, of course, India. Whereas the first volume has temporal depth, the second has a rich spatial spread. It gives us a richness of a comparative perspective.

In spite of a difference of vantage point, certain fundamental questions are implicit in both the works. Is education an instrument for transformation or for the maintenance of status quo? Is it possible for education to be vested with a revolutionary agenda or is it merely a device in the hands of the state to ensure control and conformity? Is education a part of pluralizing impulses or homogenizing ones? In other words, can it be used to nurture and promote diversity, even as it creates uniformity and standardization? These are difficult questions and the authors in both the volumes have attempted to engage with them.

Nita Kumar does not look at the world of education in isolation and enlarges this world by bringing family and community into it. She looks upon the two as important educating institutions and therefore an integral part of her discussion. Thus her work focuses not just on the formal institutions of learning but also on the functional ones.

India was modernized broadly in the process of being colonized. The two happened together. The stamp of colonialism was firmly imprinted on India’s modernization. This implied, among other things, that unlike Europe, India did not make a neat transition from predation to production. Both predation and production went simultaneously. Education played a great role in this. It is significant to note that the foundations of modern education in India were laid during the colonial period.

Modern education in India represented an exogenous force, completely divorced from the indigenous systems and traditions. Incidentally this exogenous character of education was also extended to the content and nature of education that was imparted. As a result, the hitherto powerful though informal sources of education (like family and community) got eliminated from the very manner in which education was conceptualized. In the colonial paradigm, it was not only indigenous knowledge that was excluded but also the family and the community as instruments in the transmission of education. Women too were excluded from this world. Modern education actually established itself through a series of exclusions carried out at many levels. Thus, ‘education caused the displacement of Indian by western modes of thinking, but not in a way that liberated Indians, rather in a way that enslaved them, or more mildly speaking, disoriented them’ (Nita Kumar, p. 11).

The colonial educational project – of formalization, centralization and integration – was only partially successful. The displacement of the local by the colonial happened smoothly in the metropolitan centres. But the rural areas and the small towns retained their autonomy where the family and the community continued to be important agents in education. This ‘incomplete and uneven colonization’ of education created multiple educational domains in the country – the colonial, the indigenous and, finally, the nationalist. The nationalist intelligentsia in colonial India succeeded in making a distinction between the ‘baby and the bathwater’ of modern education. They gladly embraced English education and through it the values of Enlightenment such as rationalism, secularism and universalism. But they firmly rejected colonial domination and also colonial education. They, therefore, encompassed modern education in their educational agenda but not its colonial accompaniment.

Nita Kumar suggests that this very incompleteness of the colonization of Indian education was largely because the colonial rulers refrained from pressing into service two powerful agencies of socialization – family and community. In a way we were saved from a comprehensive and all-pervasive colonial domination, partly because the colonial rulers could not, or chose not to, colonize the inner domains of the Indian social order.

Is there a lesson for us in all this today? The colonial model was unidimensional and exogenous; it eliminated the indigenous. The indigenous model incidentally too was unidimensional; it rejected the colonial but also the modern along with it. It threw the baby out with the bathwater. Both the models, based either on omnibus acceptance or an overall rejection, have something common: they are both unselective. They are unselective either in choosing or in rejecting. The way out lies precisely in being selective, in both choosing and rejecting:

It seems clear to us that we stand at a moment in time ...where the only valid choice of path seems to be one leading towards science, but environmentally sensitive science; technology, but culturally appropriate technology; and development, but development aimed at redressing gender and other inequalities (Nita Kumar, p. 305).

Nita Kumar’s concerns regarding the content and the objectives of education tie up with the concerns of the second book under review. The dilemma faced by the authors of the second book is clear and explicit: how to make the world of education socially inclusive without making it integrative. The search for an answer to this question has taken the authors of the volume to different parts of the world. It is now widely recognized that all modern societies contain within their fold marginal groups and communities, even though their size may vary. The recent thrust in the social sciences on multiculturalism is simply a way of recognizing the significant presence of groups and communities living at the margins, even in the developed countries. All the people, groups and communities at the margins have faced fundamental dilemmas relating to the prospects of their upward mobility. Their precise dilemma can be understood as the following syllogism:

a) The awareness that their backwardness or marginality is historically constituted and is a carry-over from the traditions and histories of their societies.

b) Modernization in general and modern education in particular, provides them a unique opportunity to move away from the margins and towards the mainstream of social life.

c) The resultant integration, though incrementally beneficial, entails the loss of their culture and a perpetual humiliation through contact with ‘cultural superiors’. Thus the breakdown of isolation and marginality comes at a great cost – loss of culture and freedom. It is painful to have to give up ones culture and freedom; it is also painful to remain poor and at the margins. What to do?

This, in a nutshell, has been the dilemma of the Dalits and tribals in India, the Mapuche in Chile, the Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Roma in Europe. Is there a framework of education that can ensure their autonomy, break their isolation and yet prepare them pedagogically for modern life? This is one big question the book tries to critically engage with. It is a complex question and the authors of the book, to their credit, have dealt with it in a complex manner, without reducing it to any simple formula.

In a search for answers to their questions, the editors of the book, however, place an unreasonably heavy burden on education: it should liberate and transform the underprivileged; it should equip them with necessary skills for them to claim their share in modern life; it should also sensitize them towards their own marginal status and offer strategies for overcoming this: ‘What we need, and this book offers, is a view of school education that is informed by analysis of the material, political, and ideological underpinnings of inequality, and analyses that are articulated by communities that experience oppression directly and understand how specific forms of injustice have been successfully challenged in the past’ (p. 3).

Even though the two books are connected in their basic premise, the articles in the second book operate with a different set of binaries from the first book. The colonial/indigenous binary dominant in the book by Nita Kumar is replaced by a different set of binaries, e.g., the elite/disprivileged, inclusive/exclusive, plural/integrative, pedagogic content/social orientation among others, in the second book. The new binaries help enlarge the scope of the discussion and bring a whole range of important issues within the range of the concerns of the authors.

The basic problems that beset our schools have been identified by the editors as ‘poor learning achievements, low retention, high dropout rates and indifferent attitude of the parents and communities for the school’ (p. 4). The way out of these problems is to place the emphasis on ‘social inclusion and pluralism as the core principles of the pedagogic conceptual framework, practices and processes’ (p. 4). This, however, is easier said than done. The basic trouble is that it is not always easy to achieve the core values of social inclusion and pluralism simultaneously. The book displays a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards modernity but settles down to articulate the core solutions within the framework of modernity. It then becomes necessary to recognize the contradictions between the normative framework of modernity and the lived realities within it. Modernity normatively celebrates plurality but the essential processes of modernity engender homogeneity. This is as true of education as of other agents of modernity.

Plurality as a condition was certainly not invented by modernity. It is a pervasive carry-over from pre-modern times. But modernity does bring in a new insistence that this plurality be preserved sans its hierarchy. This insistence actually imparts a Janus like character to modernity. Its basic processes (industrialism, mobility) tend to erode plurality and homogenize people, cultures and communities by destroying their cultural nests and flattening out their cultural distinctions. At the same time it introduces a new insistence that plurality be preserved and nurtured. And that education should serve as one of the instruments to preserve and celebrate plurality.

Thus the world of education under modern conditions gets deeply divided between the normative and the real. There is generally a big gap between what it endeavours to do and what it ends up doing. Under pre-modern conditions, education was seen as a marker of stability and not of change. It was meant to underwrite and endorse the status quo, not question or challenge it. Modern education, by contrast, is expected to be a vigilant watchdog, and question and critique rather than accept and endorse. The issues become much more complicated when the specific case studies under discussion are colonial societies such as India.

For India (and colonial societies in general) modern education was an exogenous influence, as mentioned earlier. Modern education was introduced in India by alien colonial rulers, not by blending the modern with the traditional, but by displacing the traditional. Modern educational institutions began to be established around the beginning of the 19th century and, by the end of the century, the traditional systems of education had virtually disappeared. The new education was pressed into the service of colonialism. The justification for colonialism was provided above all by new education.

The education system in modern India thus brought about change without betterment, and expansion without any structural transformation. Education became merely a tool in the hands of the state. It acquired an instrumental relevance to accomplish and fulfil the modern and colonial agenda. The educational system that developed in independent India after 1947, carried strong resemblances from the colonial system. The task of transforming this system so as to fulfil some of the priorities listed by the editors of the volume is indeed quite gigantic, and requires a fundamental reorientation, both at the philosophical and pedagogical levels.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I focuses on ‘Marginal Communities, Social Exclusion and Schooling’. It raises important questions of why school education has failed to reach out to groups that need it the most. Why is it that the major expansion of education in independent India has failed to be inclusive? The answer provided by R. Govinda and Madhumita Bandyopadhyay (‘Achieving Universal Elementary Education’) is that it entails much more than expansion and resource investment; it requires ‘a change in the mindsets’. ‘Objectives of education will have to focus more on collective rather than individual excellence that supports the position that all are capable rather than a few; intelligence is multiple rather than a matter of solving puzzles with only one right answer; imagination and emotional engagement are as important as technical expertise; ability to imagine alternative futures and to solve open-ended problems, and interpersonal skills are integral to the definition of intelligence. School performance is important but not the final benchmark of personal growth and excellence’ (p. 49).

Part II engages with a discussion on ‘Hegemonies, Formal Schooling Systems, and the Child’. It raises certain key issues, at a theoretical level, on some of the major structural determinants that shape the trajectory of education. Thus the range of options available for educational transformation is quite limited and severely constrained by the overarching structures of power and production. Education, after all, carries with it the stamp of the broad context within which it operates. Hence, ‘within a social democratic welfarist framework, education continues to play a key role in continuing, reproducing unequal and exploitative economic and social relations, reproducing the labour-capital relations, capitalism itself’ (David Hill, Caste, ‘Race’ and Class Inequality: A Marxist Analysis’, p. 199).

Part III extends this discussion to ‘Pluralism, Citizenship and School Education’. It includes a number of important case studies from parts of Europe and South Africa. This section describes the kind of challenges that are confronted by education while trying to transmit values of citizenship in plural and conflict ridden societies. The task is by no means easy and some of the essays in this part of the book have explored it in the context of South Africa with deep insight and sensitivity.

Part IV of the book is on ‘Developing Teaching and Learning Methods: The Social Context’. It is more in the nature of an overview. It picks up the questions raised in the previous parts and proceeds to construct concrete models of pedagogic practices that are rooted in specific experiences. The major focus here is on ‘culturally responsive or culturally appropriate schools’ (p. 12) which must make good use of the cultural resources of communities for pedagogic purposes. This principle is adequately substantiated by the last essay in the volume by Sanjay Kumar and Rafiul Ahmed (‘Alternative Schooling for Children from the Musahar Community: An Innovative Experiment’), which describes the experiment of an alternative schooling system, developed in Gaya in Bihar, for an oppressed, low caste community. This experiment focused on building the social and cognitive capacities of the community by using its own cultural resources. This has had the big advantage of linking education to people’s own experiences. As a result, the transformative potential of such an education is much higher compared to the ‘alien’ and the externally constructed pedagogic processes, expected to transform from without.

The book in its entirety can be easily divided into an empirical component and a generic conceptual one. The empirical component in which different case studies from different countries are presented and the problems posed in the context of existing practices is easily the richer part of the book. The generic conceptual component is, however, not always rooted in the case studies and does not always emanate from them. It also appears to be spreadeagled between a pluralist pull and an integrationist one. And so, even as the values of citizenship and social cohesion are generally upheld, so are the values of diversity and preservation of cultural richness and autonomy. This is perhaps inevitable in a volume in which the contributors are drawn from different persuasions and ideological locations and often speak from different vantage points. The book generally refrains from imposing a single perspective and is basically multi-perspectival in nature. On the whole, the volume dabbles into three different territories: one, some kind of a loosely held blueprint of what ideally the role of education should be in creating a desirable social universe; two, a recognition of the multiple problems and obstacles in education which act as barriers in the realization of certain cherished social goals; and three, rich and instructive descriptions of actual case studies drawn from different countries and societies. There is little doubt that the book is at its best in the third venture.

Overall, the book is an extremely valuable resource. Its significance is three-fold. One, at an operative level, it discusses the inner world of education – teachers, students, curriculum, textbooks examinations. At the same time, it also looks at the world of education in a wider setting – democracy, pluralism, multiculturalism, nation state and modernity. Retaining the focus on the pedagogic aspects intrinsic to education, but also on the multiple socio-political aspects extrinsic to it, imparts a richness and complexity to the volume. Two, the many case studies enable a comparison across cultures and societies. This enlarges the range of possibilities, both at the level of problems and solutions. And finally, all the discussions and case studies are eventually geared towards building a solution-based approach. All the problems and constraints are examined in the light of what can and ought to be done. Admittedly such a focus has made the book unrealistically optimistic at places. But that the exposition of all the problems is with a view to finding a solution goes to the credit of the book and its authors and editors.

Salil Misra

 

EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY IN INDIA: A Classroom View by Manabi Majumdar and Jos Mooij. Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, London and New York, 2011.

THE issue of inequality in education has been with us for a long time. For over sixty years researchers in the field of education have tried to grapple with inequality in access to schools – access to similar kind of schools, the right to non-discrimination in the choice of schools and to what happens inside the schools. While there are indeed a lot of good research studies, nevertheless one can be sure that inequality will remain an important area of research for years to come. However, this volume is unique because it tries to unravel the texture of how inequality manifests itself in the classroom. It is a view from the ground.

The book is based on intensive qualitative research in two states, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. The first aspect that stands out is the methodology adopted by the researchers to understand and unravel the texture of inequality in India’s education. The researchers have been able to interact with different actors in education in their own contexts and have used ‘interactive interviews, ethnographic methods and qualitative analysis’ (p. 9) to go behind the smokescreen of quantitative data.

Starting with a thorough review of the literature on the subject, the book explores segmentation and segregation of the schooling system and how it not only mirrors existing social divisions but also strengthens and reproduces them. Poverty, according to the authors, is clearly present in the village schools – right from the infrastructure, the presence-absence of certain kinds of children, the teaching-learning materials, and most importantly, the teachers. That is not all; even within an already impoverished school ‘we observed a behavioural pattern on the part of the teacher to favour good students and to neglect the so-called slow learners’ (p. 14). It is noteworthy that the study not only looked at government schools, but also private ones – and found that the low cost private schools that cater to the poor are a far cry from the high-end schools that cater to the rich, the powerful and the ones with voice. The very poor and uneducated parents are in no position to hold malperforming schools, in both the government as well as private sector, to account. As a result, children from diverse poverty situations end up receiving little by way of education in the schools.

This is an important finding of the study, especially in light of the vigorous campaign in favour of school choice. There is really no choice for people with no voice or power – whether their children go to government schools or private. The bottom line is that they emerge five or eight years later, barely having learnt to read or write, far less acquiring a working knowledge of English (the great desire) even in the so-called English medium schools. The authors compel the reader to revisit their own understanding of education and in particular prejudices and stereotypes. There is a common belief that the ‘home environment of the children is an impediment to education rather than as something that may assist them’ (p. 36) and this belief (or should one say prejudice) works against children from families in poverty. Teachers (and administrators too) question the educability of some children; the tragedy is that many children often internalize this view and begin to believe that they cannot learn. The authors have been able to bring to the fore the voices of children who are trapped in this kind of self-belief.

The book then moves on to explore in some depth the role of the state and how active/inactive it has been to ensure all children – regardless of social and economic status – receive quality education. The authors explore four contradictions: (i) the formal rule-based arrangements versus the less formalized, yet institutionalized practices that undermine the formal system; (ii) simultaneous tendencies to both centralize (teacher appointments, accountability systems, planning, teacher training) and decentralize (school level committees/ village level committees); (iii) coexistence of activism on a few fronts and inertia on others; and (iv) simultaneous existence of different modes of public management whereby new structures are created to efficiently administer central sector projects (many of them donor funded) while at the same time neglecting essential systemic reforms. This chapter of the book draws upon a wealth of literature on the subject and provides a valuable synthesis.

The chapter on teachers explores the ambivalence and contradictions in the life of government school teachers – starting from the environment in which the teachers are expected to work, their status in society and in the education system, the prejudices that they carry and transmit and the lack of a professional identity and pride. There have been a plethora of recent studies on how children from extremely disadvantaged communities – especially Adivasi and Dalit children – experience schooling. This lies at the heart of the equity-quality debate. The tragedy is that many teachers question the educability of some children and as a result do not put in the required work to enable children from poverty situations to cope with the demands of formal education. Equally, the in-service training regime does not even touch this issue, focusing instead on what are considered ‘hard spots’ in teaching of language, mathematics or science. Attitudes, prejudices and daily practices are not even acknowledged as important barriers to universal education. Interestingly, the situation is not dramatically different in the two states, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, though the authors have relied essentially on secondary literature and far less insights from fieldwork.

The relationship between teachers and the children remains a highly debated issue. Notwithstanding the introduction of new child-centred pedagogies, the situation on the ground has not changed much. The authors reinforce the findings of several other studies, arguing that caste and gender play themselves out in teacher-children relationship. Teachers get the children to do a wide range of chores and caste and gender identity play a major role in allocation of duties. Equally significant is the fact that teachers actively ignore a substantial proportion of children – the so-called backbenchers, frequent absentees and latecomers. The regular and the best students sit in the front and the teacher relates primarily to them. The authors point out that there were schools where teachers genuinely interested in education, defied all stereotypes and worked to ensure all children participated. However, such instances/cases were few and far between.

The most interesting chapter is the one on quality and equity – the authors present an excellent analysis of textbooks used in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. Textbooks are important in so far as they provide teachers and children with a starting point. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that what is in the textbook is actually taught and what is taught is actually learnt. What matters is the quality of engagement and a textbook comes alive or fades away depending on how the teacher uses it. How the children’s own experience could be intertwined in the teaching-learning process remains inadequately understood and thus remains one of the more formidable challenges.

The book concludes with a discussion on the work being done by the Pratichi (India) Trust in West Bengal and the M.V. Foundation (AP). This section is a bit of a let-down because it does not build on the arguments of the preceding chapters. It seems like an add on, but could still be an interesting read for those interested in understanding the world of education activists. While the M.V. Foundation has been instrumental in getting thousands of children who were out of school back into the mainstream, they have been unable to address the inherent inequality that pervades the education system. In particular, they have not been able to turn the spotlight on what and how much children are learning in schools and the daily reality of thousands of Dalit and Adivasi children who are excluded from active participation. Equally, while the Pratichi (India) Trust has done commendable work with schoolteachers and teacher unions, they have also failed to change mindsets among teachers about educability or un-educability of some children.

The authors argue that in order to find ways and means to address the multiple layers and different textures of inequalities, we must first acknowledge differences and diversity, understand how they inhibit educational processes, the needs and challenges specific to each group/situation, and then devise situation/group specific strategies to help children realise their right to education. While some degree of standardization may be essential, there is little sense in designing national programmes and schemes that end up standardizing everything. This holds true for both the government (through programmes like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan) and the private sector (voucher system/school choice). It is high time we acknowledge that India is a country of vast diversity and tremendous inequalities and one size just cannot fit all. This only results in the very poor, the Adivasi, the Dalit, the migrants, and so on being left out or pushed out.

Vimala Ramachandran