The Social Context of Learning in India: Achievement Gaps and Factors of Poor Learning [1 ed.] 103219569X, 9781032195698

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“This volume seeks to provide theoretical and macro perspective towards the idea of learning achievement gap and poor learning at the outset and then moves on to capture the social context to the learning advantage or disadvantage. The proposed book then specifically identifies the micro issues of language, multilingual classroom contexts in schooling and their impact on learning processes and also the teacher attitudes and strategies in facilitating or not facilitating learning among socially disadvantaged social groups such as tribes.” Anonymous Reviewer “The book illuminates the complex and embedded nature of school learning. By considering the contextual and personal factors, it offers an account of the academic achievement gap. The analyses presented have implications for the rejuvenation of the school system. The work deserves the serious attention of scholars and policymakers engaged with the issues of access, equality, and justice in society.” Girishwar Misra, Former Vice Chancellor, Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishvavidyalaya, Wardha, and Former Professor and Head, Department of Psychology, Delhi University, Delhi “The Social Context of Learning in India offers a bold analysis of factors hindering the education of historically marginalized children and youth. This fascinating collection of chapters peels back layers of complexity that produce both successful learning among the middle classes, as well as failure among the poor. While the authors suggest no quick fix, they pinpoint specific problems that can be addressed. I highly recommend this valuable book for anyone interested in improving education in India.” Christine Sleeter, Professor Emerita, California State University Monterey Bay, Member, National Academy of Education

The Social Context of Learning in India

Why are children from disadvantaged and minority communities overrepresented among academic underachievers, poor learners, and school dropouts? This volume engages with this question and examines classroom learning as a process that involves a multitude of actors situated in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts. The volume covers an interdisciplinary spectrum of educational processes, contexts, educational ambitions, and limitations of low-caste, workingclass, and middle-class students from different Indian communities and regions. The volume delves into the problem of academic underperformance from a social identity perspective and probes into social context-based variability in classroom learning, systemic disadvantages in the form of negative stereotypes, and the family as an under-studied social group in all discussions of schooling. It also examines the teachers’ perceptions and attitudes towards Adivasi students and other minority groups in primary schools and their effect on children’s classroom engagement. The chapters in this volume provide insights into unresolved and critical research questions that require the attention of teachers, school management, educators, and policymakers alike. This book will also be useful for academicians, policymakers, teacher educators, pedagogic practitioners in India and abroad, and state and central government institutions working on school education, educational psychology, policymaking in education, learning methods, and research on educational enhancement. Manoj Kumar Tiwary is an educationist and research fellow for a number of organisations based in India and the Netherlands. His research explores the social history of education, teacher training, and learning achievements, with a particular focus on Bihar. Sanjay Kumar is a scholar, practitioner, and founder of Deshkal Society, Delhi, India. He has been working in the areas of social diversity, inequality, and education for more than one and a half decades both in practice and scholarship. His articles, monographs, and occasional papers have been published in journals and magazines. He is the co-editor of various books:

Interrogating Development: Insights from the Margins; School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives; and Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India. His recent co-edited publication is The Marginalized Self: Tales of Resistance of a Community. Arvind Kumar Mishra teaches Social Psychology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the co-editor of four books: Interrogating Development: Insights from the Margins (2010); School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives (2012); Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India (2017); and The Marginalized Self: Tales of Resistance of a Community (2020). His research papers have been published in prestigious journals such as the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry and the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. His research interest focuses on theoretical and philosophical issues in psychology, resistance to modernity, self, and identity processes among marginalised communities.

The Social Context of Learning in India Achievement Gaps and Factors of Poor Learning Edited by Manoj Kumar Tiwary, Sanjay Kumar, and Arvind Kumar Mishra

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Manoj Kumar Tiwary, Sanjay Kumar and Arvind Kumar Mishra; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Manoj Kumar Tiwary, Sanjay Kumar and Arvind Kumar Mishra, to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-19569-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-48108-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-38744-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Imtiaz Ahmad, for sensitizing to view the dynamics of education from the lens of marginality.

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface List of Contributors

xi xiii xvi

Introduction 1 1 Understanding Classroom Learning: Psychological Tools Approach to Education 14 JYOTI RAINA

2 The Power of Collective: Responses to Systemic Disadvantage in the Educational Context 36 DIVYA PADALIA AND ARVIND KUMAR MISHRA

3 The Family–School Relationship 53 NITA KUMAR

4 Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage 64 SMRITI SINGH

5 Samaj and Sangat: Parental Construction of Children’s Poor Educational Attainments in a Caste-Based Segregated Settlement 84 SRITI GANGULY

6 Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’: Marginalising Textbooks and Teachers’ Strategies of Subversion 101 KISHORE DARAK

x Contents 7 Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Adivasi Students and Their Effect on Children’s Classroom Engagement 120 MINI SHRINIVASAN

8 Understanding Comprehension: Classroom Problems with English for the EWS Child 130 PEGGY MOHAN

9 Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives 142 MANOJ KUMAR TIWARY

Index

159

Acknowledgements

This volume is a culmination of the first national conference on Factors of Poor Learning: Challenges, Opportunities and Practices for Learning Improvement in Socially Diverse Elementary Schools of India. The conference was organised from 2 September to 4 September 2016 at the India International Centre in New Delhi by Deshkal Society in collaboration with Save the Children, Language and Learning Foundation (LLF), Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, Poorest Areas Civil Society Programme (PACS), and Sulabh International Social Service Organisation. The representatives of these partner organisations not only gave their valuable suggestions for formulating the key objectives of the conference but also generously supported the conference financially. In addition, their feedback on the concept note in preparation of the conference created fertile grounds for the contextualisation of the theme and the formulation of the key questions that shaped the vision of this volume. First and foremost, we would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their effort, diligence, and perseverance. A warm thank you also goes out to all the educationists, social scientists, policymakers, and development practitioners who contributed to the conference as chairs, discussants, and presenters. We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the eminent educationist Dr Dhir Jhingran, the founder director of the Language and Learning Foundation, who proved a true friend and guide during every stage of this project. We are also deeply indebted to Dr Harish Khare, the renowned journalist and former editor in chief of the Tribune in Chandigarh, who recommended us to Shri Hamid Ansari, honourable vice president of India, who inaugurated the conference. We owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous reviewer whose constructive observations helped us to further improve the manuscript. We are also grateful for the interest expressed and commitment shown by the publishing team headed by Dr Shashank Sinha, the Publishing Director of Routledge South Asia during the initial stages of compiling this book. A big thank you to Ms Brinda Sen, Ms Joy Angelin and Ms Shelley Strelluf of Routledge for your perceptive advice and kind encouragements, and to Mr R. Narayanan

xii Acknowledgements for the diligent copy editing of the manuscript. We would also like to thank Dr Janet Kamphorst for her useful suggestions. Last but not least, a warm thank you to the Deshkal Society core team of Dr Muhammad Mukhtar Alam, Mr Jai Prakash, Mr Rahul Sharma, Ms Sonal Singh, and Ms Devarti Sarkar for their untiring efforts in preparing our manuscript for the publication.

Preface

The present volume brings together new perspectives on, and empirical facts about, the social context of poor learning in India as presented during the international conference Factors of Poor Learning: Challenges, Opportunities and Practices for Learning Improvement in Socially Diverse Elementary Schools of India (2016). The conference focused on interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the poor learning achievements of school pupils from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. As a result, the papers selected for the volume here offer comparative insights that intersect more than one discipline and methodology and involve theoretical research as well as practice-oriented contributions. Senior policymakers, eminent educationists, and other academics, practitioners, and relevant stakeholders gathered for the conference to discuss the following themes: (1) poor learning among socially marginalised children; (2) multilingual classrooms; (3) challenges, opportunities and innovative practices; and (4) social diversity and teacher education. This volume reflects this broad thematic range and presents multidisciplinary perspectives that examine the roots of learning achievement gaps in India, including the systemic and socio-cultural causes that help explain the learning advantage or disadvantage of students from different sections of society. The different contributors to this collection of essays discuss theoretical as well as grassroots issues such as the diverse learning acquisition and outcome processes in Indian classrooms, the impact of the difference between home languages and the languages taught in schools, and the role teachers play in helping or impeding the inclusion of pupils from disadvantaged social groups into the Indian education system. In doing so, it becomes clear that the study of marginality and schooling in the context of a pluralistic society needs to redefine what educational failure and underachievement are. It is therefore essential that existing parameters of failure and success are redefined. Only then, the poor learning results of a large percentage of India’s school children, the all-pervading fear of failure, and the skewed emphasis on performance goals instead of learning skills can be superseded by truly inclusive schooling. Such schooling needs to encompass respect for

xiv Preface the pluriform socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds and multifaceted inherent knowledge of school children. This book is the third in a series about school education, which serves to theoretically ground the action research, classroom ethnographies, and policy evaluations at grassroots level. Together with the earlier two volumes in the series, titled Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India (2017) and School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives (2012), this publication is also part of Deshkal Society’s efforts to render Indian classrooms more inclusive. The aim is to promote the reformulation of education policies and develop programmes to enhance the pedagogical preparedness of teachers to provide justly inclusive education to the increased number of pupils from historically marginalised and oppressed communities. The strength of all three publications in this series lies in the fact that the presented research not only offers theoretical approaches but also presents practical case studies and field examples that envision the processes and practices through which learning can be made inclusive and democratic. Deshkal Society’s research into and vision for educational reform has resulted in a two-tiered approach. First, it launches programmes for grassroots action research and documentation for developing a contextualised understanding of the issues of exclusion and inclusion in elementary education and for identifying school- and community-based factors responsible for the difficulties children from diverse and marginalised backgrounds presently experience at school. The grassroots practices contribute to the strengthening of school effectiveness and the promotion of inclusive classroom practices in primary and upper primary government schools and thus enhance the learning achievement of children from underprivileged backgrounds. The second cornerstone of Deshkal Society’s approach is a concerted effort to build and coordinate a network of leading governmental and nongovernmental institutions as well as independent researchers and practitioners who are constructively and critically engaged in the transformation of the Indian school system. Part of this effort is the organisation of national and international conferences in collaboration with the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), the Department for International Development (DfID), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Language and Learning Foundation (LLF) in Delhi, as well as the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) in Patna. The success of the conferences and the urgency of the issues under consideration are such that the conferences have become instrumental in setting the collective national agenda for education reform in India. Thus, Deshkal Society contributes to the critical examination of school education and its systemic failures as well as successes. It also provides strong evidences that help advance the contextualisation of policy frameworks in dealing with crucial questions concerning school reforms and

Preface  xv learning outcomes. Deshkal Society’s report Social Diversity and Learning Achievement, for example, throws light on the ways in which school- and community-based factors are interlinked and how the different types of educational and social synergies affect the learning experience and achievement of children from diverse backgrounds. Another example of Deshkal Society’s theoretical as well as practical approach to inclusive education is the teaching and learning materials of the alternative schooling programme of Gram Nirman Kendra (Gaya district, Bihar). This has proven to be an important step forward in the Deshkal Society research team’s approach to the convoluted interconnectedness of marginality and school education. Deshkal Society’s wide-ranging approach to pressing educational problems aims to function as a bridge between global and local contexts by formulating relevant comparative perspective. This has resulted in, among others, the following publications: Alternative Schooling for Children; Sanskara, The Notion of Hereditary Educability and Changing Behaviour of the Teachers; Action research on Increasing School Participation and Learning Enhancement of Children through Activity Based Learning in K. Nagar Block, Purnia, Bihar; and Report on Social Diversity and Learning Achievement: The Status of Primary Education in Rural Bihar. With this book, we once more hope to bring to the fore the importance of empirical evidence for drawing up theoretical frameworks and policy proposals to identify and address the achievement gaps and factors of poor learning in a pluralistic country like India. Sanjay Kumar Founder, Deshkal Society New Delhi

List of Contributors

Kishore Darak has been working in the field of education for more than two decades. For the past five years, he is with the Education Design team of the Tata Trusts, one of India’s leading and oldest philanthropies. An alumnus of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, Kishore holds a Diploma in Finnish Education from Helsinki University, Finland, and is a fellow of Georg Eckert Institute of International Textbook Research, Braunschweig, Germany. He has worked on textbook writing committees of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra states. Teacher development, cultural politics of education and language, educational policies and practice, and pedagogy of Mathematics are areas of his research interest. He has written extensively in Marathi language print media on issues related to school education and has presented his work at many international conferences and published in renowned journals. Sriti Ganguly is Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Haryana, India. She is interested in urban sociology, sociology of education and mothering, and her work focuses on the education of marginalised groups, poverty, and forms of exclusion based on class, caste, space, and gender in the urban context. She has published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Economic and Political Weekly, and Contemporary Education Dialogue. Nita Kumar is Brown Professor Emerita of South Asian History at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA. She is the author of The Artisans of Banaras (1988), Friends, Brothers and Informants (1992), Lessons from Schools (2001), The Politics of Gender, Community and Modernity (2007); editor of Women as Subjects (1994); translator of Mai (2000) and Udhar ke Log (2023); co-editor of Food, Faith and Gender in South Asia (2020); and has published assorted essays, blogs, plays, and scripted the movie Shankar’s Fairies. She runs the organisation NIRMAN that works for children, families, education, and the arts and the school Vidyashram – the Southpoint in Varanasi, India.

List of Contributors  xvii Arvind Kumar Mishra teaches Social Psychology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He is the co-editor of four books: Interrogating Development: Insights from the Margins (2010); School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives (2012); Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India (2017); and The Marginalized Self: Tales of Resistance of a Community (2020). His research papers have been published in prestigious journals such as the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry and the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. His research interest focuses on theoretical and philosophical issues in psychology, resistance to modernity, self, and identity processes among marginalised communities. Peggy Mohan, linguist, educationist, and teacher at Vasant Valley School, New Delhi, India, was born in Trinidad, West Indies. She has taught linguistics, been an expert witness in terrorism trials, and made television programmes for children, besides creating animated calligraphs, painting, writing songs, and doing stone mosaics. She is married and has a daughter, and teaches music at the Vasant Valley School, New Delhi, India. Peggy has also authored the novels Jahajin and The Youngest Suspect. Divya Padalia teaches at the Department of Psychology, Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi, India. Her research interests can be clubbed broadly under critical social psychology and intergroup relations. She has completed her doctoral dissertation from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2019 wherein she has explored how stereotypes manifest in educational contexts and how the disadvantaged group members respond to negative stereotyping and discrimination. She has presented at various national and international conferences, including a meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology. Jyoti Raina is a teacher educator at the Department of Elementary Education, Gargi College, New Delhi, India. She is keenly interested in school education and serves as a member of Managing Committee of Raghubir Singh Junior Modern School, Humayun Road, New Delhi, India. Her teaching and research during the last three decades is in the arenas of school education policy, psychological studies in education, and initial teacher education. She has published extensively in these fields in various journals and has co-authored several popular articles with her students on varied themes in education. Mini Shrinivasan has been involved in providing technical support for elementary school education for over 30 years. She is currently an advisor with the Tata Trusts. She is a Sahitya Akademi award-winning children’s writer and has a particular interest in the way children learn languages, particularly those whose home language differs substantially from the language used in school.

xviii List of Contributors Smriti Singh teaches Sociology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi, New Delhi, India. Her doctoral work explores questions of space and social stratification in neo-urban contexts of Gurugram, India. Manoj Kumar Tiwary is an educationist and research fellow for a number of organisations based in India and the Netherlands. His research explores the social history of education, teacher training, and learning achievements, with a particular focus on Bihar (India).

Introduction

Why are children from disadvantaged and minority communities overrepresented among academic underachievers, poor learners, and school dropouts? Are they deficient in the abilities required to learn and to perform well in academic activities? Do these abilities depend upon hereditary factors or socio-cultural factors? The answers to these questions are not straightforward and require a critical examination of dominant discourses on learning and competence. It should be noted that such understanding of learning in educational theories and practice is based on the premise that learning is purely a mental activity and thus can be optimally accomplished in situations where the learner can remain undisturbed. This theory also presupposes that the act of learning requires the support of a certain level of cognitive development. From this perspective, learning is viewed as the acquisition of abstract and objective knowledge by applying some rational rules. Conversely, some children are not able to achieve an optimum level of cognitive development and hence their learning either lags behind or they fail all together. If we accept this conceptualisation of learning, then how do we explain an amazing universal phenomenon of acquisition of competence in native language by unschooled normal, young children by the age of five in every culture? Clearly, these young children neither require solitude nor have they been explicitly taught any rules for using their native language. However, for learning some other kinds of knowledge and skills, they do need coaching from a specialist or more knowledgeable members of society. Further, the same children who show a very high level of competence in performing certain tasks that are valued in their communities miserably fail in learning the materials in the context of school (Lave, 2009: 200-08). Against this backdrop, it may be argued that a more precise definition of learning should reflect its complex nature and varied processes. In consequence, the chapters in this volume examine classroom learning as a process that involves a multitude of actors situated in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts. Each author discusses different aspects of this process, taking as their starting point the ongoing poor levels of learning among Indian students in elementary schools. Thus, a varied picture of poor learning in India arises, with due consideration of the genesis of DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-1

2 Introduction this process in divergent socio-political, psychological, cultural, and historical factors that influence children’s scholastic dispositions. Academic peers, parents, communities, teachers, teacher educators, educational administrators, all contribute to the learning processes, practices, and their outcomes. Schools in India strive to enable pupils to acquire learning and skills to lead a competent, socially adjusted, and economically productive life. The success or failure of this endeavour depends on many different variables. In this volume, the focus is on the failure of the Indian school system to successfully impart minimum standard education to scores of children and, as a result, the ongoing poor learning outcomes for a large section of India’s school students. The main research questions addressed in the contributions to this volume focus on the reasons why schools fail to execute the process of learning for specific groups of students. Why does a large percentage of Indian students achieve poor learning status or, in other words, why do they fail to perform up to the expected level? As the contributions to this collection of essays make abundantly clear, it is impossible to pinpoint one specific variable as the cause of poor learning. The qualitative research in this volume, supported by rich field evidences, probes the different factors that are responsible for the present-day poor learning status of particular groups of students enrolled in Indian schools. In addition, quantitative data gathered from the field serve to further document that optimal learning levels are yet to be established despite concerted efforts and inputs geared towards improving the learning level of school children. Indeed, there are a host of factors that influence the learning status of school children as it is, including classroom pedagogical practices and their family’s/community’s own articulation of the purpose, context, and role of schools in their children’s life. But, an equally critical component is the education policy of, and management by, government agencies that design the frameworks and guidelines that have to be micro-managed and carried out in the classrooms. Take, for example, concepts like ‘child-friendly education’, ‘child-centred education’, and ‘continuous and comprehensive evaluation’ (CCE) that have been laid down in the Right to Education (RTE) act. This rights-based framework directs the state to take these approaches into consideration to provide elementary education of satisfactory and equitable quality to all Indian schoolchildren (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2009: 9). After almost ten years of its promulgation, it appears that these concepts are no more than passing fads, instituted without an eye for the complexities of educational processes in, and lived social realities and capabilities of, the majority of schools in India. The use of child-centred/friendly terms and mention of continuous and comprehensive education in SSA can be understood, to a certain extent, since it is a policy framework, and as such defines ideals. But the RTE act is a rights-based document and the laying down of the aforementioned concepts and their mode of implementation and implications must be worked

Introduction  3 out a priori: What do they signify in a particular educational set-up; what is the trajectory and timeline of its implementation; how and who will implement it; are there enough resources available and sufficient infrastructure in place to enable and translate such idealistic concept into reality? To date, the implementation and implications of such policy-based educational concepts remain riddled with problems that are barely addressed, neither by policymakers, nor by educationists. These concepts, fraught with dense significance and connotations, are neither detailed or explained to the stakeholders, nor have they been critically assessed against the backdrop of India’s historical learning achievement experiences and its endeavours, or lack of it, to contextualise them in the socio-political and cultural settings of pedagogic and education systems. The real question that policymakers and educationist need to answer is how the introduction of new educational ideals and concepts can be realised in the Indian system of education without continuous and consistent robust follow-up and realisation plans? Concepts like child-centred or childfriendly education and CCE were designed for processes and outcomes that cannot be achieved in an untailored and casual manner. Lackadaisical and disjointed approaches to deal with these issues just create more confusion and do not contribute to better teaching methods or learning results. On the contrary, the introduction of these concepts and ideals in elementary schools seems to just serve as an avoidable distraction, requiring more time, tailored approaches, and resources than their outcomes presently warrant. The concept of child-centred learning is a case in point. This approach requires immense empathic teaching skills and observational expertise to help a child in his/her full development to grow up as an acting, feeling, and thinking human being (Friedrich Froebel quoted in Doddington and Hilton, 2007: 14). This is indeed a gargantuan task as it requires engaging 111,310,953 children in the child-centred learning process by the 4,732,916 teachers who teach them in 1,072,836 government schools all over India (National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, 2018: 2). Even if the concept were to be recontexualised and tailored to the ground reality of Indian schools, this will first of all require a methodical understanding of the original idea and the development of ways to deploy it in the Indian context. As has been aptly observed by Arathi Sriprakash: ‘One of the unintended effects of the emphasis on “independent learning” in the child-centred programs was its recontextualisation by teachers as legitimising their reduced participation in (and, indeed, absence from) learning activities’ (Sriprakash, 2012: 182). Similarly, CCE is another rather panoptic learning assessment process that is not only an end in itself, but also a means to improve teaching-learning processes and to empower students to optimally develop their potential in both scholastic and non-scholastic domains (Nawani, 2013: 34). The Indian reality, however, shows that children in elementary schools are promoted to the next grade without any meaningful assessment let alone CCE,

4 Introduction since assessment is yet another element that continues to receive little attention in the RTE implementation design. The educational and pedagogic approaches for school education markedly differ from, and vary between, countries like India and of economically developed Western nations. In the West, the educational polemics revolve around the kinds of learning being handed down to students, which may or may not reproduce social inequality based on an overly commodified and technologised education system. In India, the enrolment of children in schools has yet to be converted into basic learning experiences where the main goal is to realise the acquisition by students of reading, writing, and arithmetic skills that correspond to the respective levels of the textbooks. Unfortunately, most learning assessment studies and surveys consistently find that Indian schools are not successful in enabling children to acquire age-appropriate and textbook-specific proficiency and learning outcomes (Tiwary et al., 2017: 1–4). In the Indian context, therefore, priority should be given to addressing recurrent basic issues first. This involves answering questions like whether teachers spend enough time in classrooms and, if so, are they supported in fulfilling their academic functions without external non-academic distractions? We also need answers to questions about whether there exists a minimal lesson preparedness before teachers enter the classrooms; are headmasters and other higher education officials adequately involved with the ongoing learning activities in schools? In addition, more knowledge is needed about the extent to which teachers and education department officials are aware of the difficult learning trajectories of first-generation learners, whose poor learning outcomes continue to skewer their future prospects in Indian society. The poor learning outcome of children from marginalised communities is one of the major issues explored in this volume, in particular the idea that the learning and pedagogic challenges faced by these children, especially firstgeneration learners, are conceptually and pragmatically different from what other children have to contend with. Several contributors examine how the implementation of context-independent frameworks guided by universalism and one-size-fits-all approaches goes a long way in explaining why children from disadvantaged communities perform less well. Their researches also underscore that factors of poor learning cannot just be understood in the light of unitary and rigid theoretical underpinnings. On the contrary, there is instead a need to take into account conceptual and practical possibilities and challenges in developing framework(s) that brings into focus the economic, social, and cultural constituents that determine the learning level of children. In bringing together socio-cultural, psychological, historical, pedagogic, and ethnographic research into the contemporary status quo of the Indian education system, this volume aims to articulate new frameworks for a better understanding of poor learning outcomes. The selected contributions

Introduction  5 clarify how and why the integration of disadvantaged children into Indian schools is still weighed down by societal misconceptions and existing power relations that prevent them from fully realising their educational potential. In so doing, a multi-disciplinary approach to educational processes is offered to provide answers to the question of why children from disadvantaged communities continue to be overrepresented among academic underachievers, poor learners, and school dropouts. The quantitative and qualitative researches brought together in this book cover a broad spectrum of educational processes and contexts as well as the educational ambitions and limitations of low-caste, working-class, and middle-class students from different Indian communities and regions. The contributors to this volume provide fresh insights into thus far unresolved and critical research questions that require the urgent attention of teachers, school management, educators, and policymakers alike. These questions are as follows: 1. How has the concept of learning/poor learning been interpreted, and how has it evolved and has it been negotiated within its temporal and spatial constraints? 2. What are the determinants of learning? How do the socio-cultural backgrounds of children impact their learning experiences and outcomes? 3. What are the social and pedagogical challenges that teachers and teacher educators face in socially diverse classrooms wherein the majority of the children come from poor and marginalised communities? Do they possess the necessary professional, social, and emotional capabilities to adequately handle this kind of diversity and the many levels of inequality? 4. What are the challenges of multilingual classrooms? In which ways do children from lower social strata and different ethnic group experience difficulties and alienation in learning a language other than their mother tongue? The study of this complicated, transitional, and revealing trajectory of school education in India forms the backdrop of the present book. The contributors address the contemporary educational gaps and highlight the often neglected social factors and their contexts that help explain the present learning predicaments of disadvantaged school children. This volume unites a broad selection of studies from researchers, policymakers, and academics from different parts of India. Together, the contributors present arguments and data to better comprehend and interpret the factors of poor learning from different points of views in various Indian states, providing meaningful new insights and researches to help position practice-level initiatives in the public domain. Thus, these studies provide fresh conceptualisations of (poor) learning and the way in which it is inextricably linked with institutional policy perspectives and practices, a student’s family, community and

6 Introduction social background, and the agency of teacher in socially diverse multilingual classrooms. In the first chapter of this volume, Jyoti Raina argues that school practices are located in a monopolistic discursive framing based on mainstream educational psychology which views classroom learning in a very narrow framework drawn from the theoretical traditions of behaviourism and cognitivism. Both of these perspectives regard classroom learning as an individual accomplishment of school-type cognitive tasks and see academic achievement as the hallmark of a successful school career. The responsibility for poor learning is attributed to the individual student disregarding even the empirically observed correlation between educational disadvantage and social inequality. This relationship has attracted theorisation and research in sociology of education but educational psychology as a discipline has remained insulated from a broader interdisciplinarity that could help account for the manner in which individual learning capacities and skills are shaped by a student’s social context. As a result, mainstream educational psychology does not acknowledge the pervasive influence of the social on the psychological that operationalises during classroom learning. This chapter attempts to understand classroom learning beyond this monopolistic discursive framework of mainstream educational psychology by deploying L.S. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory to contextualise classroom learning. The theory views cognition and learning as an intermental function which has a fundamentally social character. The key focus of the chapter is on the concept of psychological tools and their educational applications. Raina argues that these psychological tools include material tools like the ubiquitous paper and pencil in the formal school classroom to write down a given body of information that needs to be memorised mainly for regurgitation during examinations. They also include decontextualised symbolic systems such as sign systems like language, mathematical systems like formula and scientific literacy through reasoning, among other modes of thinking. Proficiency in the use of these tools is a prerequisite to fulfil the specific ‘cognitive demands on students’ during the course of formal learning. Since children can only acquire the psychological tools offered by their social backgrounds, the psychological tools approach highlights how failure to learn has an essential social class basis. Likewise, educational advantage is also class based as students belonging to middle-class sections of society acquire facility with the psychological tool systems necessary for school-type cognitive tasks during interactions at home and benefit from this context-specific endowment in classroom learning processes. Cognitive education, which is a practical application of the psychological tool approach, can effectively meet the classroom learning needs of disadvantaged students’ who may lack the facility with the cognitive tools that are necessary for formal schooling. Raina’s approach thus offers a promising direction of research by deepening our understanding of variability in classroom learning across diverse social

Introduction  7 contexts on one hand, and enhancing the learning potential of disadvantaged students’ on the other. Divya Padalia and Arvind Kumar Mishra’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 2) explores the long-standing and worldwide problem of low academic performance of students from low-status groups in comparison with their counterparts from dominant groups, even when socio-economic and other relevant factors are controlled. They articulate this problem as one of the consequences of social inequality rather than the result of a lack of skills or academic abilities that in India continue to be stereotypically ascribed to students from marginalised communities by their teachers and classmates. Although psychology has much to contribute to the research into educational processes and systems, its role in offering a critique of unequal social systems has over the years taken a back seat. The method and subject matter of psychology have drifted away from engaging with social contexts and focused on emulating the aim of physical sciences instead by attempting to render its findings in terms of universal generalisations at the cost of ignoring the role of socio-political factors in shaping human psychology. By engaging with the present social context of Indian education, Padalia and Mishra aim at a critical review of literature on ‘stereotype threat’, a socio-psychological concept used to explain the low academic performance of students from low-status groups. Instead of endorsing the ‘inevitability’ of the detrimental impact of negative stereotyping on the academic performance of low-status group students, they argue that – under certain conditions – these students are capable of demonstrating resistance to the threat social stereotyping represents. In developing this argument, they examine the ideological bias in psychological theorisation in general and in the theorisation of stereotype in particular. As the meaning of any stereotype is contested rather than being accepted by all members in a society, Padalia and Mishra argue that it is possible for members of low-status groups to politically counter and redefine the substance of negative stereotypes. As a result, marginalised students are able to successfully overcome the obstacle of stereotyping by making political activism part of the educational discourse. The school learning activities and the array of social, pedagogic, and psychological phenomena – with the child at their centre and surrounded by various socio-cultural actors – include the needs and goals set by the students’ families, the communities, and the schools themselves as well as the socio-cultural backgrounds of the learners. All these aspects exert their influences and contextualise what learning actually is, and how and where it should be placed in the hierarchy of a host of other activities. This theme is taken up in Nita Kumar’s ethnographic essay (Chapter 3), which documents the many layers of the relationship between family and school. The process of unravelling these layers is the ultimate key to success or failure of any education project. Kumar evaluates the complexities that have been informed by age-old traditions and conventional patterns. Construction of identities and counter-identities is both part of family-prompted socialisation and of

8 Introduction pedagogies initiated by school. Through her incisive interviews and observations, Kumar illustrates the reproduction of gender, class, language, and dispositional roles and identities, mostly at home, where they are portrayed as ‘natural and indisputable’. Besides, Kumar also identifies the selective use and interpretation of modernity, which is not only employed by the families of students in treating children as they do, but also conditions the way the learning process and its eventual assessment mechanism are addressed by the state and related stakeholders, for example through periodic assessment reports. Though such reports, under the aegis of ‘modernist discourse’, highlight how children are different as if there is ‘something innate’ in them, it nevertheless creates an enabled ambience to embrace efforts – or lack thereof – to succeed, and that is an important achievement. To conclude, Kumar advocates for risk taking both in concepts and practices of schooling that will assist students and their guardians in their realisation of ‘knowledge, power and success in life’. Smriti Singh (Chapter 4) discusses the critical awareness of the importance of education among the middle classes of India and how their intention to provide educational chances to their children, as well as their tunnel vision, drives them to fortify the educational advantages of their wards in opposition to the children of socially and historically disadvantaged communities. The production, control, and manipulation of social and physical space by the middle classes to provide an enabling environment for their own children is remarkable, and considered essential by them, in particular against the backdrop of a globalised economy where their children are expected to compete not only at national level but also internationally. Singh bases her research on her fieldwork among middle-class communities who live in the National Capital Region’s gated residential enclaves in Gurgaon. Her interviews with sampled respondents paint an illuminating picture of these communities’ determination and choreographed ambitions to continue the inter-generational transmission of class advantages, thereby ensuring the best possible educational attainments by their children. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Singh describes middle-class groups and their practices as relational, taking advantage of the proximity in social space to appropriate, accumulate, and defend their cultural, social, and symbolic capital in order to continue to put themselves apart from the general populace by providing their children scholastic and learning privileges. As a result, middle-class parents redesign and manipulate their personal social sphere and expectation to the demands and priorities of their children’s educational strategies and targets. To reinforce their efforts and align them with the general advancement of their middle-class community’s interest, they advance arguments of meritocracy and a sense of fair play, on the one hand, and deny the euphemistic connotation of the so-called objective evaluation process and skewed competition in the name of positive discrimination, on the other.

Introduction  9 At the other end of the social spectrum, Sriti Ganguly (Chapter 5) explores the parental constructions of factors that shape the learning outcomes of Dalit school children, documenting how a combination of poverty and the low educational status of their families perpetuate these students’ low educational outcomes and high dropout rates. For this study, Ganguly draws upon her fieldwork among the Balmiki of Delhi, a marginalised and stigmatised Dalit community, traditionally engaged in so-called unclean occupations (cleaning work and manual scavenging). She found that the community’s spatial and social segregation is both a reflection and reinforcement of their social and economic circumstances, and that these negatively influence the educational trajectories of Balmiki school children. Ganguly’s interviews with Balmiki parents show that they first and foremost blame their children’s lack of educational success on the sangat (network of friendships in the neighbourhood) and samaj (the Balmiki community in general). The existential struggles of many parents make it difficult for them to supervise their children and protect them from negative neighbourhood and peer influences. Thus, peers become very influential and often negate parental norms and values, especially among boys. When probing further, however, Ganguly found that the neglect of Balmiki children’s education stems from a far more complex interplay of factors. Family circumstances such as illness, unemployment, and financial problems, for example, frequently lead to a child’s withdrawal from school. Another reason quoted for Balmiki children leaving school is the lack of schools’ efforts to retain them. Especially at times, the hostile attitude of teachers and fellow students towards them is seen as the reason why negative stereotypes are perpetuated, describing Dalit children as not clever enough to successfully complete their education. Yet another factor that contributes to the below-par educational outcomes and high dropout rates among Balmiki students is the fact that most Balmiki parents cannot help their children attain better learning outcomes. Neither they, nor their parents before them, received any form of education themselves. They therefore lack the cultural capital to support their children, in particular in terms of what Pierre Bourdieu has coined embodied, objectified, and institutionalised capital. The role of a teacher as a facilitator, who helps motivate students to creatively evaluate the textbook content or to facilitate conventional dispositions, cannot be overestimated. For teachers to be effective, however, they themselves have to be critically educated and learn, in a meaningful way, to engage with diverse social contexts that have been traditionally dominated by hegemonic conventions and concepts. Kishore Darak (Chapter 6) describes how the Brahmanisation of the educational content of state textbooks in Maharashtra perpetuates existing patterns of Brahminical dominance and the concomitant marginalisation of children from SCs, STs, poor, Muslim, and other minority communities and also serves to establish dominance over women and girls. His study of the state-produced Marathi

10 Introduction language or Balbharati textbooks demonstrates how deeply affected these learning materials are by the social dynamics of power, resulting in an ‘idiom of national ideology’. Because their texts and illustrations are prejudiced in favour of Brahminical perspectives on Indian society, history, culture, and language, they commonly fail to represent – or they continue to under-represent and misrepresent – marginalised groups. The second part of Darak’s study focuses on how a special group of Maharashtrian teachers subverts this kind of textbook-borne marginalisation. In describing the strategies they devise to counter the pedagogic and socio-political shortcomings of the current textbooks, Darak shows how these teachers try to break the state-sanctioned silence on controversial issues by expanding on the prescribed textbook content with the help of technology and classroom interventions. In addition, these teachers also devise counter-strategies to put local language varieties on an equal footing with government-sanctioned ‘standard languages’. Darak makes a strong case for teaching underprivileged students about contexts familiar to them and teaching them in their own languages as well as the standard language. He describes how this kind of teaching can help create classrooms that speak to children’s strengths rather than continually emphasising their weaknesses. In creating a space for their students to question the absence of their own experiences, backgrounds, and languages in the official textbooks, this special group of teachers manages to counter the alienation and textbook-based marginalisation many of their underprivileged students experience in school. Mini Shrinivasan’s study (Chapter 7) is based on 25 years of classroom observations and teacher interviews and provides us with perceptive examples of the disconnect between the reality and language of Adivasi students, on the one hand, and the present teaching-learning process and school language on the other. Her observations offer us a rare glimpse into the lived experience of Adivasi children, often tucked away at the back of classrooms. With vivid examples of Adivasi students’ classroom behaviours, she makes clear how very ill-equipped these children are to take any kind of advantage of the learning that is on offer. In classroom after classroom, Shrinivasan observes, Adivasi students are left disengaged, lost, and ignored on the last row of seats at the back of the class. She documents how little many Adivasi students are actually able to understand the lessons taught in the school language, which is not their home language, and their struggles with words and concepts alien to their world. These struggles at times involve very basic skills and knowledge like knowing how to turn a page in book or how to find the relevant page number. While language is an important part of the problem, the fact that teachers do not take into consideration the background of Adivasi children also accounts for their lack of learning achievements. In addition, teachers evince a complete lack of understanding of what these students know and do not know and, consequently, their educational needs. Due to their lack of

Introduction  11 training, most teachers appear to be unaware of the learning problems that Adivasi children need to overcome and the fact that Adivasi students, more than others, need to learn how to learn in the context of school. Shrinivasan, on the basis of these reflections, offers practical suggestions to create more awareness of the kind of knowledge and skills Adivasi children are, and are not, taught at home and, hence, of their educational needs. These suggestions focus on ways in which to improve teacher preparedness at the pre-service and in-service levels to help teachers enable Adivasi children to better access mainstream education. Classrooms are hardly ever one-dimensional and require a host of analytical tools to get to properly analyse the issues being faced by children with varying language proficiencies and different home languages sitting side by side in one classroom. This is illustrated by Peggy Mohan’s empirical study (Chapter 8) of what happens when the home language and the school language differ. Mohan details the comprehension problems of students from Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) at the English-medium Vasant Valley School in Delhi where she teaches. In looking at language comprehension as a way of understanding the difficulties EWS children face in acquiring English language skills, Mohan argues that since language comprehension is largely a process of recognition, language acquisition greatly depends on what students already know. Mohan’s everyday classroom experiences lead her to conclude that the main problem that dogs EWS student is a lack of middle-class knowledge and the associated elaborated language codes. Being taught in an unfamiliar language is a rather obvious barrier to comprehension. But, notes Mohan, her middle-class Indian students with a Hindi background, or Korean and Japanese students in her classes, find it significantly easier to learn English than her EWS students who continue to lag behind until Class 4 or 5. Compared to their middle-class peers, EWS children have to face two additional hurdles in acquiring English language skills, that is, diglossia and the fact that EWS children often enter school speaking non-standard varieties of Hindi with restricted language codes. Students from middle-class homes early on acquire the knowledge necessary to help them learn English and are brought up speaking the elaborated language codes of middle classes worldwide. EWS children lack this cultural knowledge and often make use of restricted language codes that do not match the elaborated codes of middle-class Hindi or English. A way to create a more level playing field for EWS students, Mohan suggests, is by first teaching young EWS children the basic concepts that constitute middle-class knowledge in Hindi, instead of in English. By teaching elementary schooling in Standard Hindi, with English being taught as a separate subject, it will be much easier to integrate EWS children into English-medium classrooms in Class 6. Manoj Kumar Tiwary (Chapter 9), in the final chapter, studies modern and historical educational landscapes and experiences to map the accumulated disadvantages of students from marginalised communities in Bihar.

12 Introduction His wide-ranging analysis provides a framework for a better understanding of the problems of poor learning that the majority of first-generation learners continue to face in Bihar. By examining India’s post-independence educational policies in tandem with Francis Buchanan Hamilton’s and William Adam’s colonial surveys, and with census data on Bihar’s literacy rates, he charts the staggeringly low numbers of students, teachers, and schools that existed in the period under investigation. Tiwary’s findings document how long, and to what extent, education in Bihar has lagged behind, as a result of which many students still find themselves in a disadvantaged position. He traces the roots of this current state of affairs to the very exclusionary, caste-based nature of Bihar’s education system and the way in which contemporary as well as colonial and post-colonial educational policies have failed to counterbalance it. By offering an account of the long shadow that modern and colonial educational policies have cast over the school system in Bihar, Tiwary details the way in which caste and colonialism have impacted, and still impact, the learning achievements of students from different social backgrounds in Bihar. This is of particular significance when we consider the plight of children from the lowest rungs of society who have only recently become part of Bihar’s school system in larger numbers. As first-generation learners, these students continue to be held back by the deeply entrenched socio-cultural prejudices of the present-day school system and by the lack of education of their parents, grandparents, and all those generations before them, who were deprived of education. The wide variety of approaches brought together in this volume, as well as the different regional perspectives and fieldwork among many different Indian communities and schools, will provide fresh insights into the dynamics and factors of learning and poor learning outcomes by offering critical examinations of the various stakeholders of education – students and their teachers, parents and communities, state agencies, and institutions. With this variegated exploration of educational processes in Indian schools from the vantage point of these stakeholders and the challenges and opportunities faced by them, we aim to point the way towards a future where marginalised and vulnerable students can effectively become part of the Indian school system and benefit from the education on offer. It is hoped that the successful integration of the students from the marginalised communities into the mainstream education system will not benefit only them but also students from the privileged background stand to gain a lot in terms of developing sensitivity towards fellow human beings and learning to appreciate and deal with social diversity. By studying the contemporary problems of Indian school education in their social, psychological, historical, and pedagogic contexts of learning, as well as the challenges faced by the learners, teachers, and the institution of teacher education, we hope to also indicate ways out of the present stalemate of poor learning results and contribute to solutions for effective learning-teaching practices in socially diverse classrooms.

Introduction  13

References Doddington, C. & Hilton, M. (2007). Child-Centred Education: Reviving the Creative Tradition. London: Sage. Lave, J. (2009). Practice of learning. In K. Illeris (Ed.), Contemporary Theories of Learning: Learning Theorists … In Their Own Words. New York: Routledge. pp. 200-08. Ministry of Law and Justice. (2009). The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. New Delhi: The Controller of Publications. National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA). (2018). Elementary Education in India: Where Do We Stand? State Report Cards 2016– 17. New Delhi: NIEPA. Nawani, D. (2013). Continuously and comprehensively evaluating children. Economic & Political Weekly, XLVII(2), 33–40. Sriprakash, A. (2012). Pedagogies for Development: The Politics and Practice of Child-Centred Education in India. Dordrecht: Springer. Tiwary, M. K., Kumar, S. & Mishra, A. K. (Eds.). (2017). Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

1

Understanding Classroom Learning Psychological Tools Approach to Education Jyoti Raina

Classroom learning in formal school systems is far more varied than it is imagined to be. This is notwithstanding that it is based on a very limited notion of what constitutes human competence: a certain kind of intellectual action. Even though variability in classroom learning is a widely perceived phenomenon attracting a range of theories and research, the inherently plural nature of classroom learning is still far from being completely understood. The monopolistic discursive framing of school practices through mainstream educational psychology located around the two major theoretical traditions of behaviourism and cognitivism views classroom learning (judged through academic achievement) as an individual accomplishment at school-type cognitive tasks. The learning and achievement gaps among students, therefore, are looked at as individual deficiencies on part of students. The individual student is viewed as a deficit-agent. This is ironic as the role of the social context in achievement gap is widely perceived, and is visible to teachers, researchers, and other school practitioners. In fact, wide gaps in academic achievement among students belonging to different socioeconomic strata, caste, regions, and gender have existed since the inception of modern education system in India. There has been an unprecedented educational expansion in the previous two decades with near 100 per cent enrolment in elementary education in contemporary India but this is coupled with concerns of lack of classroom learning with particularistic terms like ‘poor learning’, ‘learning crisis’, ‘poor learning outcomes’, and ‘only 50% of grade V children can read a grade II text’ (ASER, various years) which have been centre stage in educational debates in recent decades. A distinction has been made in this regard based on empirical survey datadriven research between learning outcomes in public and private school systems in which the former are presented in poor light because of suffering from lower learning outcomes. This research in recent years has highlighted learning gaps between government and private schools, focusing mainly on alarmingly low learning levels in the former (Anand et al., 2020; ASER, 2020; Valeskar, 2016). This distinction does not recognise that the different types of schools are attended by students belonging to multi-layered social hierarchies of our society. It is further noteworthy that government schools DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-2

Understanding Classroom Learning  15 are widely perceived not only as dysfunctional centres of learning but have been abandoned by any student belonging to a family from a fee-paying socio-economic background (Mukhopadhyay & Sarangapani, 2018). They are attended by students from the most marginalised social backgrounds, namely SCs, STs, and Dalits (Sadgopal, 2016). The binary in learning outcome gaps between the two types of school systems assigns the responsibility for poor learning mainly upon the student in his/her individual capacity. This deflects attention away from the integral role of the social context in classroom learning and its assessment solely through narrow markers like measurable learning outcomes. In the absence of recognition of the role of the social context, variability in classroom learning tends to be accounted for as an individual-level phenomenon. The relationship between educational disadvantage and social inequality is largely non-acknowledged in mainstream educational psychology disciplinary framework that shapes schooling practices, placing the blame for poor learning upon the individual student. On the other hand in sociology of education, the relationship between social class and educational disadvantage, and how it plays out in classroom learning, has continued to remain theory-worthy (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and research-worthy (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Lareau, 2008). The inadequacy of theoretical perspective on the relationship between social context, classroom learning, and academic achievement from an interdisciplinary stance is one of the consequences of ‘pitfalls created by the separation of sociology and psychology’ (Daniels, 2012: 1). This has led to a lack of awareness about the essential class-based character of education ‘at all times and in all places’ (Vygotsky, 1997a: 56). There is hardly any theory in conventional educational psychology that wholly captures the social formation of the mind within the small-scale interactional location of the formal school classroom, and consequently explains commonly observed variations in classroom learning on account of student’s social context. The Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky (1896–1934) expressed the need for such a theoretical agenda through his sociogenetic commitment for production of a more integrated social science with the words, we must be profoundly historical and must always present man’s behavior in relation to the class situation at the given moment. This must be the fundamental psychological technique for every social psychologist. (Vygotsky, 1997a: 212) This chapter attempts to understand classroom learning particularly its variability among students from different social backgrounds beyond the monopolistic discursive framework of mainstream educational psychology through the psychological tools approach. The practical applications of the approach aimed at facilitating learning in academic contexts for children from the non-middle class and other disadvantaged backgrounds are discussed.

16  Jyoti Raina

View from Mainstream Educational Psychology Educational psychology emerged as an intellectual tradition with the ascent of learning theory as a vital area of study. The behavioural approach to learning beginning in the late nineteenth-century proposed stimulus– response (S–R) explanations. The role of ‘reinforcement’ and its various schedules was assumed to be central to learning. The concept of learning was explained in terms of contiguity, conditioning, association, connectionism, and S–R bond formation. Psychologists the world over were in search of ‘general laws that would lead eventually to a scientific theory of learning’ (Wood, 1998: 3). The key debates that continued to occupy preeminence till the first half of the twentieth century were on the themes of contiguity versus reinforcement, types of conditioning, and whether different types of learning occurred through different or the same laws and principles (Bower & Hilgard, 1981: 16–17). There was fealty to recognise only the objective, directly observable, universal, and manipulable aspects of individual psychological functioning as legitimate objects of study. Behaviourism has remained a tenacious influence upon school education as it dominates educational practices since its inception, with classroom learning defined as an externally observable activity (learning outcomes) manipulated by external reinforcement from the environment (teaching). The competence movement, learning by practice, programmed learning, pedagogic techniques based on worksheets, paper–pencil testing, and rewards are ideas that reflect the pervasive impact of behaviourism upon prevailing schooling practices. The domination of paper–pencil testing as the sole measure of learning, with external learning outcomes as its proxy indicator, has resulted in rote-memorisation-based, examination-oriented practices all over modern societies in various parts of the world. Ironically behavioural perspectives are nearly moribund in educational theory as ‘educators are unwilling to accept its assumptions about human nature and process of learning’ (Raina, 2008: 26). The behavioural theories lost salience from the 1960s onwards with the ascension of belief in human learning as an internal mental activity. American psychologist Jerome Bruner’s four influential works A Study of Thinking published in 1956, The Process of Education in 1960, Towards a Theory of Instruction and The Culture of Education both published in 1996 spurned educational psychology’s shift to a study of cognition, particularly the role of instruction in school-type learning. He described a series of exploratory experimental studies with school-going children detailing their mental strategies, processes, and acts of cognition that characterised classroom learning. His research demonstrated that while children possessed the innate capacity to form categories, their psychological processes varied not only from individual to individual but also from discipline to discipline. In this emerging era of cognitivism, Jean Piaget’s (1896–1980) philosophical position of genetic epistemology proposed a novel approach to cognition

Understanding Classroom Learning  17 and learning (Piaget, 1950). His theory acknowledged the doctrine of the inherent educability of children in a stage-specific naturalism proposed earlier in French philosopher-educator J.J. Rousseau’s (1712–1778) educational novel Emile. He believed that children are born with an innate tendency to make sense of their experience of the world and learning was thus ‘conceived of as the elaboration and substitution of innate responses’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 80). Piaget’s theory assumed that knowledge has its origin in the ‘subject’s action upon the objective world’ (Baveja, 2018: 86) because the individual mind tends to organise its experience of the world (Piaget & Inhelder, 1972). His theory deciphered the ontogeny of mental representations through ‘the notion of single, general, cognitive structure underlying particulars of intellectual behaviour’ (Rosser, 1994: 4). His structuralist explanation of mental functioning is based on the principle that cognitive structures that get formed are held together as networks that direct distinctlooking behaviours. The structures are like mental units, symbols, and signs for the interrelated phenomenon that correspond to what are understood in formal school systems as various disciplinary domains. A student may, for example, in the mathematics classroom invent a mental representation for a round object, as a circle in one dimension and as a sphere in three dimensions. He/she may also invent a concept of ‘roll’ for motion. The relationship between these varied mental representations involves understanding a principle: round objects roll. The principle leads to object-directed behaviour, physical acts like throwing a ball, and ‘cognitive behavior like computing the location of contact between the moving object and a stationary boundary’ (Rosser, 1994: 3), during various developmental stages. The networks of organised cognitive structures build knowledge and knowledge systems. The structures, networks, and knowledge systems that develop are stage specific, with each stage representing a particular cognitive structural level of organisation, and a stage shifts its global reorganisation to a more and more advanced level finally culminating in formal operational thinking. Formal Thinking as a Goal of Classroom Learning Formal thought develops through a constant, hierarchical, and culturally invariant order of an adaptive process of interiorisation till ‘formal operations’ become completely independent of physicality or action. The process of development of formal thinking follows a stage-wise shift from concrete action to formal thought. In cognitivist epistemology, formal operations represent the highest form of thinking and are thus the goal of classroom learning. Thinking at this stage is as logical, profound, and sophisticated as it can ever be. A student who has attained formal thinking understands concepts as deeply as possible. It involves the complexity of logic, cause–effect analysis, increasing level of abstraction, and cognition that becomes increasingly covert, relying less and less on the physical aspects of the environment. School-type cognitive learning mainly involves these elements based on

18  Jyoti Raina allied cognitive skills like abstract thinking, decontextualised comprehension, and memorising large bodies of knowledge. It is an individual attribute regarded as the most advanced human ability developed through individual cognitive action. This formalistic framing of school education aligns with academic achievement as its individualistic measure and the goal of school education (Sinha, 2015). This kind of intellectual competence is the main goal of classroom learning as if it is a superior epistemological product. Critiquing this dominant view regarding formalism as the pinnacle of epistemic activity, Mishra (2017) explains, The philosophical position underlying the belief in the inherent superiority of one kind of thought process is known as hierarchical epistemological dualism, a position that maintains that there are modes of knowing, of which one is superior to the other, one of the implications of this philosophical position is that the mainstream psychological theories, including mainstream educational psychological theories, are in agreement with dualistic ontology of Western philosophy—the reality of inner mind and the outer world. (304) However, the ontological duality, epistemological hierarchy, and individual as learning agent assumption characterising mainstream educational psychology are decontextualised worldviews in which the individual student and his social world are viewed as dichotomous units of analysis. This framework does not deny that the two influence each other as factors affecting learning, which is why the topic ‘differences’ exists in the study of educational psychology, but are not believed to be co-constituents of one another. Human psychological functioning is assumed to be an individualistic dynamic process with the student as an independent cognising being whose cognitive structure and processes are presumably autonomous from the context of cognitive activity, as Traditionally, it has either been cognition without context or context without cognition. The epistemological traditions followed in mainstream psychology typically follow the Cartesian model, thereby segregating the individual and the environment or context, into two exclusive categories—the mind and the world. (Baveja, 2018: 61) This makes it unnecessary for educational psychology to ‘study and make sense of the social context in which their students are situated’ (Kinchloe, 1999: 11). Is that an acceptable view of human nature? Variability in classroom learning would be viewed as an attribute of the individual student with responsibility for poor learning being regarded as an individual act. Behaviourism presumes the nature of students as that of a manipulable

Understanding Classroom Learning  19 puppet in the hands of the classroom environment while cognitivism in its narrowness suffered from ‘a refusal to extract thought from being, and being from the historical social world’ (Wexler, 1999: x). Neither of the two individualistic educational psychologies provides a space for ‘integration between macro-social forces and micro psychological forces’ (Kincheloe, 1999: 9). He argues, There is something wrong with a discipline that cannot discern the impact of the social on the psychological, that claims neutrality and objectivity but fails to appreciate its own sociocultural embeddedness. (Ibid., 3) The discursive monopoly of cognitivism and behaviourism that shapes the understanding of classroom learning as it is practised in mainstream school systems cannot wholly explain the social context-based variability in classroom learning. It views classroom learning as a context-neutral individualistic psychological process and therefore lays the agency for learning solely upon the student. This makes it a very limited perspective through which to explain poor learning, especially among the disadvantaged.

Social Advantage in Classroom Learning Educational advantage among students belonging to middle-class social backgrounds is a widely perceived phenomenon. Its genesis in classroom learning can hardly be understood from the vantage point of mainstream educational psychology. Since classroom learning ability is considered an individualistic attribute, then by natural default it ought to be normally distributed across social classes. With this orienting assumption of individual student as the main agent of learning, formal educational psychology falls short of offering a theory to interpret the wide achievement gap between the middle-class and non-middle-class students and the consequent reproduction of middle-class educational advantage. The academic achievement gap among students from marginalised and non-marginalised social backgrounds is an empirically observed phenomenon in educational studies (Deshkal, 2014; Devine, 2004; Tiwary & Kumar, 2017). So do the learning outcome and academic achievement gap between government and private schools (Singh, 2014; Mehtabul et al., 2016; ASER, various years). The reverse phenomenon which is the advantage enjoyed by students belonging to middle-class sections of society has not received as much attention as it merits (Nambissan, 2010). An understanding of the class-based nature of educational advantage and how it plays out through school education may hold the key to connecting the role of the context to variability in classroom learning as well as poor learning which translates into low academic achievement. The endowments of these advantaged students are not necessarily individualistic attributes but by-products of home resources and

20  Jyoti Raina other reimbursements coming from their social backgrounds. Research has established that it is the middle-class parents who ensure that their children ‘succeed educationally’ (Devine, 2004: 11). In middle-class parenting, parents mediate a process that transforms ‘a student’ into ‘their particular child,’ with a particular history, and embedded in a set of relationships. Key to this process is the identification of parents as a resource base for the child. (Panofsky & Vandeboncoeur, 2012: 195) This process comprises parents’ enthusiastic participation in assisting the child with homework from school, providing motivation for work at school, supporting the teacher’s particular requests for help at various assigned tasks, and drawing on semiotic practices that are valued in school settings as well as recognised by teachers (ibid.). The social world of the student (having middle-class parents) contributes to their advantage through prolepsis, a process of attribution of meaning to a less able person’s actions in a way that envisions an intended future for the young student (Vygotsky, 1978). Prolepsis assists the teacher in identifying a basis for the child’s educational experience, thereby reducing the relational distance (Panofsky & Vandeboncoeur, 2012: 197) between the student and the teacher. Overcoming this relational distance leads to far more opportunities for the student of bringing parents’ proleptic view about their children into being (ibid., 205). The role of the mother in this regard has been particularly established in the Indian context. Her role involves providing inputs that support various scholastic-type school tasks given as homework, facilitating private tutoring, extracurricular activities such as computer operations, art, drawing, and enhanced language skills. This role is often of direct instruction in the basics of reading, writing, and calculating, something on which the mothers spend a considerable amount of time (Drury, 1993). These types of practices and strategies in middle-class families convert into an educationally advantageous symbolic capital (Nambissan, 2010) generating a mental life. The middle-class children have experiences that are superindividual and lead to cognitive skills and functions drawing upon advanced symbolism. The relevance of school-based tasks accentuates for the student as there is greater linkage with social contexts located outside the school, a similarity that becomes educationally advantageous (Cole, 1990). In contrast, the matrices of family practices that non-middle-class children are embedded in are very different, a phenomenon that conventional, individualistic educational psychology ignores. Kinchloe (1999: 2) describes, Often children from working-class and lower socioeconomic-class homes do not ascribe the same importance to the mental functions required by intelligence tests or achievement tests and academic work

Understanding Classroom Learning  21 in the same way as do middle- and upper-middle-class students. In this context, the difference between cultural disposition and intellectual ability is lost upon the field of educational psychology. Consequently, students belonging to non-middle-class sections of society often have a different orientation towards school-type academic work. Their social context makes school-type academic learning appear as rather unreal series of short-term tasks largely disconnected from their lives. In mainstream educational psychology, this is read as a lack of motivation, leading to poor learning and low academic achievement on part of the student. Further, the development of formalism in students is assessed through a testing-based examination regime. In the mainstream school education practice, student learning is defined in terms of behavioural externally observable learning outcomes largely based on formal thinkingbased cognitive tasks. The assumption that formal operational thought represents the highest level of human cognition aligns with the technocratic hierarchy of STEM subjects in school education. This assumption is entrenched in the mainstream practice as a norm that tends to align with the worldview of advantaged sections of our hierarchical society, for example, students from middle-class socio-economic backgrounds. The present educational system has legitimised a vision of classroom learning constituted by ‘middle-class elements and value system, which inadvertently deprived the rights of the marginalized groups’ (Sinha, 2015). The notion of prolepsis is resonant in appreciating how middle-class students are advantaged by anticipation of prospective educational future choices subsequent to academic achievement via testing. Their prolepsis advantage is not mere rhetoric but a psychological representation that lends a purpose to classroom learning for already advantaged students. School education’s discursive framework does not take this advantage into account as a result of which the monopoly of students from middle-class backgrounds tends to become naturalised. An unjust value is endowed to a particular set of students as human agents. In a way, it can be looked at as an extension of academic educational psychology which places certain types of thinking and their externally observable outcomes as higher than other forms of human competence. This is a limited epistemological view of human competence and therefore excludes some legitimate variations in student’s cognition and classroom learning necessitated by their social locations and existential imperatives. In a broader view, classroom learning in educational psychology is understood in a monolithic formalism framework, negating the plural nature of thinking, learning, and doing of our pluriverse world – privileging a Euro/North American centric universal conception of what is thinking (Nweke, 2019) which has percolated in our post-colonial society during the development of modern Indian education. Poor learning is looked at as an individual action in a way that alienates non-middle-class students and thus,

22  Jyoti Raina the discourse of educational psychology serves all students, but not equitably. The discourse serves to marginalize some students and privilege others. Students are rewarded as their experiences and understanding of the world approximate a particular and idealized norm of mainstream schooling in this country, or as they are able to internalize this norm. (Gallagher, 1999: 80) Integrating Classroom Learning and Student’s Social Context The most significant advance in the direction of contexualising classroom learning is arguably offered by Vygotsky’s works, also referred to as culturalhistorical theory (Veresov, 1999) in educational literature. It is a perspective that is desocialised from academic psychology’s individualistic pronouncement of cognitive capacity. As an alternative vision, the theory is much more than a critique of mainstream educational psychology and offers promising educational possibilities. The cultural-historical theory is also regarded as an educational perspective for its deep linking of learning, instruction, and cognitive development. It proposes a theoretical basis to understand how the development of higher mental processes is shaped by the social world around us. The theory can be a valuable psychological foundation of a ‘postformal educational psychology’ (Kinchloe, 1999: 9) that imagines the aim of schooling beyond the development of formal operational higher-order thinking in students. The theory proposes that higher mental processes like classroom learning occur as a series of interconnected social matrices shaped by the others around a student. There is a reconceptualisation from an individualistic to a contextualised view on the assumption that the individual and his immediate social group co-constitute each other. The cognitive phenomenon thus involves not mere individualistic processes but is shaped by the interactions with other persons in one’s social sphere and contexts in which the phenomenon occurs. The mind is thus conceived of ‘as existing outside of the brain and even the skin’ (Kincheloe, 1999: 9). Classroom learning can be understood in terms of internalisation of socially rooted activities consisting of a series of transformations described in Vygotsky’s often cited succinct words, An operation that initially represents an external activity is reconstructed and begins to occur internally.… An interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one. Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). (Vygotsky, 1978: 57 emphasis original) The social context, including teachers, parents, more knowledgeable others, peers, instruction, and socio-cultural experiences, plays its role in laying the

Understanding Classroom Learning  23 foundation for cognitive structures that are the basis for classroom learning. Kinchloe (1999) expresses the promise of his theory in the words, Cognition was no longer viewed by Vygotsky as an exclusively individual dynamic but was seen more as an intermental or social function. In a sociopsychological theoretical context, therefore, Vygotsky’s work creates a space where integration between macro-social forces and micro psychological forces occurs. (9) The cultural-historical theory recognises a unity of individual mental activity and its social context where the two are not merely affected by one another but is not even possible to disconnect the two. The teaching-learning experiences provided in schools are the same for students from different social backgrounds but his theory allows for recognition that ‘It is the meaning of our experiences, and not the ontological structure of the objects, which constitute reality’ (Schutz, 1962). The intellectual experience at school affirmatively resonates with student’s everyday socially meaningful activity (Tatigkeit) for students from certain sections of society like middle class engendering educational advantage.

Concept of Psychological Tools The cultural-historical theory has evolved into several versions but the concept of psychological tools is central to Vygotskian theory. It permeates Vygotsky’s early writings as well as those of his followers who further elaborated the concept theoretically as well as for its educational consequences (Kozulin, 1986, 1998; Kozulin & Presseisen, 1995). The role of psychological tools as the mediators of human activity is a key explanatory principle in the Vygotskian generalised theoretical schema. Psychological tools are the various internally directed symbolic artefacts which children derive, appropriate, and internalise from their socio-cultural backgrounds during human activities. The process of their appropriation during socio-cultural activity involves internal reconstruction for an external operation from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal plane (Vygotsky, 1978). This process is a culturally located interpersonal process often occurring during social interactions with more capable adults or peers. In their external form, the tools include language, writing, mathematical formulae, mnemonic techniques, diagrams, maps, and algebraic symbols. They are artificial formations that are social, transforming the inner natural psychological processes into higher mental functions (Kozulin, 1986, 1998; Kozulin & Presseisen, 1995; Vygotsky, 2012). Psychological tools thus perform the function of ‘a bridge between individual acts of cognition and the symbolic sociocultural prerequisites of these acts’ (Kozulin, 1998: 1).

24  Jyoti Raina Vygotsky found it useful to draw an analogy with external material tools. He considers the invention of the tying of a knot which is an artificial formation as a memory device. The device serves as a reminder of what a person is supposed to do, akin to a tool, an auxiliary means, that discharges the intellectual function of reminding. It aims at amplifying the ability to remember so that ‘in the elementary form, something is remembered; in the higher form, humans remember something’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 51). The orientation of the physical or material tools is towards the external, while psychological tools are directed internally from the outside. They aim at mastering natural and cognitive processes, becoming the tools of the intellect mediating student’s psychological processes including school-type classroom learning. The concept of psychological tools enables cognition and learning to be seen as more than mere development of formal thinking in an individual but rather as a social process of meaning-making, participation in social and cultural activities, an intermental activity mediated by the psychological and material tools of culture as opposed to learning being an individual process of knowledge construction. Likewise, cognition is seen as semiosis—internalization of signs and symbols of a culture which are part of psychological tools of culture. (Baveja, 2018: 65) The psychological tools approach is premised on the existence of mental schemes before actual action. Vygotskian theory refers to this as the double nature of human experience (Vygotsky, 1979). The human experience, it is argued, ‘is always present in two different planes—the plane of actual occurrences and the plane of their internal cognitive schematization’ (Kozulin, 1998: 10). The basis of cognitive functioning, classroom learning, and school academic achievement can be thus understood as lying outside the individual. The tools first appear as interactions between people (for example, between the child and the more knowledgeable adults like teachers and parents) through the external psychological tools of a given social group. The interaction of students in the classroom with the tasks presented to them is mediated through psychological tools. These may be the material tools like paper and pencil to write information that needs to be memorised during formal schooling or symbolic tools such as sign systems like language (Vygotsky & Luria, 1994). Children growing up in a particular social group acquire the psychological tools offered by their socio-cultural context. Different social contexts support the development of different psychological tools in children. The available psychological tools are appropriated as tools of the mind that children go to school with (Bodrova & Leong, 2012). The transformation of memory, for example, from an unmediated, direct psychological human function to verbal memory is mediated by the introduction of language as a psychological tool (Wertsch, 1985). The forms of human cognitive

Understanding Classroom Learning  25 functioning thus change according to the nature of tools which brings about a ‘change not only the way we interact with the world but also how we interact with ourselves’ (Eun, 2016). The psychological tools approach to education provides a conceptual base to forge a link between the student as a cognising being and his/her social context. The student is not an individual thinker or agent of learning in the classroom, but the mind comes with its skin of specific psychological tools that can advantage or disadvantage the student depending on whether the social context provides or does not provide the relevant symbolic psychological tools required for classroom learning. Since the mainstream educational psychology framework-dominated school education practices pronounce formalism or formal thinking skill as the high point of academic achievement, the student needs facility with symbolic tools like reasoning, inductive thinking, and abstraction. Most school-type cognitive tasks are based on formal operational thinking, presuming it to be an individual student attribute. But according to the psychological tools approach, cognitive processes are formed and cognitive skills are developed through socially constitutive activities (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993). Consequently, the variance in systems of psychological tools can explain the cognitive differences among students from different social backgrounds and the methods of their acquisition practised in different social contexts. Symbolic devices, artefacts, and instruments like writing, numerical systems, and signs are among the cultural tools students acquire from their social backgrounds which profoundly impact their processes of classroom learning. According to Vygotsky, learning based on psychological tools encourages students to organise, regulate, and amplify their cognitive functioning in the classroom. It equips them with the unique cognitive capacity to use models (Vygotsky, 1994). These models are ‘schematized and generalized representations of objects, processes, and their relationships’ (Kozulin, 1998: 160). The other highlight associated with the capacity to use such ‘models’ is the change in students’ thinking, problem-solving, and learning activity. These can now be ‘represented as a model with the help of psychological tools, thus becoming an object of the students’ conscious deliberation, planning, and decision making’ (ibid.). As instruments forming action, tools mediate human activities; tools that mediate our mental functions are specifically called psychological tools; in the process of mediation, the tools become internalized; the mental functions become transformed with the incorporation of psychological tools; and the processes of tool use, mediation, and internalization constitute the very foundation of human development. (Eun, 2016: 617) Further detailing of psychological tool development, use, and internalisation can be found in Vygotskian and post-Vygotskian literature (Vygotsky,

26  Jyoti Raina 1978, 1997b; Kozulin, 1998 ​; Kozulin & Presseisen, 1995; Leont’ev, 2002). The concept of psychological tools has wide-ranging educational applications, some of which are elaborated further.

Educational Applications Vygotskians argue, Formal learning places specific cognitive demands on students, requiring facility with decontextualized symbolic systems of representation, hypothetical modeling, and reflection. (Kozulin, 1998: 102) This facility is provided by the ‘more knowledgeable others’ who ‘introduce symbolic tools-mediators to children and teach them how to organize and control their natural psychological functions through these cultural tools’ (Eun, 2016: 40). Belonging to the middle class socially is an educational advantage in which powerful psychological tools of literacy, including reading and writing, originate and develop directly from the children’s external environment. However, for students belonging to certain sections of society, such collaborative situations may not exist at home (with parents as the more knowledgeable others). The matrices of socio-cultural family practices that non-middle-class children are embedded in are very different, a phenomenon that conventional, individualistic educational psychology ignores. The symbolic tools to fulfil the cognitive demands of school education may be absent from the external environment in the social contexts of their lives. Such a student enters the formal school education unequipped with this symbolic tool kit of psychological tools. The blame for poor learning is laid upon the student as an independent agent disregarding the role of the social context as a barrier to learning. Kozulin (1998: 102) argues that students whose socio-cultural background does not have the required set of psychological tools should be introduced to them in order to acquire these necessary cognitive skills. Variability in classroom learning is not a difference in the linear addition of S–R bonds by individual students but is shaped by social purpose, human activity, and meaningful action. Activity forms psychological tools, takes the place of dash in the formula S–R (stimulus– response), which becomes the formula subject–activity–object, where both subject and object are socially specific (Kozulin, 1998: 13). Meeting Student Needs through Cognitive Education The child’s processes of cognition and its development are interdependent on instruction (Vygotsky, 1978). A practice like learning to write, for example, requires a psychological tool system but when the tool system emerges,

Understanding Classroom Learning  27 subsequent school-type academic learning undergoes a rapid transformation. Classroom learning activity gets mediated by such symbolic psychological tools as writing. Such new psychological functions further serve the twin role of enhancing a student’s cognitive repertoire in a specific domain and mediating other cognitive processes. The teaching of domain-specific content and the acquisition of psychological tools can be intertwined. The term cognitive education refers to such deliberately structured instruction that not only provides domain-specific knowledge or skills but also supplements student’s psychological tool system (Kozulin, 1998; Davydov, 1988; Haywood, 2013). School-based cognitive education is characterised by specially designed learning activities aimed at the deliberate, methodical acquisition of symbolic tools. The purpose is to meet students’ needs by filling cognitive gaps, if any, to satisfy the cognitive demands of classroom learning. The focus is especially on enabling the learning potential of disadvantaged students, who are unable to appropriate these symbolic psychological tools from their social context. Their lack of facility with symbolic psychological tools causes a cognitive gap in fulfilling the cognitive demands often leading to poor learning. Semiotic mediation modelled through cognitive education offers possibilities to fill these gaps. The design of cognitive education programmes can be varied in nature ranging from content-based cognitive education, where the teaching of content material is embedded with acquiring psychological tools, to infusion approaches that introduce teaching about one’s thinking in the regular school curriculum, and special supplementary cognitive intervention programmes focusing on providing psychological tools to individual students who particularly lack them. The aim of cognitive education remains to address cognitive challenges associated with classroom learning (Panofsky, 2003). The three key features of cognitive education include a deliberate rather than spontaneous learning process, systematic acquisition of tools, and an emphasis on their generalised nature (Kozulin, 1998: 86). The emphasis in cognitive education is on specific psychological tools useful in formal school education. There is a nascent body of empirical evidence in the international arena that highlights the value of cognitive education programmes in the enhancement of the learning potential of disadvantaged children (Kozulin et al., 2003). Psychological Tool System in the Classroom Vygotsky (1978: 83) defined learning as the acquisition of many specialised abilities for thinking. In this specialised process, the focus is not on the teaching-learning of a specific domain or concept from a specific school subject but on a psychological tools approach that emphasises a more general principle that is useful to a variety of different tasks. A study was undertaken on the assumption that different socio-cultural contexts support different psychological tools and enable children to solve

28  Jyoti Raina different problems and also to solve problems differently (Raina, 2006). The key focus was on the role of the socio-cultural context in providing the psychological tools for middle-school science problem-solving. The study gathered data by administering 18 problems in school science to 120 students studying in grade 8 in four different schools around the NCR of Delhi. The schools varied in their socio-cultural location as two of them were urban schools in middle-class neighbourhoods and the other two were located in rural regions. The social context of students attending the two types of school was characterised by marked rural–urban variance in cultural norms, everyday practices, and human activity. Some of the administered problems were based on concepts of reflection and refraction. These related to student’s experience of light and some of its properties like travelling in a straight line, bending while going from one optical medium to another, estimating the depth of water bodies, and seeing light itself. No instruction with reference to the need to draw diagrams was given. The participating students from middle-class social backgrounds attending the two urban schools illustrated their written responses about various optical phenomena with labelled ray diagrams which facilitated their problem-solving in this particular content domain. The facility with ray diagrams leads to other mental tools like meaning-based comprehension and reflective abstraction while reasoning that the light while passing through water droplets can refract and magnify an image, a phenomenon that was further explained through a ray diagram as was evident from student’s written protocol analysis. As a result, the student’s responses were characterised by a theoretical abstraction, scientific literacy, and inductive reasoning which were anchored in the process of constructing ray diagrams to represent, understand, and illustrate problem-solving about the optical phenomenon. The students from the schools located in rural regions did not demonstrate facility with the ray diagram, as a cognitive tool of classroom learning. During clinical interviews they shared that the goal of science teaching was never the ‘construction of a ray diagram’ but information about various topics was presented to them verbally. The contextual difference among the two groups of students emerges as a viable variable responsible for the facility with ray diagrams as a psychological tool for symbolic representation of the scientific phenomenon. Symbolic representations of concepts, phenomena, or experiences, and values assigned to different symbols, differ from urban middle class to the rural socio-cultural context. Comparison reports prepared on the basis of written protocol analysis, classroom observation, and clinical interview of student’s problemsolving reflected that for students growing up in urban middle-class homes, social interactions with the parents, particularly mother while undertaking homework, are characterised by the use of symbolism as abstraction, written discourses, and formalism which aligns with the formal school culture. For example, the parent’s mode of communication, during this exercise, tends to be predominantly symbolic and textual literacy oriented.

Understanding Classroom Learning  29 This everyday practice is a culturally organised activity in which possibilities of children’s thinking nurture a tool kit of literacy, abstraction, comparison, discrimination, drawing of analogies, and grouping that enable them to appropriate a mental life of their own. In the rural socio-cultural locale, such possibilities of formal school-type psychological tool appropriation are available mainly at school only. Interviews with participants who attended rural region schools indicated an everyday lived experience located around domestic discourse with a focus on informal conversation, work in the field, and household chores in the verbal mode. The availability of a print-rich environment, textual materials in general and social practices such as engagement in tutored homework with parents, was not reported. The research found sharp contrast in variability in school science problemsolving across the two types of schools. This contrast may have its genesis in the socio-cultural context as the data from this study seem to suggest. The participants from the urban and rural contexts represent the different sets of psychological tools or rather the absence of the tools in the latter. Also, there is a relationship between psychological tools used by children and the contextual conditions in which these tools are acquired and appropriated. It is not the mere presence of symbolic tools like ray diagrams (which were a part of the school science textbook) that leads to its acquisition among students. The process of its acquisition requires that it be consciously mediated to students, something which makes cognitive education a resonant idea. The school is the lone agency for transmission of this psychological tool to students from rural backgrounds but there was an absence of its mediation which seems to be prerequisites for school science classroom learning. The research concluded that different socio-cultural contexts lead to the acquisition of different psychological tools among students. These cognitive tools of scientific literacy, meaning-based comprehension, and diagram-making, for example, shaped variability in student’s classroom learning. Contextualising Poor Learning A refreshing, radical, and critical perspective on the social class basis of failure to learn is offered by poor village schoolchildren from a farming community in Tuscany, Italy (Scuola, 1970). The children present a view that is arising from inside the world of the poor rather than being about it, which is that the schools are simply too disconnected from their social context. These children had been pushed out of conventional schools as they failed the examinations. They argue that poor learning at school is because the poor get a poorer start from the very beginning. The school rejects how children write by not following their spoken home language by a logical pattern, lingers over grammatical mistakes which discourage self-expression, teaches mathematics that does not happen in their life, is indifferent to children’s lack of background knowledge which was necessary to make sense of classroom lessons, ignores compelling political

30  Jyoti Raina inclinations that connected children with their real world of factories and fields, and avoided proceeding to topics that were tied to their real life. The children appealed for a life in which school is for all day, all around the year, morning to dark, summer and winter. This would provide time for full-time teaching, including peer tutoring, so that every student is able to have the time for formal school experience. The conventional half a day of school hours, they argued, forces them to go back to the home environment after school hours where they lead the intellectual life of those around them (Vygotsky, 1978: 88) which is completely disconnected from the life at school. The longer hours create a broader social context in student’s life with scope for interpersonal interaction with more able others. These imply opportunities for the acquisition of symbolic tools by more time at mediated learning experience in association with more able human mediators, who may have already appropriated them, as also an association with a school-type formal culture where these tools would be generally available. This critical stance calls for greater attention to how social background, life activities, and shared pursuits shape psychological phenomena in mediating learning in diverse classrooms. Though not explicitly located in its framework, the children’s contentions can be looked at through the lens of psychological tools. The extended time at school with possibilities for interactions with teachers as well as peers is like a cognitive education programme that offers promise for all students to acquire symbolic psychological tools necessary to fulfil the cognitive demands of school education.

Towards a New Psychology of Education Vygotsky’s theory can be a step forward in this reconceptualisation with its assumption of the nature of learner as that of ‘a collective and social subject or knower’ (Lourenço, 2012: 282), learning in terms of how ‘one participates in various forms of social interaction, using then tools (e.g., abacus, pencil, hammer) and signs (e.g., language, pretend play, mathematical formulae), tools and signs which are also social in their very nature’ (ibid.) and origin of psychological tools in macro-social reality of student’s own lives. The student is neither an autonomous subject nor classroom learning visualised as a self-governing process. Instead it is mediated by diverse heteronomous social structures that provide the mental tools with which to engage in classroom learning. Psychological tools approach can be regarded as a ‘psychologically relevant application of dialectical and historical materialism’ (Cole & Scribner, 1978: 6) which is useful in deepening understanding of cross-contextual variability in classroom learning. Vygotsky (1978) writes, [f]rom the very first days of the child’s development his activities acquire a meaning of their own in a system of social behavior and, being

Understanding Classroom Learning  31 directed towards a definite purpose, are refracted through the prism of the child’s environment. (30) The nature of learning process is further psychologically oriented to transcendence and heteronomy, i.e., to what is extrinsic to the individual and comes primarily from without, that is, from what transcends or is above that individual, namely, from the subject’s interaction with adults and more, not equally, competent peers. (Lourenço, 2012: 284) Mainstream educational psychology overlooks the supra-individual constitutive practices that form the basis of variability in classroom learning, often leading to educational disadvantage. These practices operate in formal schooling across the two main contexts. First, interactions between teachers and students, where the teaching focus on school curricular content obfuscates the generalised capacity to learn through psychological tool development. Second, between the home and the school where the practices implemented generate aspects of student lives (Mehan, 1992: 16). The forms of mental life generated by the former may not always be constitutive of fulfilling the cognitive demands of formal school. Further research within the psychological tools approach can offer useful insights for not only deepening the understanding of the relationship of student’s social context with classroom learning but also serves the students through cognitive education programmes aimed at enhancing the learning potential of students from non-middle-class social backgrounds. This can show a way forward to a field that may be loosely called a new psychology of education that outreaches the theoretical and methodological developments in the behaviourist and cognitivist perspectives, while trying to get informed by a sociology of education. This new sub-field can attempt to explain classroom learning, achievement gaps, and learning disparity not as individual accomplishment or deficiency but through social ontologybased interactivist process.

References Anand, K., Bali, M., Banerji, A., Ranjan, M., Jain, S., Khan, F., Singh, A., & Lall, M. (2020). Policy Brief: Impact of Covid 19 on School Education in India. New Delhi: Institute of Research and Development in School Education. Available at https://www​.irdse​.org​/front​/Policy​-Brief​-Covid​-19​-and​-School​-Education​-final​ -new​.pdf accessed on 28 January 2021. ASER. (2020). Annual Status of Education Report: Rural Wave I. New Delhi: ASER Centre, Pratham. ———(various years). Annual Status of Education Report. New Delhi: ASER Centre, Pratham.

32  Jyoti Raina Baveja, B. (2018). Culture, Cognition and Pedagogy. In Misra, G. (Ed.), Psychology Volume I, Cognitive and Affective Processes, (pp. 61–110). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bodrova, E., & Leong, D. J. (2012). Tools of the Mind: Vygotskian Approach to Early Childhood Education. In Rooparine, J. L. & Jones, J. (Eds.), Approaches to Early Childhood Education (6th ed.), (pp. 241–260). Columbus, OH: Merrill Prentice Hall (Original work published 1995). Bourdieu, P., & Passerson, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage (Original work published 1977). Bower, G. H., & Hilgard, E. R. (1981). Theories of Learning (5th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Original work published 1948). Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cole, M. (1990). Cognitive Development and Formal Schooling: The Evidence from Cross-Cultural Research. In Moll, L. (Ed.), Vygotsky and Education (pp. 89– 110). New York: Cambridge University Press. Cole, M., & Scribner, S. (1978). Introduction. In Vygotsky, L. S. (Ed.), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (pp. 1–14). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Daniels, H. (2012). A Brief Introduction. In Daniels, H. (Ed.), Vygotsky and Sociology, (pp. 1–4). London and New York: Routledge. Davydov, V. (1988). The Concept of Theoretical Generalization and Problems of Educational Psychology. Studies in Soviet Thought, 36(3), 169–202. Deshkal Society. (2014). Report on Social Diversity and Learning Achievement: The Status of Primary Education in Rural Bihar. New Delhi: Deshkal Publication. Devine, F. (2004). Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drury, D. (1993). The Iron School Master: Education, Employment and the Family in India. New Delhi: Hindustan Book Company. Eun, B. (2016). Equipping Every Student with Psychological Tools: A Vygotskian Guide to Establishing the Goals of Education. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 31(4), 613–627. Gallagher, S. (1999). An Exchange of Gazes. In Kincheloe, J. L., Steinberg, S. R., & Villaverde, L. (Eds.), Rethinking Intelligence: Confronting Psychological Assumptions about Teaching and Learning, (pp. 69–84) . New York and London: Routledge. Haywood, H. C. (2013). What Is Cognitive Education? The View from 30,000 Feet. Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology, 12(1), 26–44. Kincheloe, J. L. (1999). The Foundations of a Democratic Educational Psychology. In Kincheloe, J. L., Steinberg, S. R., & Villaverde, L. (Eds.), Rethinking Intelligence: Confronting Psychological Assumptions about Teaching and Learning, (pp. 1– 28). New York and London: Routledge. Kozulin, A. (1986). The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology: Vygotsky, His Disciples and Critics. American Psychologist, 41(3), 264–274. ———. (1998). Psychological Tools: A Sociocultural Approach to Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (2003). Psychological Tools and Mediated Learning. In Kozulin, A., Gindis, B., Ageyev,V. S., & Miller, S. M. (Eds.), Vygotsky’s Educational Theory in Cultural Context (pp.15–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Understanding Classroom Learning  33 Kozulin, A., & Presseisen, B. (1995). Mediated Learning Experience and Psychological Tools: Vygotsky’s and Feuerstein’s Perspectives in Study of Student Learning. Educational Psychologist, 30(2), 67–76. Lareau, A. (2008). Watching, Waiting, and Deciding When to Intervene: Race, Class and the Transmission of Advantage. In Weis, L. (Ed.), The Way Class Works: Readings on School, Class and the Economy (pp. 117–131). New York: Routledge. Leont’ev, D. A. (2002). Activity Theory Approach: Vygotsky in the Present. In Robbins, D. & Stetsenko, A. (Eds.), Voices within Vygotsky’s Non-Classical Psychology: Past, Present and Future (pp. 45–61). New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc. Lourenço, O. (2012). Piaget and Vygotsky: Many Resemblances, and a Crucial Difference. New Ideas in Psychology, 30(3), 281–295. Mehan, H. (1992). Understanding Inequality in Schools: The Contribution of Interpretative Studies. Sociology of Education, 65(1), 1–20. Mehtabul, A., Kingdon, G., & Wu, K. B. (2016). Impact of Private Secondary Schooling on Cognitive Skills: Evidence from India †. Education Economics, 24(5), 465–480. Mishra, A. K. (2017). Conclusion: Situating India’s Inclusive Education in the Global Episteme of Diversity, Inequality and Democracy. In Tiwary, M. K., Kumar, S., & Mishra, A. K. (Eds.), Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India (pp. 296–311). New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Mukhopadhyay, R., & Sarangapani, P. (2018). Education in India between the State and Market-Concepts Framing the New Discourse: Quality, Efficiency, Ccountability. In Jain, M., Mehendale, A., Mukhopadhyay, R., Sarangapani, P., & Winch, C. (Eds.), School Education in India; Market, State and Quality, (pp. 1–28). London and New York: Routledge. Nambissan, G. B. (2010). The Indian Middle Classes and Educational Advantage: Family Strategies and Practices. In Apple, M. W., Ball, S. J., & Gandin, L. A. (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education, (pp. 285–295). London and New York: Routledge. Nweke, V. (2019). What Is Wrong with the Foundations of Education in a Pluriverse? A Personal Account. Convivial Thinking, May 3, 2019. Available at https://www​.convivialthinking​.org​/index​.php​/2019​/05​/03​/what​-is​-wrong​-with​ -the​-foundations​-of​-education​-in​-a​-pluriverse​-a​-personal​-account/ accessed on 20 December 2021. Panofsky, C. P. (2003). The Relations of Learning and Students Social Class: Toward Re-“Socializing” Sociocultural Learning Theory. In Kozulin, A.,Gindis, B., Ageyev, V. S., & Miller, S. M. (Eds.), Vygotsky’s Educational Theory in Cultural Context, (pp. 411–431). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panofsky, C. P., & Vadeboncoeur, J. A. (2012). Schooling the Social Classes: Triadic Zones of Proximal Development, Communicative Capital, and Relational Distance in the Perpetuation of Advantage. In Daniels, H. (Ed.), Vygotsky and Sociology, (pp. 192-210). London and New York: Routledge. Piaget, J. (1950). The Psychology of Intelligence. London and New York: Routledge. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1972). The Psychology of the Child. New York: Basic Books.

34  Jyoti Raina Raina, J. (2006). Non-Cognitive Correlates of Problem Solving. PhD diss. University of Delhi. ———. (2008). Two Theories of Psychology Applied to Education: Behaviourism and Cognitivism. Perspectives in Education, 24(1), 25–31. Rosser, R. (1994). Cognitive Development: Psychological and Biological Perspectives. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Sadgopal, A. (2016). Common Classrooms, Common Playgrounds. In Prasad, M. (Ed.), Newsletter, April. New Delhi: All India Forum for Right to Education. Schutz, A. (1962). Collected Papers Volume I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Scuola, B. (1970). Letter to a Teacher: By the School of Barbiana (Translated by Rossi, R. & Cole, T.). Middlesex: Penguin. Singh, A. (2014). Test Score Gaps between Private and Government Sector Students at School Entry Age in India. Oxford Review of Education, 40(1 Special Issue: School Quality Counts: Evidence from Developing Countries), 30–49. Sinha, C. (2015). Post-Formalist Explanation of Academic Achievement: Exploring the Contribution of John Ogbu and Joe Kincheloe. Journal of Pedagogy, 7(2), 33–50. Tiwary, M. K., & Kumar, S. (2017). Social Diversity and Learning Achievement: Contextualising Policies and Practices in Rural Bihar. In Tiwary, M. K., Kumar, S., & Misra, A. K. (Eds.), Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India, (pp. 105–138). New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Velaskar, P. (2016). Neo-Liberal Policy and the Crisis of State Schooling. In Singh, A. K. (Ed.), Education and Empowerment in India: Policies and Practices, (pp. 251–274). London and New York: Routledge. Veresov, N. (1999). Undiscovered Vygotsky: Etudes on the Pre-history of Cultural Historical Psychology. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cole, M., Jolm-Steiner, V., Scribner, S., & Souberman, E., eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (1979). Consciousness as a Problem of Psychology of Behaviour (Translated by Veresov, N.). Soviet Psychology, 17, 5–35. (Original work published 1925). ———. (1994). The Methods of Reflexological and Psychological Investigation. In van der Veer, R. & Valsiner, J. (Eds.), The Vygotsky Reader (pp. 27–45). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. (1997a). Educational Psychology (Translated by Silverman, R. with an introduction by Davydov, V. V.). Boca Ratan, FL: St. Lucie Press. (Original work published 1926). ———. (1997b). The Instrumental Method in Psychology. In Rieber, R. W. & Wollock, J. (Eds.), The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky: Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology (Translated by van der Veer, R.). (Vol. 3, pp. 85–89). New York: Plenum Press. ———. (2012). Thought and Language (revised and expanded edition) (Edited & Translated by Hanfmann, E., Vakar, G., & Kozulin, A). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (Original work published 1934). Vygotsky, L. S., & Luria, A. (1994). Tool and Symbol in Child Development. In Van der Veer, R. & Valsiner, J. (Eds.), The Vygotsky Reader (pp. 99–174). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.

Understanding Classroom Learning  35 ———. (1993). Studies on the History of Behavior, Ape, Primitive and Child (Edited & Translated by Golod, V. I. & Knox, J. E.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (Original work published 1930). Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wexler, P. (1999). Foreword. In Kincheloe, J. L., Steinberg, S. R., & Villaverde, L. (Eds.), Rethinking Intelligence: Confronting Psychological Assumptions about Teaching and Learning, (pp. ix–xi). New York and London: Routledge. Wood, D. (1998). How Children Think and Learn. Hoboken: New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.

2

The Power of Collective Responses to Systemic Disadvantage in the Educational Context Divya Padalia and Arvind Kumar Mishra

Academic underperformance of students from low-status groups (also known as minority groups or disadvantaged groups; hereafter will be used interchangeably) is a long-standing concern among education researchers, administrators, and policymakers across the world. Blacks, Hispanics, and Latinos in the United States; Koreans in Japan; Finnish in Sweden; and the Dalit and the tribal communities in India, in other words, the low-status social groups are overrepresented among the academic underperformers. Traditionally, learners from such groups were considered to be lacking in the psychological abilities necessary for learning in school settings. For example, ambitious programmes such as the Head Start launched by US president Johnson were based on the premise that students from disadvantaged/low-status groups were deficient in certain skills and needed extra help from the government to develop those skills. Any intervention focusing on developing a set of such necessary abilities for improving academic attainment has inherent limitations. It is well known that the Head Start Programme met with little success. One of the main limitations of such an approach is that the learners and their abilities are viewed as existing and operating in a social vacuum, disregarding their social context, the opportunity to access material and cultural resources necessary to pursue academic activities, and the power and status of the group they belong to. In reality, these (disregarded) factors do influence learners’ academic performance. Explaining the politics of ignoring the role of sociocultural and material reality in educational psychological discourse, Mishra (2017) observes, ‘If human mind is conceptualised as the product of historical, political, economic, and ideological forces of society, it will challenge the foundation and legitimacy of modern educational thinking and practices’ (p. 304). Responding to the individualistic bias in psychological literature, a group of European social psychologists theorised the social dimension of human psychological functioning. They conceptualised the relation between the larger social structure and individual psychological processes in terms of social identity. Social identity has been conceptualised as that aspect of a person’s self-concept based on her/his knowledge of belonging DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-3

The Power of Collective  37 to a social group with the associated value connotations and emotional significance. In other words, it is a person’s definition of self in terms of some social group membership. According to Social Identity Theory, selfprocess is a dynamic principle that acts to internalise society as part of cognitive functioning (Turner, 1999, p. 28). Psychological research has examined the pernicious effect of negative social/group identity on the academic performance of racial and ethnic minority group students (see Aronson & McGlone, 2009; Hanselman et al., 2014). A recent example is a concept called ‘stereotype threat’ (Steele & Aronson, 1995) which can be understood as a ‘threat in the air’, a kind of added pressure one feels to confirm or be seen as confirming the negative stereotype about their group on a task that one values. A series of empirical studies on stereotype threat provides insights into the perplexing problem in the field of education – that social psychological processes do play a significant role in the academic underperformance of certain minority group students. Ironically, even the stereotype threat perspective that explains academic underperformance as a social phenomenon rather than a merely individual one assumes to some degree that the onus for repairing the problem is on the individual. One can even go on to claim that the framework assumes a sense of passivity (instead of agency) as the dominant feature of human nature, wherein the discourse has focused more on coping, managing the threat, and remediation of the disadvantage (see Martens et al., 2006; Shapiro et al., 2013; Alter et al., 2010; Stricker & Ward, 2004; Good et al., 2008; Blanton et al., 2000). Though this approach may be helpful to a certain degree and in some contexts, it involves working around systemic constraints/injustice and not striving for systemic/structural change. Such approaches may obscure our understanding of the dynamics of educational spaces and the positive role that the collective identity of students from socially disadvantaged communities may play by presenting a lopsided view of education and human nature – a relatively static or fixed understanding of how students from different social groups engage with and respond to the predicament of their social identities. In asking what other ways of responding to stereotypes/social identity threats exist, we wish to explore the possibility of a framework to understand responses to social disadvantage in academic contexts from a more agentic perspective. Another critical question to understand is what makes these responses possible. This chapter attempts to integrate the different social–psychological perspectives to understand the problem of academic underperformance in India to obtain a more holistic picture of responses to this problem. From mainstream psychology’s focus on the individual-level processes, we shift towards the social–psychological processes (social identity processes). We argue that this shift may lead us to expand the social–psychological conceptualisation of responses to disadvantage. We hint at the possibility of resistance as a probable response.

38  Divya Padalia and Arvind Kumar Mishra

Social Psychology of Academic Underperformance Social inequality has been a characteristic feature of most societies in the world. Under the influence of globalisation, these inequalities are on the rise (Oxfam India, 2018; Oxfam International Report, 2019; Piketty, 2014). These glaring social inequalities influence individuals in many different ways. In the education setting, these could manifest in explicit discrimination by way of violence, aggression, bias in marks, and treatment in the classroom by teachers and peers. In modern societies where overt discrimination is often unwarranted or even punishable by law, discrimination is disguised as subtle behaviours such as microaggression and snide remarks. In other words, disadvantaged group members experience classes of threats. Discriminatory behaviours often manifest through stereotypes – or false generalisations about people based on the status of their group – that operate at the level of cognition. It may be noted that stereotypes can be positive or negative. However, stereotypes about the low-status groups in valued domains are invariably negative. For example, stereotypes about women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and ethnic minorities in the academic domain. When internalised, these stereotypes have the potential to change the cognition, motivation, and behaviour of low-status group members through various social, cultural, and political processes. Mainstream education psychology literature sheds light on several reasons for academic underperformance in India. These range from absenteeism due to medical ailments and hospitalisation, learning disabilities, mental health, behavioural and emotional issues, and family-related issues to the educational environment. A recent addition to the list is the pandemic and its exacerbating effect on inequality which has made matters worse for students who are now performing at alarmingly low levels of academic performance. This academic achievement gap has several psychological and social consequences for students, such as low self-esteem, labelling, performance failure (Steele, 2010), dropout (Dreze & Sen, 2002), low motivation (Dweck, 2002), and academic disidentification (Osborne, 2007; Subramaniam, 2015). Though the antecedents and consequences of academic underperformance mentioned above lie on a continuum from individual to social factors, mainstream psychology puts a disproportionate focus on the individual-level analysis such as an individual’s lack of motivation, interest, and intelligence. A critical social psychology of education perspective informs us that individual-level attributes are not sufficient explanations for academic underperformance. Individual attributes intersecting with social and political factors such as social identity, social structural factors, and educational ideology may provide better explanations of academic underperformance. For instance, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER, 2014) by Pratham reports the gap between students attending public and private schools, wherein specifically in villages, there is a growing divide between those who have access to private schooling and private tutors and those who do not. The report

The Power of Collective  39 attributes this to a relative neglect of learning outcomes on the part of the government even though infrastructure continues to grow. In India, the education of tribal communities has also remained a cause for concern. Sujatha (2002) attributes the lagging behind of the tribal population in education to several external and internal constraints, such as indifferent administration and governance, residential patterns, poor quality of schooling, and infrastructure. For Brahmanandam and Babu (2016), the low performance of scheduled tribe students is because of geographical and social isolation. Anthropologist John Ogbu (1995) has argued that a reason for the performance gap for minority group students is the cultural and language problems they face in school. Supporting the arguments of Steele (2010), Ogbu asserts that the cultural hegemony of schools – mainstream curricula and pedagogy – puts an extra burden on minority group students who have to not only perform according to the standards set by the dominant groups but also give up parts of their social–cultural identity to fit into the mainstream settings. Brahmanandam and Babu (2016) point to the absence of culturally linked education as a major reason for the underperformance of scheduled tribe students in India. Kumar (2009) in his eco-behavioural approach to understanding the education system emphasises expectations placed on the student by others along with social support as predictors of academic success. Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) make the case specifically of teachers’ expectations in what they call the ‘Pygmalion phenomenon’ or the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ where teachers’ expectations of students doing well lead to performance increments for students. Bennett (1976) shows links between students’ race and social class and teachers’ expectations of them. In most cases, what is expected of a student has direct links with the status of the social group they belong to. The World Development Report published by the World Bank (2015) supports the view that an excessive focus on the individual depoliticises social processes related to gender, class, caste, poverty, etc. The consequence of such individualism is the belief that the sole responsibility of performing well and remediation in the case of underperformance is on the individual. An approach that takes the ‘social’ and not just the individual into consideration when understanding underperformance has implications at the level of policy. Kumar (2009), for instance, makes a case for reservations for students from different social and caste backgrounds by arguing that others’ expectations and social support are vital for understanding academic achievement. Hoff and Pandey (2006) demonstrate the cyclical nature of caste discrimination leading to performance impediments and lack of confidence, which furthers the discriminatory ideologies that reproduce discriminatory social order.

Stereotypes, Discrimination, and Social Identity Threat Although belonging to social groups can have positive consequences for individuals, such as a sense of belongingness, identification, and being

40  Divya Padalia and Arvind Kumar Mishra valued, it may also have negative consequences such as being stereotyped and discriminated against because of the group identity. For minority or disadvantaged group members, it is often the negative consequences that form a salient part of their life experiences which in turn can influence their sense of well-being, academic performance, and other life outcomes. This experience of (or anticipation of experience) discrimination because of one’s social group membership can be understood as a social identity threat (see Branscombe et al., 1999). In education contexts, the threat can manifest in behavioural outcomes such as disengagement or lowered academic performance. Of the different classes of identity threats described by Branscombe et al. (1999), ‘categorisation threat’ or the threat of being categorised against one’s will appropriately describe the experience of students belonging to disadvantaged groups. This threat may impact those who identify more with the group than with low identifiers. Branscombe et al. (1999) also note that those who do not identify with their group much (known as low identifiers) may disengage further in case they perceive a threat to their value as a competent person because of their group identity. The India Exclusion Report of 2013–2014 mentions harsher corporal punishment, verbal abuse, unfair stereotyping, segregated seating, and fewer opportunities for leadership roles in extra-curricular tasks for students from disadvantaged groups. Categorisation of tasks such as cleaning and their allocation to students based on appearance (tidy vs. dirty) and skin colour is still an ongoing part of the school experience for these students (Mander & Prasad, 2014). Hoff and Pandey (2006), through a series of studies conducted in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, explored how the public revelation of participants’ caste identity affected their performance on cognitive tasks. The results show that for groups that are negatively stereotyped and discriminated against, the revelation of the social (caste) identity affects members’ confidence which further impacts their learning ability. According to Begley (2000), the power of stereotypes lies in their ability to change the behaviour of the person holding the stereotypes. Stereotypes also have the power to change the behaviour of individuals who are target of these stereotypes. In the last few decades, the concept of stereotype threat has gained traction. Steele and Aronson (1995) explain stereotype threat as ‘being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group’ (Steele & Aronson, 1995, p. 797). This seminal work demonstrated how the knowledge of one’s group’s negatively stereotyped identity makes its members conscious of the stigma associated with their social group. This consciousness further leads to apprehensions about their performance on a valued domain such as taking a test, selecting a career, and performing at work. The heightened awareness and vigilance coupled with several other socio-psychological processes, may impact how they perform in the valued domain. For instance, a woman conscious of the mathinferiority stereotype may worry about failing a math test but this worry may also extend to the anxiety about reinforcing the negative stereotype

The Power of Collective  41 about her group – a double whammy that may lead to diminished performance (see Singletary et al., 2009). According to Kit et al. (2008), stereotype threat is a ‘situational phenomenon leading to test performance decrements, in which a member of a stigmatized group feels pressured by the possibility of confirming or being judged by a negative stereotype’ (p. 132). The possibility of the self and one’s group being judged in stereotypic terms becomes a central concern in that specific context. This implies that stereotype threat could affect different target groups such as caste, class, ethnic, gender, and ethnic minorities in the context of academic achievement; women in math test performance; elderly on memory tasks. Many studies concerning the impact of stereotype threat on women examine this phenomenon within the math domain and STEM fields (e.g., Brown & Pinel, 2003; Schmader, 2002; McIntyre et al., 2003; Murphy et al., 2007; Oswald & Harvey, 2000; Rydell et al., 2010; Cadaret et al., 2017). Sinha and Mishra (2013) examined the stereotype threat effect in the context of social class among school children in India. A few studies in the context of caste in India have been conducted to test the impact of caste stereotypes on school students (e.g., Hoff & Pandey, 2004). Those with intersecting disadvantaged group identities (such as Dalit women) may experience multiple discrimination and multi-threats (e.g., Thiem et al., 2019; Neuberg & Sng, 2013; Kray et al., 2002). A central finding in the stereotype threat literature is that members of negatively stereotyped groups are more likely to underperform when they believe that the task or the task context is diagnostic or evaluative of their abilities in a valued domain. Many studies have shown that convincing the targets of a stereotype that the task is non-diagnostic can negate stereotype threat effects (e.g., Carr & Steele, 2009; McKown & Strambler, 2009; Steele & Aronson, 1995). For example, negatively stereotyped participants no longer underperformed on intelligence tests like the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices when it is presented as a ‘set of puzzles’, rather than as an IQ test (Brown & Day, 2006). According to Aronson et al. (1999), stereotype threat is an important contribution to the literature on the academic achievement gap because ‘it locates the problem not exclusively within the person, but within the social circumstances confronting the person … [and] underscores how changing those circumstances, even subtly, can have dramatically positive effects on performance’ (p. 44). Early research on stereotype threat established that impaired performance in the academic domain was the main negative consequence of stereotype threat (e.g., Brown & Josephs, 1999; Sekaquaptewa & Thompson, 2003; Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000; Kray et al., 2001). Empirical research has proposed a combination of physiological, affective, cognitive, and motivational processes underlying the performance decrements in the stereotype threat situation (Schmader et al., 2008). The main postulate of this theory is that physiological stress response, which is a result of the stereotype threat situation, depletes the working memory; since individuals become

42  Divya Padalia and Arvind Kumar Mishra busy monitoring their behaviour consciously, their efficiency on the task goes down; and along with the above two, self-regulation tactics such as suppressing negative thoughts and emotions also become a prime focus of the individual. This suggests that individuals devote their efficiency to focusing on the risks associated with the stereotype threat and ways to fight the threat, which hardly leaves them with any psychological resources to perform well in the task at hand. While the early sketch of stereotype threat suggested that stereotype threat may result in reduced effort and lowered achievement motivation, later research found, ironically, that it may result in too much effort (Nussbaum & Steele, 2007). A key longitudinal component of Steele and colleagues’ model is that of protecting oneself from the unpleasant experience of stereotype threat by progressively disinvesting from the domain in which the negative stereotype is active (Steele, 1997, 2010; Steele & Aronson, 1995). Disinvesting can take the form of leaving their valued domain, such as a preferred school or course, or no longer valuing or identifying with the domain that was previously valued. Findings show a significant effect of stereotype threat on women and minorities leaving the science, math, and engineering fields. Adding to the predicament, Osborne and Walker (2006) suggest that students of colour who are most invested in schooling will be at the highest risk of disengaging and leaving school because of the stronger stigma they face for their negatively stereotyped identity (see also Aronson et al., 1999). The different strategies employed by individuals to manage their stereotyped identity include stereotype suppression (Schmader et al., 2008), denial of the importance of the stereotype (von Hippel et al., 2005), self-defence strategies including vigilance, agitation, and diffused attention (Förster et al., 2004). Pronin et al. (2004) reported that women stereotyped in the domain of mathematics renounced their feminine characteristics associated strongly with the math stereotype about women. Stereotype threat not only creates performance decrements but ultimately may also impact major life decisions (i.e., choice of profession) and prevent individuals from reaching their full potential within a threatened domain (Gupta & Bhawe, 2007). Because of the several short- and long-term negative effects, scholars in this area have proposed ways to remediate stereotype threat. However, even in a phenomenon characterised as a situational threat (which emerges due to a relatively stable unjust social structure), it is mainly the individual-level processes that take precedence in dealing with it. Self-affirming interventions have been established empirically as a remediation strategy for stereotype threat by several scholars (e.g., Sherman et al., 2013). This involves shifting focus to that part of one’s domain identity that is not threatening. Mindfulness training (Weger et al., 2012) has also been effective in reducing the negative impact of stereotype threat. Other researchers have focused on interventions such as reframing the task (e.g., Alter et al., 2010), deemphasising threatened social identities (e.g., Stricker & Ward, 2004; Good et al., 2008), role model interventions (e.g., Blanton et al., 2000), having the

The Power of Collective  43 test administered by a member of the stigmatised group, providing external attributions for difficulty (e.g., Good et al., 2003) by encouraging the students to believe that academic ability is expandable rather than being fixed (Aronson, 2002), and assuring individuals that they are capable (e.g., Martens et al., 2006). Other interventions include psycho-education. Johns et al. (2005) found that educating participants about stereotype threat – that the stereotype is illegitimate – results in decreased threat. Intervention strategies that go beyond the individual involve creating identity safe spaces and cultures and have proven effective in reducing threat effects (Wayne et al., 2010). The extent of effectiveness of these strategies outside the laboratory, however, has seen mixed results. Meanwhile, certain ironic effects from studies that have produced contradictory results, such as negative stereotypes have resulted in increased performance for members of the negatively stereotyped group (e.g., Crisp et al., 2009), have also been demonstrated. This development has implications at several levels. First, it shows the complexity of the concept of stereotypes and social identity threat and that simple individual-level remediation techniques may not suffice. Moreover, the newer understanding puts the onus outside the targeted, stereotyped individuals, on to the social context. Most importantly, this opens door to the possibility of understanding responses to social identity threats on a spectrum – ranging from vulnerability to contestation and resistance – instead of a one-sided focus on vulnerability.

On the Possibilities of Alternative Responses Undoubtedly, the concept of stereotype threats aids our understanding of academic performance gaps among disadvantaged groups. However, in order to understand the range of possible effects of and responses to stereotype threat, it is important to understand the socio-political dimension of the concept of stereotype and stereotyping. According to McGarty et al. (2002), stereotyping is a dynamic social–psychological process embedded in intergroup relations. Haslam et al. (2002) argue that stereotypes are shared or collective tools that are used to understand and shape reality. Tajfel and his colleague have argued that attention should move towards ‘social stereotypes’, which ‘cannot be understood without a consideration of the functions they serve in the competitive and power relationships between groups concerned’ (Tajfel & Forgas, 1981, p. 133). By suggesting that stereotypes serve a certain function in societal power relations, Tajfel and Forgas (1981) put forward the social and political aspects of stereotypes. The creation and use of stereotypes is not a naïve activity of individuals; it involves negotiation, instilling a sense of dependence in the ‘subordinate’ other, and altering the other’s sense of identity as a group of people. Césaire (1955) and Fanon (1952) have both described in their writings the dependency and inferiority that Blacks experience in a White world. As Fanon (1952) asserts, ‘[W]hat is called the black soul is a construction of the white folk’ (p. xviii). The role of

44  Divya Padalia and Arvind Kumar Mishra the stereotyped must also not be discounted. As Césaire (1955) points out in the case of Nazism, ‘Europeans tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them, they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it’ (p. 14). Thus, interactions and negotiations are important features of the stereotyping process, and because stereotypes are embedded in complex and dynamic socio-political intergroup contexts, their meanings are open to contestation and change. According to McGarty et al. (2002), stereotypes serve the political function of both maintaining and challenging the social order. This idea serves as a cue for exploring alternative responses to stereotype threat such as that of resistance. For Leach and Livingstone (2015), psychological resistance is ‘the myriad ways in which the disadvantaged assert their view of themselves and the world despite dominant pressures to accept societal messages to the contrary’ (p. 616). Reicher and Haslam (2006) have demonstrated that groups are not merely spaces for conformity but also have a basis for resistance. Contrary to what mainstream psychological literature would have us believe, resistance is not rare or extraordinary, but a common, everyday feature of our social reality. It could range from individual to collective efforts and can take the form of ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott, 1985) to everyday experiences of stereotyping and discrimination. From this perspective, identification with low-status groups that may have earlier been in a predicament may become a source of strength to contest and resist any injustice (van Stekelenburg et al., 2011). This idea is a key feature of the social psychology of protest and collective action – a line of research that postulates individuals as active and agentic, and societal processes as dynamic – and has consequences for views on human nature as one holding the ability to resist disadvantage, injustice, and subordination. Perceiving threat to one’s self due to one’s group’s disadvantaged social status may be inevitable, but claiming that all individuals will respond to it by a lowered academic performance is far from the truth. Several moderating factors – such as aspects of the context, group identity, collective efficacy, groupbased emotions, counter-hegemonic ideology, and social structure – may play a role in determining one’s response to stereotype threat. For example, a group of high-achieving women engineering students displayed reactance in the face of negative stereotypes (Crisp et al., 2009) with the aid of cultural and individual resources they developed over the time they spent in the male-dominated field. This evidence points to the presence of both individual and situational agencies in helping people reject and/or challenge a negative stereotype effect. Responses to stereotype threat are an outcome of an intersection of social identity and the context in which the subject’s interpretation of the situation, in terms of their identity – the position they hold in the power structure – emotions, and motivations, intersects with the constraints imposed on them by the social setting (Quayle, 2011). According to Simon and Klandermans (2001), given certain conditions, collective identity (or the perceptions of ‘us’ belonging to the aggrieved group) may get politicised and transformed into a politicised collective

The Power of Collective  45 identity. Collective identity has important psychological consequences; these include belongingness, distinctiveness, understanding, respect, and agency (Simon and Klandermans, 2001). The politicisation of collective identity usually begins with a perception of injustice for the ingroup, for which an outgroup is made an adversary. Politicised collective identity has proven to be an important antecedent factor for people engaging in power struggles to achieve justice and equality for their group (e.g., Wohl et al., 2014; Klandermans et al., 2002). Research in the context of higher education proves that features of the social identity (such as caste identity) and the social context (institutional context, political climate, etc.) intersect along with the individual’s strategic interpretations in deciphering how disadvantaged group members respond to stereotype threat (e.g., Padalia, 2019). Disadvantaged individuals and groups do not always accept the status quo. There is sufficient anecdotal and empirical evidence of the fact that disadvantaged individuals may challenge the inequalities and injustices they face and actively resist them. In the Indian context, historical and anthropological evidence has shown that the subordinate caste groups have been able to fight against their oppression (Jogdand et al., 2016). For example, in contemporary times, in some of the institutions of higher education in India, the emergence of Dalit students’ organisations has been found to facilitate students to contest the negative stereotypes and discrimination associated with their groups (Padalia, 2019). Thus, in the case of identity threat, individuals may respond to the threat as members of a group (that is, in terms of their collective identity) drawing upon their social and collective identity. The site/context of education in itself is of importance here for it is education that provides tools for the realisation of collective agency by facilitating the development of politicised collective identity. Freire (1970), Giroux (2010), and Kincheloe (1993, 1995, 1999) using their unique approaches have all argued for a transformative role of education and the importance that critical pedagogy holds for critical reflection. Several education theorists have emphasised the need to overhaul traditional systems of education that emphasise the reproduction of the social order. Giroux (1983) argues for supplementing the traditional schooling approach with one that accounts for the active role schools play in developing human subjects as social agents capable of resisting injustice and domination. Mead’s idea of education as a creative process is vital for reaching the goal Giroux envisions. For Mead, ‘education is not a process of imitation, but a process of action and reaction, of social stimulation and response. It is, in other words, a creative process, a process in which meaning is constantly made, rather than reproduced’ (Biesta & Tröhler, 2008, p. 7). Further, Mead believed that the objective of the philosophy of education was to understand the complex process of the emergence of social consciousness (Biesta & Tröhler, 2008). Ogbu’s (2003) position as an immigrant ‘outsider’ is more radical in his emphasis on education spaces for political movements based on collective identities. His idea of the ‘cultural frames of reference’ highlights the issues (involuntary)

46  Divya Padalia and Arvind Kumar Mishra minority students having oppositional frames face in transcending cultural and language barriers (Ogbu, 1995). Ogbu’s work tilts towards academic disengagement and more direct resistance as a response to oppressive sociocultural contexts. As many visionaries have previously proclaimed, education holds the power to transform individuals, groups, and society.

Concluding Comments Despite holding the view that education is a complex social (also political and ideological) process by educational thinkers and researchers, the naïve empiricism of mainstream (North American version) social psychology has overemphasised individual-level processes such as cognition, emotion, motivation, and personality in understanding the phenomenon of the academic performance gap. This approach assumes that psychological phenomena have their independent existence and are universal and take place in a social vacuum, thus reinforcing negative social stereotypes about the minority group members as deficient in academic competence. This kind of psychological understanding of academic underperformance serves an ideological goal of the dominant group to maintain the status quo in a society. Unfortunately, this ideologically biased understanding of education in general and academic underperformance in particular has influenced the understanding of general public as well as that of policymakers to a great extent. However, the European social psychological approach (particularly, social identity tradition) and critical pedagogy argue to shift our analytical gaze to the unequal distribution of economic, political, and cultural resources in society and its dominant ideology that shapes individual psychological processes. Studies on stereotype threat demonstrate that the social identity processes, that reflect as well as reinforce the social structure, play a significant role in the so-called academic underperformance of the minority group students. However, it is important that we do not overlook the other aspect of social identity – one that leads to politicised collective identity or a shared sense of belongingness to the group – which forms a basis for empowerment and resistance. Thus, the same group identity that works against the interests of group members is seen to work in their favour when it gets politicised – quite often, members of disadvantaged groups use their politicised collective identity in contesting negative stereotypes about their groups as well as in overcoming stereotype threat in the educational context. Some educational thoughts and empirical studies in the field of education support the view that students are likely to develop critical consciousness in the process of receiving education. The critical role of education in an unequal society cannot be exaggerated. This perspective has three main implications. (1) It emphasises the need to redirect focus from micro-level interventions that involve managing or coping on the part of the individual towards bringing in socio-structural level changes for promoting learning in an unequal society. (2) Disadvantaged group members may use their group identity as a

The Power of Collective  47 resource to contest negative stereotypes about their groups and fight against social and political injustice and humiliation if the education system helps them develop critical consciousness among the learners. (3) It paves way for viewing human nature in a more social, powerful, and agentic light.

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3

The Family–School Relationship Nita Kumar

Every society needs to reproduce its values in its younger generations. It does so primarily through two agencies: the family, or community, and progressively in modern times through its schools. While this may be a truism, schools are in fact studied in far greater detail (for instance, Sarangapani, 2003; Srivastava, 1998) than is the family-as-educator, the family taken loosely as ‘culture’; or ‘tradition’ (Conlon, 1977; Shils, 1961). I argue that schools can neither be understood nor improved if their relationship with the family, now symbiotic, now adversarial, is not given due attention. Because both the ‘family’ and the ‘school’ are complex, heterogeneous categories, the study of their interaction becomes a fascinating historical and sociological enquiry. In this chapter, I give some ethnographic data on family socialisation of children in Varanasi, North India, highlighting select points about the family–school relationship. My goal is to increase the appetite for many such studies and to point very briefly at useful lessons from such studies for creating excellence in the schools studied. In an interesting twist, not only is the scholarship on Indian education weak because it ignores the family, the schools themselves are often weak because they do not take families seriously, do not fight them in some cases, and do not try to learn lessons from them in others. Even though ‘the family’ and ‘the school’ are complex, heterogeneous categories, we will see that we can usefully generalise about them. Although an ethnographic chapter, the discussion is based on a historical premise about colonial and modern India. Schooling is understood here as the backbone of the colonial endeavour to control India, the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The ‘other side’ that in turn resists, cowers before, ignores, resists, and proactively fights back is the family. The ‘family’ is one possible translation of what may be also called the community, a caste or sub-caste, indigenous or vernacular society, natives, or the emerging Indian nation, in different formations at different times. This history of the colonial school and the native family has produced in post-Independence India a situation of mutual hostility that still has no name and that I call ‘the family–school conflict’. The hostility is one-sided: the school, with its colonial DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-4

54  Nita Kumar legacy, looks down on the family. The family, usually the elite family, often cooperated with the colonial school in the past, and this collaboration continues in the present. Today, seven decades after colonialism, it is not the business of the school or of educators to pay attention to the family.

Love and Security The one thing that a family near universally provides is love and security. Nowhere in my research did I find a lack of love in the home. This may seem an odd point to make, but it becomes relevant when we note how the home and the child within it are perceived by educators. The school largely sees the home as a weight dragging the child down, refusing to do the required work to remove her overall ‘dullness’ such as by providing support for homework through tutoring and materials, further infusing her with superstition, communalism, and passivity. The school supposedly tries to educate her on the opposite: science, secularism, globalism, democracy, and overall intelligence. For the school, there is a refuge in locating its failure to thus educate in the problematic home. This problematisation of the home is translated by educators all the time into an ethical judgement on the neglect of the child in terms even of love. Educators routinely go through three arguments: (1) ‘Parents are too busy with economic and domestic problems to take any interest in the performance of their children at school’. (2) ‘The atmosphere at home is one of chaos and disorder, typically caused by illiteracy, stupidity, bad habits such as alcoholism’. (3) ‘Ergo, there is a lack of love, which damages the student beyond repair’. The irony is that in the colonial period all Indian families, rich and poor, were thus condemned as ‘wrong’ and ‘backward’. The discourse remains even when educators and educated are one and not racially different, as the British and Indians supposedly were. I mention race because the educators’ fault-finding with families is impossibly essentialist, a quasi-racist argument. A huge jump is made from the set of problems that characterise poor and illiterate parents, such as lack of resources and time, to a marginal social situation: frustration, abuse, alcoholism, to go on, most astoundingly, to the lack of love. Let us be clear: lower class families are in fact very poor. They live typically in one room each, sometimes six or seven or more people in the one room. Parents work long hours and do not have the leisure to pass time with their children. They are uneducated and do not share the discourse of many educated people that to take an ‘interest in the performance of their children’ is somehow a requirement of schooling. Gulnaz, Gulfesa, and Rafia’s home is exactly such a poor home in which the parents are unable to provide children with stationery items or give any academic support, and moreover, make their child labour at the ‘ancestral work’ and require their children’s help with household chores. Their daily problems are staggering. Their home was surrounded by a sea of rainwater

The Family–School Relationship  55 and ditchwater on my last visit in the monsoons. The girls, however, were enjoying their childhood monsoons tremendously, as the games they improvised and the delight with which they played them showed. This is despite the fact that their house is broken down, very cramped, surrounded by filthy water, and they are themselves resourceless, poorly fed, and nightmarishly educated.

Gender and Class The child’s experience of emotional security in her poor home continues into her gender and class socialisation (among many studies of gender socialisation, see Kapadia, 1998). She does not become overtly class-conscious because her home space is the only kind of space that the child knows. Even when she visits others it is likely that she will visit those of the same class as herself and their homes will be roughly similar to her own. Almost every ethnography attests to the high comfort level of children in their own home environment, Almost the reverse process applies to gender. Within this home space there are two different genders, and the child’s learning from the home rests on an ongoing comparison between the two as it does not in the case of class. From the moment she opens her eyes, the child notes the sounds and movements around her. They are all gendered. If the tap is running and the broom is swishing, it is likely to be her mother. If the stove is being lighted and the water boiling and the utensils being touched, it is her mother again. Maybe the father has to go to work early and makes his preparations. Otherwise, he will sit still, drink tea or smoke, and think. Activities, spaces, sounds, and ways of being are all separated in the child’s mind according to gender. There is more direct gendered training, however. Indeed, there is so much of it that in my earliest study of girls’ education I called it the ‘grihastini (housewife) discourse’: the ‘education’ that girls had before there was formal schooling (Kumar, 2007, chapters 7, 10, 15). There is still a pursuit of this parallel education for girls at home, but the process is weakened because the school is a powerful contender for time and resources. The double education desired is not clearly acknowledged and the child suffers from the inadequacy of both efforts. She not only suffers, she is actively blamed for not balancing and maximising the two, as the example of Deepshikha shows. Deepshikha Sharma, 16 years old, in Class 11, goes to school at 9.30. Before that, she helps her mother cut vegetables. She is proud to tell me that she knows how to make jams and jellies as well, from her Home Science class in school. In the ensuing conversation, for whatever Deepshikha says she does, her mother proceeds to amend it as not voluntarily done. Whatever Deepshikha is proud of is what her mother pokes fun at. Deepshikha says that she knows how to make rice, dal, vegetables, parathas, and has learnt

56  Nita Kumar it all ‘dekh dekh ke (by watching)’. Her mother interjects, ‘mar kha kha ke (by being beaten)’. Deepshikha says that she knows how to make puris also, a three-part process of kneading, rolling, and frying. ‘Not the dough—that she won’t knead’, adds her mother sarcastically. ‘Just the rolling’. Deepshikha likes her school – all teachers ‘take’ their classes unlike in her previous school (that is, they don’t leave the students to sit idle) – and she gets bored at home, especially during long holidays. Her mother says loudly, ‘Naturally she will get bored, she doesn’t do any housework. She runs away from work. She will not cook’. In a later, separate interview, I learnt that Deepshikha wants to become a teacher, and meanwhile wants to socialise with her friends and not go out only with her mother to temples and to visit family. But as lives turn out, to jump rapidly ahead in the story, Deepshikha grows up and gets married and has children and is almost completely a replica of her mother. When her presently toddler daughter becomes a teenager, she might treat her the same way as her mother treated her. Or she might glimpse the regrettable domination exercised by her mother, and indirectly her father, and be reluctant to replicate something so subtle, yet so brazen, in the control of another and change her course. We cannot say. But it is almost certain that she will repeat to her growing daughter, ‘It is not good for girls to go out too much’, as her mother did, blaming for this rule, ‘society’, and ‘people’. This is the greatest contribution that the home makes to the child’s learning, to equate gender construction with biological sex, and make the sex/ gender of one’s identity a natural, indisputable fact. School experience is gendered as well, but nowhere near as powerfully or consistently as is the home. At home there is the unconscious experience of it, then there are deliberate divisions of labour according to sex, and finally, there are direct instructions about what girls and boys must do, including harsh rules on movements, dress, speech, and behaviour. All these together comprise an education as powerful as the school’s. The school, at best, is left in the familiar position of liberal reformers who can only endlessly analyse and complain about the problem but would be shocked at any truly radical activism to attack it. I could not agree more with Martha Nussabaum when she says, the family reproduces what it contains. … Just as it is often a school of virtue, so too (and frequently at the same time) it is a school of sex inequality, nourishing attitudes that not only make new families in the image of the old, but also influence the larger social and political world. … It is implausible that people will treat women as ends in themselves and as equals in social and political life if they are brought up, in the family, to see women as things for their use. (Nussbaum, 2009: 87) In our own school (Kumar, 2003), I have been repeatedly struck at how our own well-planned and forceful – we think – efforts to socialise and educate

The Family–School Relationship  57 children into gender equality and neutrality are toppled over by relatively simplistic teachings from home. Dayashankar Tiwari’s son and daughter have been going to our school for ten years. As they entered teenage, Ankur, the son, was visible in all activities. Anupriya was almost in parda or seclusion after school. Things came to a head one day when we learnt that he had hit both his wife and daughter (Ankur might have run away). When accosted, he proceeded to explain, in the way of a balanced, rational patriarch what it was they had done that had forced him ‘to raise his hand’ in anger. If I remember right, he quoted from the Ramcaritmanas, the verse that some men can miraculously bring to mind about beating women like drums.

Apprenticeship The family does its apprenticeship training extremely well. The full pedagogic dimensions of apprenticeship should be the subject of a separate monograph. But here I have given a small glimpse into this world, rife as it also is with violence and domination of children by adults. The apprenticeship is sometimes difficult to disassociate from the socialisation into class and gender roles, and also perhaps religious. All the little girls among my informants who learn sari cutting and zardozi embroidery also learn the Qur’an, also learn their place and their gender-appropriate roles, and altogether learn comfort with themselves and their identities in society. But all children learn the ethos and culture of their family, as well as concrete skills, such as Bhojpuri or other home languages, family narratives, customs, codes of behaviour, and the common sense of everyday life. The integration of diverse parts of life to produce a combination of intelligences – professional, ethical, social, emotional – savours very much of a ‘modern’ procedure for the school to try to adopt. At the potter and painter Bachche Lal’s house, the mother and a daughter-in-law are making papier mache masks. There are hard clay moulds of all the animals. Each is covered first by newspaper, then by a clay mix they call malad. They have a mound of leyi (home-made glue) and a bowl of water to wet their hands and move across the leyi and then the malad in swift, expert movements. Five little children play around, being alternatively swatted off and abused or coddled by the adults. The smallest, sweetest of them is called harami and shaitan, treacherous and devilish. The same children are then put on an adult’s lap and caressed. No child is directly taught the mask-making trade of the family, but they claim, and it is quite apparent to me, that children are indeed ‘picking it up’. At a broader level, apprenticeship is observable in almost every home, regardless of the profession of the adults. It consists of teaching both workrelated skills, and ethics, to the younger generations in different ways. In merchant families, there was mahajani education in the past and an MBA in the present, together with routine practical professional guidance and practice at home (Kumar, 2000, 2021). In Brahman families, there is the

58  Nita Kumar teaching of rituals and sacraments, apart from instruction into priesthood (Menon, 1999; Parry, 1985). In Kayastha families, it could be a socialisation into the importance of studies in general, of reading and writing, of intellectual competition and victory. Thus, one could go through castes and communities and comb them for their socialisation work, and one would find that regardless of the continuity or not of a caste system, there is socialisation into family norms in almost every case, even if shaken off by the adult liberal or reformer (see Navaria, 2013). One may quarrel with the use of ‘apprenticeship’ for this socialisation, but when one is looking for the multiple sites of a subject’s formation, the distance between deliberate apprenticeship (which turns out to be remarkably informal, as in Bachche Lal’s case above) and casual socialisation turns out to be small.

Abuse, Physical and Verbal We jump here to a story of a working-class family becoming middle class. On the list in this process of mobility is – in an eery similarity to Srinivas’ model – secluding women, acquiring furniture, and the little son Vikas’ admission to a neighbouring private school called Diamond English School. Together with that, he was also given a private tutor who came daily to supervise his homework and give him further homework in all his subjects. Vikas was then in kindergarten. We will never know his inner state. But he developed an ulcer within a year, had to be carefully treated till he recovered, and lost one year of school. When he went back, he was a ‘poor student’, but continued in the routine of school, homework, private tutor, more homework, disciplining, revolt. His mother, Mangra, has spoken of him since at least the age of four as badmash and harami (mischievous and treacherous). She says boastfully that he draws beautifully and then gets in a rage and destroys his work. She says he does not listen to her and will not ‘sit down’ when asked, that he is restless and always trying to run around. Every other mother I know says the same things about her sons, including of those children just a few months old. Mangra then calls her son fasadi, which I had so far thought referred to someone who caused riots. She speaks of him throughout without a smile. I take Mangra and Vikas’ combined plight seriously and strive to share some views with her about her parental attitude. I tell her gently that she should not speak critically of her son in his presence, should not call him names, and should not assume that he would always disobey and do manmani (whatever he pleased). That she should praise his good efforts and not generalise. I tell her more severely that she should not burden him so much with schoolwork, particularly when the work consists only of learning the English and Hindi alphabets and simple sums in arithmetic. That she should let him be and that he is intelligent enough to learn these things without so much overseeing and bullying. She looks at me (now with a smile) while I

The Family–School Relationship  59 say all this and continues to do exactly as before. Whatever else she may have trusted me in, she does not trust me to give advice about her son. After all, I am clearly to the manor born and what would I know about the strategies of moving up? As a rule, the elite effectively disguise their strategies and are often not totally aware of the ones related to mobility since they are typically two or three generations in the past. What they do not display is then difficult to imitate. It is not understood, or is misconstrued, by lower class, ambitious people. It becomes crystal clear to me that when I would like to share the technology the elite rely on, the matter is too complicated and difficult to convey, and the trust needed is almost impossible to build up. Mangra is herself educated till Class 5. She has never considered helping Vikas herself with any of his schoolwork, including the beginning alphabets and the elementary arithmetic. Why, one may wonder. She, like a very disciplined housewife and also landlady, believes her primary duty lies in cooking, cleaning, and running the house, and this she does with unrelenting efficiency. So one of the reasons she might give is that she had no fursat or leisure. But most of the time when mothers give such an excuse or reason, the underlying conviction in their minds is that they cannot help with the work. They believe that they are too uneducated, behind-the-times, know no English, and know none of the rules that are the backbone of English schools. This sentiment is caricatured in both the novel Mai and in various Hindi films such as English Vinglish. In both of them, the husband and the son/daughter make fun of the fairly educated, but demoralised, mother for even trying to interfere in the school work. What they cannot decipher at all is the tragedy that takes place with the child. While I said that we will never know Vikas’ inner state, we do know that he gets himself labelled as restless and destructive – he tears up his artwork, no matter how pleasing to the eye. Mangra’s ambitiousness for him and the family plays itself out in double and triple schooling for the child, with excruciatingly boring work. The tragedy seemed doubled when we note that Mangra’s own father was a craftsman of special talent and had seemed to feel no identity crisis in his own life. Mangra is not able to articulate her ideas, but it is clear that she hears the siren calls of modernity and mobility. For this, Vikas’ education is as crucial as her other consumption. The key may lie in that she, and some others in the neighbourhood, have worked or do work as domestic servants in middle-class homes, and then proceeded to read, mis-read, interpret, and mis-interpret the signals of middle-class identity even more than other aspiring working-class people do.

The Role of Modernity There are some positive and some negative sides to these processes of learning in the home. On the positive side, we have love and security, both present and displayed variously. There can be absolutely no question that even in the poorest of families, economic poverty does not translate into ‘poverty’

60  Nita Kumar of emotion. For upper- or middle-class people, or educators or reformers, to claim some kind of privileged access to love in the family is absurd and unsubstantiated. The school could learn from this production of psychological security, since it creates the ground for hegemonic teaching. The school does not have to replicate the family’s high level of comfort and intimacy, but neither does it have to go to the other extreme as at present in reproducing harsh, deliberately ‘masculine’ conditions in unstated opposition to the home’s softer, maternal ones. I see this as one of the colonial legacies, when all Indian, particularly lower class, family practices were by definition backward and deficient, a legacy that has only expanded into contemporary times and not been questioned. On the negative side are these very gender and class roles that are played out with such finesse. One may critique the family – and one would be right – for its violence towards the individual and its cunning hegemonic style, its emotional tactics of giving and withdrawing love according to the amount of correct learning by the child, and its terrible ignorance about such crucial matters as non-violence and humanism. And why this ignorance? We should look briefly at the discourse of modernity and at the dual discourse of the child. The discourse of education and of children in India today is ‘modernist’, which means ‘aiming to be modern’. This discourse presumes that formal education, measured by literacy and success in schools, is of central importance. Children who do not get this education are ‘failed’ or ‘backward’. Adults who do not have it are a huge problem. Government and private reports, such as PROBE or ASER, document the various failures of formal education in India. However, this discourse of the superiority of formally educated adults and children is not a natural one or the only one possible. Modernity would teach that a child is an individual who needs to get attention in his own right. He is not merely a tool of his parents and family. Mangra’s behaviour, like every other parent’s, is authoritarian in both the pre-modern and modern mould and consumerist in the modern mould. The benign effects of modernity are eluding those tempted by its visions, and its malign hand is falling heavily on almost all. There are certainly cases of more gentle, affectionate control of parents over children. While using exactly the same language to describe the children (shaitan, badmash, harami), Raisa speaks to her four sons Rais, Rizvan, Shaban, and Faizan in a way that makes her unthreatening. It is unlikely to result in ulcers, though it will also result in scholastic failure for them, thanks to their going to the same kind of school as Mangra’s son. The discourse of education and children proposes that there is something innate in children that precludes transformative change. This innate trait or state is sometimes called jahan or zahan (the mind, the brain); sometimes svabhav (nature); and sometimes only described by longer phrasing such as ‘wah baith nahin sakta/sakti’ (he/she is not capable of sitting down). The implication is not one of effort and failure, but of something that precludes

The Family–School Relationship  61 effort. Nor is the attitude one of pity. It is totally matter of fact and assumes difference between children, which has to be respected. The contradiction that arises is the following. In music, for instance, the student is expected to do an immense amount of riaz or training practice. Only if the student can labour thus and employ self-discipline will he or she learn and be a successful student. If the student does this, he or she is praised for the labour and the discipline, not for something innate in him or her. We never hear that someone has learnt well because he or she was ‘naturally’ gifted. If the student does not do well, however, the pronouncement is that he/she cannot. Obviously, the student has not worked hard enough and neglected riaz. Since that is not what is said but rather that ‘the work is not all right’ (kam thik nahin hai) or ‘did not/could not do it’ (nahin kiya; nahin kar paya). The understanding is clearly not that some children have the nature to be able to work as hard as needed for success, and some do not, but that anyone could choose to and some do not thus choose. Music is best taught at home, as apprenticeship; all those serious about music would claim that the teaching in schools and colleges is hollow and worthless. The double discourse of the child having an essential nature and the child being open to formation exist both at home and in school. The difference is that the school is the reformer and the constructor of modernity. The limitations imposed on their children by some guardians who claim that their child has such-and-thus a nature can all be superseded by the co-existing discourse of the power of education to produce change. Since the natural ability of children to succeed or not is only comprehensible retroactively and can never be predicted, there seems no real obstacle to the insistence that we have to proceed to teach as if every child can study and succeed.

Possible Resolutions The problem arises when the family is regarded as an institution distant and unconnected to the school. Teachers and administrators, as well as management committee members and inspectors, distance themselves in myriad ways from the family and the community. In schools that are of the community, such as the Islamic schools Jania Faruqiya and Jamia Islamiya, the teachers Rahnuma and Shabahatullah, respectively, will say, ‘The parents are from “labour category.” Mahaul jagruk nahin hai (the atmosphere is not an enlightened one)’. But these teachers and administrators are themselves ‘unreformed’ community members, because they are happy in so being and because their training is so weak and their transition to a modern ‘subject-position’ so incomplete. They bring to the school many of the favoured practices of the family, both deliberately and unreflexively. In any study of education, therefore, it behooves us to give very serious attention to the socialising and educating work of the family, to recognise the overlap with the school, and to work towards closing the distance.

62  Nita Kumar The provinciality and the stubborn refusal to learn of the family are equally reflected in the utter lack of questioning of the child’s school. After all, when almost every school complains of the guardians’ recalcitrance in engaging in a dialogue with them, such as by attending parent–teachers meetings regularly, we should imagine that although much of this is an excuse to blame the parents for the school’s failure, some of it is grounded in an actual refusal of the family to learn about the school. If it did, the family could do much more justice to the child’s intelligence and imagination by becoming a constructive critic of the school. One simple conclusion for the educator regarding the home–school relationship is that the educator – we – have to be bold and we have to take risks. The risk is not that imagined in innovative schooling (Sarangapani, 2003: 97–98). Children will not learn less if we use ideas, images, and practices from their home lives; they will learn immeasurably more. Childcentred, interactive, open, community-based schooling, such as does not exist in India, would be powerful and successful. It is not a theory but a practice. It is not a form of idealism but gives to children and their guardians exactly what they rightfully seek from schooling: knowledge, power, and success in life in the long run and also pleasure in the short run. It is an unfortunate mistake to imagine that the community – small cities and villages especially – have a culture of rote learning and memorisation, that they are somehow less capable of grasping the individual identities of children or the progressive techniques that would work better with children, and that we have to make concessions to this provincialism. The historical and sociological fact for educators to acknowledge is, is that we are them. We are the community.

References Conlon, Frank. (1977). A Caste in a Changing World: The Saraswat Brahmans. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kapadia, Karin. (1998). Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste and Class in Rural South India. New York: Routledge. Kumar, Nita. (2000). Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banaras. New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ———. (2003). A Postcolonial Site in a Modern World. Economic and Political Weekly, 38(29) July 19: 3049–3055. ———. (2007). The Politics of Gender, Community and Modernity: Essays on Education in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. (2021). Education and Hinduism. In T. Coleman (Ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Hinduism. New York: Oxford University Press. Menon, Dilip M. (1999). Being a Brahman the Marxist Way: E.M.S. Nambidiripad and the Pasts of Kerala. In D. Ali (Ed.), Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia (pp. 55–87). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Navaria, Ajay. (2013). Udhar Ke Log. New Delhi: Rajkamal Publications. Hindi novel, translation in English by Nita Kumar forthcoming from Niyogi Books 2023.

The Family–School Relationship  63 Nussbaum, Martha. (2009). The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and the Future of India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parry, Jonathan. (1985). The Brahmanical Tradition and the Technology of the Intellect. In J. Overing (Ed.), Reason and Morality (pp. 198–222). London: Tavistock. Sarangapani, Padma M. (2003). Constructing School Knowledge: An Ethnography of Learning in an Indian Village. New Delhi: Sage. Shils, Edward. (1961). The Intellectual between Tradition and Modernity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Srivastava, Sanjay. (1998). Constructing ‘Postcolonial’ India: National Character and the Doon School. New York: Routledge.

4

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage Smriti Singh

Scholars world over have studied inter-generational transmission of class advantage, concerted cultivation, and its impact on educational attainments among middle class over time (Ball, 2003; Furlong, 2005; Lareau, 2011; Toft and Ljunggren, 2016). This chapter highlights how the middle class’s cultural practices systematically produce class advantage (Liechty, 2003). The chapter highlights the nuanced and intricate ways the middle class acts upon physical space towards producing an enabling environment that optimises learning outcomes for their children. Producing this advantage through enacting physical space is a direct function of class privilege available to those who own, control, discipline, and manipulate both physical and social space. Advantage does not have a clear, objective, and operational definition or character, and neither has the associated discourse of entitlement been strengthened in such a way as to help situate the idea of advantage. However, this lack of definitional clarity is not true of the idea of disadvantage with a strong discourse of discrimination. Disadvantage and discrimination have been defined operationally and objectively to be identified in the social reality. However, despite having not been defined in clear terms, a lot of scholarly deliberation has centred around the inter-generational transmission of class advantage among middle classes or how it is translated into educational success (Power et al., 2003; p. 2; Ball, 2003; Furlong, 2005; Toft and Ljunggren, 2016). The ambiguity in defining or a lack of an operational definition allows a lot of practices and values that contribute to inter-generational transmission of class advantage among middle classes to escape scrutiny. The middle-class transmission of class advantage has been approached from the vantage point of all the factors it is a function of. Middle-class advantage has most readily been associated with the mobilisation of economic and cultural capital towards producing educational outcomes that are then garbed in the discourses of merit, talent, and natural ability (Reay et al., 2011; Lockwood, 1995; Power, 2000). Inter-generational transmission of middle-class advantage in educational outcomes could be understood as a collective function of many factors, such as the ability of middle-class families to form associations and collectives and DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-5

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  65 lobby with relevant authorities (Matthews and Hastings, 2013). Middleclass advantage has also been studied from a policy perspective. Studies have highlighted how policies reflect a middle-class bias shaped outside the immediate educational context (Bondi, 1988; Carroll and Walford, 1996; Thrupp, 2007). It is also a function of social networks that provide relevant or necessary information that contributes to more informed decisions about education (Ball, 1993; Ball et al., 1995; Bagnall et al., 2003; Crozier et al., 2008; Vincent et al., 2008). Inter-generational transmission of middle-class advantage has also been tied to investments in supplementary education such as shadow education or personality and skill development (Majumdar, 2014; Vincent and Ball, 2007). Middle-class advantage has also been linked to practices and routines in middle-class families (Kumar, 2011). The educational outcomes of such a concerted effort of middle-class parenting are often seen as critical markers of the children’s ability to deservedly reproduce the middle-class status through occupational success as young adults. However, the middle-class advantage is as much about the transmission of a decisive edge over class-others in the critical field of occupation (towards the reproduction of class status) as it is about performing middle-classness. Needless to highlight, the two functions are anything from mutually complementary to interlinked and interdependent. Middle-class parenting is often presented as a critical element of middle-class distinction over the class-others on either end of the spectrum. As in this study, the middle class often prides itself in child-centric parenting and being invested in children’s education as a marker of moral high ground against the ‘uncaring’ poor and ‘self-centred’ elites. These discourses and practices concerning education and the child’s socialisation are also a function of the middle-class performativity of middle-classness. This chapter captures the middle-class routines and practices concerning the education and socialisation of the middle-class child through cultivating an ‘enabling environment’. Jeffery et al.’s (2007) study highlights the salience of padhai ka mahaul for the pursuit of education by Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh villagers. This ‘mahaul’ is a collective impact of peer culture, amenities (like electricity), and educational resources (like good tutors). Sriti Ganguly (2018) explores the importance of this mahaul among urban Dalit families of a neighbourhood in Delhi. The understanding that the right mahaul is critical to educational pursuit is recognised by those living in villages and urban Dalit-dominated slums. This chapter takes forward the arguments about the mahaul, its presence or absence as a matter of fact, to an invested and concerted effort by the middle class to produce it. ‘Enabling environment’ in the context of the middle class in gated enclaves isn’t as much a fact as a spatial declaration of class privilege through practices. These class practices are meant to mobilise economic, cultural, and social capital towards translation into a cultural advantage that aids and facilitates scholastic and learning success. It is through these practices that class differences are pronounced. Providing an enabling environment to

66  Smriti Singh children is seen as a necessary condition for actualising the promise of future success. An enabling environment for children is the concerted efforts of parents to systematically provide the most optimal conditions for learning through disciplining the social and physical space that children inhabit. It is simultaneously a dedicated attempt at minimalising distractions, reducing the negative influences and inhibitors to learning. Providing an enabling environment is also tied to the acquisition and making available those resources that are seen as conducive to learning objectives and the child’s future success. These include supplementary tuitions and personality and skill development lessons linked to the middle-class parents’ understanding of their role as facilitators and enablers (Reay, 2005; p. 130). These practices and routines, pertaining to the social and physical space inhabited by the middle-class child, mark middle-class distinction from those identified as the ‘class-others’. As Liechty (2003; p. 255) highlights, ‘class as cultural practice and performance is about locating one’s self and one’s class “others” in social space’. In extension, therefore, it aims to eliminate all contingencies understood as inhibiting and a characteristic of class-other home environments. This chapter examines how these routines and practices are performed through physical and social space among the middle class. It highlights the depoliticised middle-class advantage (Liechty, 2003) by studying the class practices geared towards disciplining and reproducing the social and physical space. The insights of this chapter are drawn from data extracted from field notes and in-depth interviews of 28 respondents who identified themselves as middle class. The respondents were approached through snowball sampling, and the fieldwork was conducted from February through December 2014. The insights of this chapter particularly draw from the field data collected from individuals residing in gated enclaves of New Gurugram who can more or less be described as people with those middle-class occupations most closely tied to educational credentials, and to those sections of the middle-class most likely to seek the right kind of education for their children to secure a competitive edge in what they regard as the main site of social selection. (Power, et al. 2003: p. 2) However, what is interesting about the data incorporated here is that it reflects how the middle class of Gurugram and its migrant middle class have been shaped specifically. The middle class of New Gurugram has emerged against the fractures that have emerged from the tension between a local ancestral agrarian community (LAAC) and migrant educated middle class (EMC) (whose stronghold is now in gated enclaves). The LAAC hold central to itself the socially determined criteria of being powerful as tied to caste, patriarchal entitlements, and land ownership. LAAC feels shortchanged for the value of their land, acquired and repurposed to create islands of globality

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  67 that are giving returns exponentially higher than what LAAC received in land deals. Further, LAAC, whose entitlement is tied to withdrawal from labour, finds itself excluded from the profitable global circuits of capital that EMC can access. EMC, in contrast, claims the city space specifically via their jobs/occupations that bring inclusion into global circuits of capital and therefore are mindful of how occupations are the basis of a foothold in the city, a privileged claim over the city as well as the basis of class distinction against LAAC. As a result, the EMC is deeply invested in reproducing their children’s merit, which allows sustained participation in global circuits of capital inter-generationally.

Conceptual Framework: The Economy of Cultural Practices and Routines Class-specific cultural practices must be understood by bringing together ‘a Weberian concern for the role of culture in social life (lifestyle, education, status goods etc.) with a Marxian insistence that cultural practice should be located in the context of unequal distribution of power and resources between classes’ (Liechty, 2003; p. 253). Bourdieu (1998) manages to do this by suggesting that class practices be understood as relational. Therefore, any class-specific cultural practice is ‘relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties’. Therefore, the practices of class that produce space seek to reproduce a relational difference between the social and physical space of its class-other. The point is that these relationally categorised practices tied to relationally categorised class habitus are not inherently better or advantaging. It is important to understand that the practices become advantageous in the context of a system that values those practices. The schools, therefore, and the larger education system reinforce behaviours and dispositions by setting their expectations as per middle-class parenting. As a result, children who have contextually been exposed to these practices are advantaged within the system. To put it another way, none of these practices has anything inherently advantaging about them. These practices become advantaging in the context of the larger systemic expectations and appreciation of what these practices produce. The chapter looks specifically at practices that manifest themselves through control, manipulation, and disciplining the space (physical and social). Space is critical to understanding middle-class performativity and, by extension, to middle-class advantage. The ability to control, manipulate, and discipline physical and social space constitutes and represents class privilege. In his book on performing middle-classness, Liechty (2003; p. 255) highlights that class-cultural practices play an important role in the cultural production of space. He suggests that space is culturally constructed through practices and class is ‘endlessly enacted spatial declaration of class practice -the construction and location of class difference, the mapping of

68  Smriti Singh social space, the annexation of physical space as class domains -that makes class a fact’. Therefore, practices, specifically in the context of the production of space, provide the perfect way of situating the production of class advantage. The chapter situates middle-class’s cultural practices and routines in the context of Bourdieu’s framework of the economy of practices (1986). With ‘economy of practice’, Bourdieu implies practices that may not always be socially recognised as economic resources but can be critical discourses linked to general reproduction and inheritance of social order and operate on the logic that different types of capitals can change into one another. These can be goods, class values, cultural practices and discourses that are not depending mainly on economic resources in a restrictive sense (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Bourdieu et al., 1990). Therefore, it merits looking at how a class’s cultural practices are integrated into an economy of practices. Assuming this approach highlights why it is important to study the cultural practices of a class to understand the associated advantage they produce.

Enabling Environment Enabling environment is spatially producing the most optimal conditions for actualising one’s full potential in a specific sphere (in the case of the middle class in educational outcomes/scholastic performance and occupational success). It is the systematic production of all conditions conducive to this outcome and removing anything seemingly inhibiting or counterproductive to the goal. The production of space as enabling environment requires the control, manipulation, and disciplining of both physical and social space. The following sections describe the cultural practices adopted to this end. The following sections also examine how values and dispositions are shaped to align with the economy’s expectations and principles. Though not inherently advantaging, these practices are part of an economy of practices that advantage the children of the middle class. Collective Residence (Gated Enclaves) The space is not a passive backdrop but co-constitutive of ‘lives, relations and actions’ (Thompson et al., 2014, p. 66). The neighbourhood of gated enclaves is critical to the EMC’s idea of enabling environment. As Lupton (2003) suggests, neighbourhoods are profoundly important for the kind of houses and amenities available and the social and political networks. This section begins by exploring how the amenities and resources within gated enclaves contribute to enabling the environment. The idea of an ‘enabling environment’ is a principle that is not just applied to controlled settings for children towards advantaging them in scholastic performance and educational outcomes but also supports and supplements the adult middle-class individual in accruing occupational success. The

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  69 closed residential space of gated enclaves embodies this idea of an ‘enabling environment’. The plan of the gated enclaves includes provisions and utilities that meet the most functional needs of households. Further, such an arrangement removes the need for individuals to separately invest time and resources in the upkeep, maintenance, and doing odd jobs around the house to the underclass employed collectively by the gated enclaves as maintenance staff. Such an arrangement is meant to foster the actualisation of the highest potential in an ‘objective-merit-based competitive’ system by both adults and children by eliminating labour investment in the upkeep of living quarters; as Jahanvi explained, all you have to do is to call from the extension phone here and inform a guard that you need a plumber or an electrician, and they send them over … if you need fixtures replacement, then you have to pay for the material that gets installed in your homes, but otherwise, there are no additional service costs … these are employees of the enclaves only, and their salaries are part of the maintenance funds we pay. -Field Interview The builder handles the upkeep requirements and subsequently handed over to a facility management company that is answerable to the residents’ welfare association. These needs are maintenance-upkeep-related labour, security, procurement of provisions, facilities such as water, electricity backup, safe playing space for children, recreational and extra-curricular activities for personality enrichment available at ease through shared infrastructure, and collectively acquired labour force through shared cost. In extension, individually employed household helps – drivers, caretakers, nannies, nurses, etc. – function to further free the educated middle class from domestic labouring, significantly reduces time investment, allowing them to concentrate their energies on career pursuits, education of the children, and/or being able to ‘enjoy life’. These supplementary labour and amenities are essential to EMC individuals because job stability–security and salaries are directly impacted by employee performance in the new labour market. The collectively arranged resources function to get EMC individuals to access facilities that would individually prove costly. Additionally, these facilities, labour force, and amenities help by outsourcing labour requirements in upkeep and maintenance, reducing commute to access facilities, and increasing the resources available to an EMC family. The principle of an enabling environment narrows the focus of individuals inhabiting this culturally produced space to pursue that which the economy values and reinforces while subsidising the costs of social reproduction of labour through collectively owned amenities and facilities by sharing the cost.

70  Smriti Singh Enriching Residential Space and Children Enabling environment, in the context of middle-class children, is the physical and social space that the child experiences, which advantage the child in educational outcomes and occupational success. These are not just restricted to experiences at schools and individual homes but also the experiences of (physical and social space) neighbourhood. The middle-class parental aspirations for accruing exposure and experiences consistent with globality reflect the kind of amenities collectively arranged for within the gated enclaves. These amenities and coaches being made available within gated enclaves are not just from the point of view of getting children a healthy, wholesome life. Many parents like Pragya relate it to the possibilities of their children building a career out of interest, a fairly recurring theme in mothers’ reflections on their children. Many respondents also see these amenities as contributing to building a ‘US college application (essay) worthy’ hobby. There is a careful and concerted effort to build a life story and a persona through exposure and experiences that facilitates the inclusion of the next generation of middle-class children into global education and career spaces. No longer do all parents unanimously feel that children must academically perform brilliantly and consistently, only. New rhetoric is being employed regarding expectations from the children, which is to have a ‘wholesome life’ and ‘holistic development’. This holistic development has its own set of objectives. It is meant to feed into a future career possibility or supplement scholastic performance on an application to premier institutions of higher education in the United States or Europe. However, such flexibility is not without well-defined expectations of being meritorious and gifted at their talents and capable of beating the competition due to exceptional merit in any given field. Such a platform brings out in parents an ability to gauge their child’s interest and natural talent in any given activity, sports, or performance art at an early stage. Such a timely identification would enable parents to prudently invest more from an early age towards building their interest into a distinction-worthy career. The educated middle-class living in gated enclaves to ensure privileged access also seeks to restrict access to lawns, facilities, courts, parks, and swings installed for children within the enclave against the possibility of un-rightful use and ‘abuse’ by children from the underclass or even adults from the underclass. The logic given builds on the resentment of having to pay taxes towards the building of public resources that get used by people who do not pay equally towards them, the disproportionality of payment towards their building, and the flow of benefits, according to them, disadvantages them. Sneha expressed this agony by pointing out, It is far better in the United States. While we were living in New York for two years, I realised how the taxes collected from one district would

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  71 go towards building resources for that community alone … here it is like the state will suck your blood out and feed it to the poor … you see the condition of the public parks, all gamblers just lying sprawled, labourers taking naps, broken swings, rusted see-saws, cow dung cakes being dried, cows grazing how can anyone send their children to play there … everything there for kids would be invariably broken … and it is these kids who have nothing else to do, who wouldn’t go to school, who play on those swing all day long until they break … what value will they have for it, anyway?! They’re not the ones paying for it … we pay the most but end up getting no benefits for it. -Field Interview Manisha further reiterates the feeling, While we lived in Prashant Vihar in Delhi, my son would play in the colony park, and there would invariably be these men who would be playing cards there or when he cycled, we constantly would have to be on toes to ensure he is not coming in the way of the vehicles being driven down the colony road, now here, children go down and play, and I know that nobody suspicious or strange has access to my children … No kids, no people from outside can come in, and nobody unfamiliar may be at the park … I am sure my children are safe, and no anti-social elements are lurking somewhere posing as a threat to the safety and security of my child … earlier I would have to constantly worry about the kind of people in the park, even though he was two years old only … but then you know there are such horrible things people do to even children younger than that … even if not that, I would have to worry about the possibility of someone keeping an eye on him, or planning to kidnap him … there is always that possibility of a fake entry even here, but more or less this is safe. -Field Interview Another related aspect emerges from Alberta Andreotti and Patrick Le Galès’s quote from I. Angell’s work titled The New Barbarian Manifesto, which Angell offers to middle-class high-tech professionals. Andreotti and Le Galès rephrase her suggested strategy to survive the information age as ‘take(ing) advantage of collective goods and services where they are, but to avoid investing in any long term resources, and go private and temporary for as many services as possible’ (Andreotti and Le Galès, 2008; p. 128). In her book City of Walls (2001), Teresa Caldeira observes a similar trend in her study of fortified enclaves of Sao Paolo. She writes, They are private property for collective use, and they emphasise the value of what is private and restricted at the same time that they devalue what is public and open in the city … they are turned inward, away

72  Smriti Singh from the street, whose public life they explicitly reject … Finally, the enclaves tend to be socially homogenous environments. People who choose to inhabit these spaces value living among selected people (considered to be the same social group) and away from the undesired interactions, movement, heterogeneity, danger and the unpredictability of open streets. (2001; p. 258) Although Gurugram does not have what would be classified as fortified enclaves and yet residents echo the sentiments as Jahanvi says, There are many reasons why we choose to live in this kind of gated set up, one very big reason is the kind of facilities … while we were living in the villa for a little while we had our swimming pool, but then to maintain that to maintain the lawns and everything, was so costly, it is unviable …. here my children can enjoy swimming, can learn lawn tennis without the burden of maintaining the infrastructure and facility falling on my back. -Field Interview The view is reiterated by Poorvi who points out, I feel it is better to pool resources towards common but restricted use. You know, unlike the taxation system of the country, here it is reassuring to know that everyone has paid equally to access the resources, and yet it is not falling on the back of one person alone … Collective pools can be more effective because, with the same facilities and the limited input, many people contribute to the pool … a stronger pool of money means we can afford better security than any of us could individually afford, and children get better infrastructure and facilities than if we were to individually pay for. -Field Interview Disciplining the Space Another crucial aspect of enabling the environment is disciplining and manipulating the social space inhabited by children. EMC parents consider themselves facilitators and enablers of their children’s future success (Reay, 2005). In order to be efficient facilitators and enablers, EMC parents seek to control social interactions and orchestrate social experiences in their children’s lives. The strong need among the parents of the educated middle class to provide a controlled-consistent enabling environment to the children is necessary to the promise of future success. This is evident in many ways that the concern for enabling the environment shapes the choices of educated middle-class parents. For instance, Nikita’s insistence to move to a gated

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  73 neighbourhood in New Gurugram, she said, was tied to her need to provide to her son a continuity between his home and school environment, which she felt she couldn’t ensure given the semi-urban locality old Gurugram is characterised by. The gated enclave neighbourhood provides the structured environment perfect for creating the enabling environment that EMC parents imagine for their children. Gated enclaves promise the structured social and physical space that EMC desires for their children. The unstated protocol of living in gated enclaves, that is, respecting other residents’ space and discretion with regard to interacting. Despite most EMC parents having grown up in houses bustling with neighbours and relatives who would visit unannounced, the same was discouraged systematically within the gated enclaves. As Manisha explained, Nobody has time these days … you can’t expect people to be able to have those kinds of ties, as they used to be, anymore … Also, if one were to think of it this way, the kind of unannounced neighbourly visits we used to witness as children were frankly a disturbance. We used to get disturbed by these visits if we were studying. So my friend and I occasionally get together and chat casually over coffee, but we definitely confirm before we go over, unannounced is a kind of imposition and un-thoughtful … their routines and planned schedules would get disturbed if you decided to show up unannounced and stayed on for 2 hours, that induces a two-hour slag to their original plan! Even if we get guests while they are at the gate, their arrival is announced, and we get some time to put things in order, which I feel is a good thing. -Field Interview The system works so that any visitors are announced to the parents before they can appear at the doorstep. The time this gets parents allows them to limit the disturbance the visit may cause to the academic schedule of the children in the house. The structuring of social interactions is not restricted to just relatives and neighbours. Parents actively structure the social interactions of their children within their friends and peer circles. Parents look at peer circle as an important condition for the child to develop socialising skills, team spirit, and networking ability. Meanwhile, simultaneously they are also concerned about the possible risks of peer group influences distracting the child away from the controlled, well-engineered, orderly, and orchestrated enabling environment at home produced by the family. As Jahanvi put it, Sometimes I feel my mother was far more relaxed as a mother than I have been around my daughters, I mean I do not leave them alone anywhere … for one, they are girls and the world is just terrible place for girls and secondly, I feel when kids are left to their own devices, they

74  Smriti Singh can’t be trusted to make smart and sound decisions, these kids also have access to all kinds of strange influences, these days all kids by the age of 13 know all sorts of things that we didn’t even imagine … they are growing up faster than they should, and if parents don’t pay attention they will get allured by their peer groups habits and get into bad habits. -Field Interview The control extends well beyond broad ethos and peer groups. Parents organise their daily schedules by dividing time between themselves for shared and individual responsibility/contribution towards the child’s routine management. This structuring of schedules reinforces what Nita Kumar (2011) points to. She writes, ‘All of the family’s schedule should ideally be planned around child’s scholastic requirements’ (Kumar, 2011; p. 231; Reay, 2005; p. 129). There is a need among educated middle-class parents to provide a protected and controlled environment that is crucial to the future success of the children. This need leads them to weigh the value of all social interactions for their potential to contribute to the controlled environment and its vision of future success. For instance, while Mona was happy that her son knew the son of a high-rank police official, whose help she sought during a robbery, she was particularly anxious about her son’s closeness to a boy of his class who had a reputation for doing drugs. This boy later died of a drug overdose, and she decided to talk to her son about the value of making the ‘right kind of choices in life’. She exhibited what other parents also did – monitor the social circles of their children and interactions among peers. Socially useful interactions are critical to the ‘enabling environment’. Maintaining scrutiny of social associations that the child forms is important. Social ties seen as constructive and useful are maintained, and others are restricted. A good social group of a child is one where every child (of the group) goes to school, strives for a college education or, better still, a technical professional degree from an educational institution of repute and sharpens and develops skills and proficiencies that add value to the candidature of the individual in competition in the job sector. The EMC attitude towards controlling their children’s peer group reflects what Akerlof (1997; pp. 1006–1007) suggests when he writes about the importance of homogeneity within the networks of peers. Social groups of peers also fulfil another important function in creating optimal conditions for the success of the EMC child. The social networks made available through membership in an elite or reputed educational institution or enrichment club/group/batch help one achieve more than one may individually be capable of. These associations of social networks have concomitant significance in current times for the parents towards accessing appropriate social capital, as well (Coleman, 1988; Parke, 2013; p. 17). Similarly, the schools where one sends one’s children also allow parents to widen their social circle through association; therefore, school choice is

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  75 a critical decision for an EMC family. The value of social capital gained through children’s peer circle is illustrated by an incident whereby Mona’s flat was broken into. Despite filing a complaint with Gurugram Police, she couldn’t get the officials to initiate an investigation. She then decided to reach a high-rank official of Haryana Police whose son was studying with Mona’s son at the same school. Even though it didn’t help her case very much, it got the attention she wanted and emphasised how children can also facilitate the broadening of social capital for the parents. There is a whole discourse on school as an enabling environment in educated middle-class homes. Unlike the case of the British middle-class parents’ preference for sending their children to state-run public schools in hopes that their children will become ‘good’ and ‘ethical’ as a result of exposure to a mixed profile of children, EMC in this study pursued exclusivity and homogeneity as guarantee of quality education (Crozier et al., 2008). The middle-class parents that are a part of this study preferred providing their children with what they considered and understood (through in-class networks of neighbours, colleagues, and friends) as the most competitive education. Only Pragya was sending her six-year-old son to a governmentaided school. She considered it important to foster a positive self-concept and humility in the child. She felt it would work as an effective tactic to inculcate in her son the motivation to work harder towards beating the competition since he would have little assurance of all the material comforts he enjoys at home. In her words, A little sense of a lack(ing) and a greater understanding of one’s humility is the key to success in life … one has to have a hunger to be doing well … if your stomach is too full, you’d get lazy or laid back … you would only move if you have a little hunger in you … you would get off your behind and work. -Field Interview Everyone else in the study was sending or sought to send their children to global/world/international schools, arguing that this was the most enabling environment. In this case, an enabling environment at school provides superior exposure and globally oriented education (one that can lead straight to higher education institutions in Europe or the US). The world schools were credited with world-class pedagogy and exposure. They even controlled temperature and physical environment that would enable the child by neutralising the effect of temperature variations and other such issues posed by a physical environment that may negatively influence the learning environment and hence decrease the child’s learning potential. The child’s energies would get distracted from overcoming hostile weather conditions and physical environmental barriers. Even though Mudit remained critical of world schools as the best, he still said that he would be compelled to provide his child with what the society around him considered enabling environment.

76  Smriti Singh However, overall, international schools emerged as a popular choice among the educated middle class as efficient and sophisticated. The international schools and their protected centrally air-conditioned premises, English-speaking teachers with sophisticated mannerisms, global exposure through a tie-up with schools in other countries and a global culture reflected in the school calendar, pedagogy and accountability measures seemed to provide the ideal controlled environment for their child to actualise his/her potential without having to battle harsh weather or less qualified, de-motivated, or ill-tempered teachers in an obscure teacher–student ratio and bad infrastructure of state-funded schools, as perceived by the educated middle class. Even Pragya felt that while she was comfortable sending her child to an aided school, she wasn’t comfortable with sending her children to state-funded schools due to sheer lack of accountability and the dismal state of pedagogy and facilities. Time Management Time and space management towards enabling the child’s potential through minimalising distractions is also essential to providing children in an educated middle-class family with an enabling environment. Parents go all out to provide the child with a controlled home environment with the least distraction, disruption, and disturbance through disciplining space and social interactions. Parents make diligent efforts towards providing their children with a controlled enabling environment characterised by minimal disturbances of unforeseen visits and familial obligations or any other interactions that may interfere with the child’s daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly routine and academic schedules. A situation the middle-class parents recognise as contrasting to the environment within lower-income households that have stronger bonding with their extended families, unlike the contained familial interactions in middleclass families. The reduced filial interactions emerge from the understanding that the individual’s survival and sustenance are not contingent on familial and kinship contacts and a mutual agreement on children’s education being the highest priority. As a result, parents often excuse themselves from familial obligations of visits, ceremonies, and functions in favour of conflicting school or academic year schedules, which in most cases qualifies as an authentic and legit reason for missing this obligation without creating friction in the social and familial relationships. Children were also reminded time and again to be prudent with their time. Time must be mobilised in a way that prioritises those tasks and activities that are conducive to the goal of reproducing class status. ‘Wasting’ time/loitering is seen unfavourably and unlikely of a focussed, constructive middle-class child destined for success. Routines and timetables that optimised time use were integral to giving children a headstart in life. Idle periods were very rare in an otherwise neatly structured routine

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  77 of an EMC child. Wasting time doing things that do not further the goal of contributing to future success was seen unfavourably. Disciplining the routine was seen as a critical part of a goal-oriented life. Even leisure and entertainment had to be well aligned with the values of globality. Shows and movies are chosen after carefully vetting the values and their worth to further the goal of being well integrated into global culture. The repertoire gained through exposure to carefully picked shows was viewed as a potential basis for bonding among peers from different cultures. This bonding was assumed to foster better chances of social mobility and reproduction of class status. There is a collective understanding that EMC parents face constraints imposed by child-centric parenting that everyone within the social circle agrees to accommodate. Children of school-going age or in higher education may be excused from attending functions and, in many cases, may be encouraged to do so given their academic obligations and demands. Parents may also actively participate in the child’s academic pursuits through disciplining home environment and social interactions, extended tutoring, or changes in family schedules as well as individual schedules (for instance, to drive to and back from coaching, rehearsals, practices). In extension, parents are responsible for encouraging and ensuring that the child is initiated into activities that are understood as valuable from the point of view of futurity. Structuring Family The family institution is also crucial to the cultural production of enabling environment since it is the ‘primary site of production of the middle-class child’ (Kumar, 2011; p. 229) and functional units and support structures to the growing up child. The educated middle class prides itself in the coherence of its nuclear family as a functional economic, social, and cultural unit. By being a functional economic, social, and cultural unit, what is meant is that it provides for all anticipated needs of its members, efficiently providing them with the necessary and optimal ‘controlled environment’ for the actualisation of one’s highest potential. Family is highly prized, and the closeness of family ties ensures proper and efficient transmission of habitus and accruing of essential cultural capital towards efficient reproduction of class advantage. The family structure is also meant to optimise the capital at the family’s disposal. As a result, vertically extended families appear to be the most viable family type in the sample, supplementing EMC parents in balancing childcare responsibility alongside career demands. Pragya, Manisha, Patricia, Mona, and Rachna had vertically extended families, that is, in-laws staying in the same households. While Trishna and Nikita lived in close vicinity of their in-laws as well as parents but not in the same household, Suraiyya, Deepika, Sneha, and Azra regularly visited their household for fixed durations. These signals not just strong family ties

78  Smriti Singh within the educated middle class but also offered support structures necessary to the functioning of the households of salaried educated middle class with children that need caregivers. As Pragya put it, I have never been comfortable with help for daughter, but the fact that my mother-in-law is here is such a relief because I do not have to constantly worry, I know that she will take very good care of her; also it makes her feel purposeful, so it is to her interest too. She just can’t give her baths because of her knee joint issue; otherwise, she makes this whole thing much easier than it would be without her. -Field Interview Values and Dispositions Enabling environment would never be complete without inculcating in children the disposition, attitudes, and practices that benefit them in the larger context of education and occupation. Inculcating these values involves inculcating in children, from an early age, values that the economy is seen as favourably receptive to. First and foremost among these is respectability for money and monetary economy and placing a premium on it. It is critical for children in educated middle-class families to understand the value of money. Children are expected to not take for granted their material situation even while enjoying its comforts. Parents wanted their children to remain mindful that these material comforts are contingent on their ability to prove their worth in the education and economy, subsequently. They wanted their children to enjoy these material comforts but use them as a launching pad to ensure the security of the same or similar material conditions through appropriate educational success that feeds into bettering their future employment prospects. The material comforts and provisions were meant to be both tools and motivation for the children. While material comforts and provisions enable the child to free himself/herself from the obligations of labouring or participating in household chores in any significant manner, these were also meant to be a kind of motivation or a kind of driving force towards envisioning their future ambitions with regard to a lifestyle. The other associated and crucial element to the principles of educated middle classes is the idea of merit, talent, and fair and objective competition. The merit-talent-free and fair competition rationality align well with the desire to discredit other markers of identity and historical advantage, that is, the idea of merit helps cloak middle-class advantage as well as the social and historical advantage of caste and religion that have made available privileged access to various kinds of capital, even if through the absence of constraints otherwise determined by caste. Merit, talent, hard work, and fair competition are a defence mechanism for the educated middle class much in the same way as Savage (2005; p. 6)

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  79 argues fatalism and ambivalence are for the working class, that is, ‘psychological defence mechanism by which workers adapt to their life situations’. The defence mechanism for the educated middle class is objective competition and meritocracy. Competition with objective evaluation criteria is seen as the best way to identify talent. Competitive entrance examinations for admission to technical professional education courses in colleges of repute are seen as battlefields for sifting talent from the pool. All respondents felt that a fair and objective evaluation of talent should be the only basis for determining an individual’s true worth. While some felt resentful of castebased reservation of seats in these coveted entrance examinations, others felt that these were deemed irrelevant since further levels of screening of talent, that is, in university scholastic performance and employment sector, were objective enough to sift out those of them who had used their caste profile’s advantage to get admission but lacked merit. There was primacy accorded to competition over social bonding among children from an early age, prioritising individual achievement over cooperation and empathy in scholastic performance. Children were gently reminded that even friends must be seen as competitors while at the same time forming transient friendships as groups for recreation. It is reinforced that one must be mindful of one’s financial and time-related losses in and through bonds of affection, making concessions but only in events of reciprocity, that is, being smart about personal emotional and social relationships and prioritising one’s individual goals over emotional demands of relationships. As Nikita pointed out from an anecdote from her childhood, ‘This once, in an examination, I had scored 24 out of 25 and when I told papa that, he was proudly patting my back all the while saying “well done! Very good!” and I don’t know what came to my mind. I promptly said, “papa, Alka (peer from the same neighbourhood) has scored 24.5”, the next thing I know, the hand that was patting my back came and landed with a loud thud on my cheek. His expressions had changed. I still remember his words, “Why couldn’t you be the one who scored 24.5 instead of her?”’. A similar thing was noted in Poorvi’s saying, ‘I keep telling my kids that friendship is important, but they must not let friendship influence their performance, because eventually everyone will be appearing for the same exam and while you would have spent your time helping this friend of yours he would have spent time preparing himself for the exam’. Education in this regard is projected as a level playing field (Reay, et al. 2011; p. 19) and is somewhat validated by the state also through restricting state provisions for social justice for the socially and historically disadvantaged by reserving seats in educational institutions; however, as is revealed from the opinions of the respondents, illustrated above, education does not provide a level playing field since unequal habitus influences school performance for students battling social–historical disadvantage. At the same time, the socio-historic disadvantage gets discredited by the private sector employment market.

80  Smriti Singh Meritocracy, Smitha Radhakrishnan (2011; p. 87) highlights can be traced to Michael Young’s The Rise of Meritocracy. Merit is equated with intelligence-plus-effort. She adds that the merit discourse in the middle class is essentially ‘inherent personal worth and talent … (that)contains within it the historic complaints of India’s elites’. Azra illustrates this idea when discussing her expectations and aspirations for her toddler. She says, I want her to study from well-reputed institutions in India or abroad. This means she should be able to acquire a seat for herself in higher education on sheer merit because all the good institutions of higher education in India are state-sponsored, where entrance examinations are so tough to crack and if she proves her merit for a seat in higher education institution abroad she would be studying on scholarship like her father … I feel that the criteria of merit should be that the education did not cost a lot … it is not like we cannot pay, but this is the mark of good quality, competitive education … and once she gets into a good institution, a good job is assured. Therefore, merit works to garb the advantage produced through concerted mobilisation of economic capital and an economy of practices. Merit, therefore, is a critical discursive tool to hide systematically produced advantage into individual failure/success.

Conclusion This chapter looked at the cultural practices of the educated middle-class living in gated enclaves of Gurugram that seek to advantage their children through their educational outcomes and occupational success. These cultural practices should be understood in the context of how the EMC of Gurugram has evolved. While the general findings could help understand how middle-class advantage works through the spatial declaration of class practices, the context could highlight the need to study the specific ways this spatial declaration of class practices happens for middle classes in other contexts. The chapter shows how the class advantage is contingent on the mobilisation of material forms of capital towards procuring appropriate symbolic capital and cultural production of space through practices valued within an economy of practices. These practices are not obvious and easily get masked in the rhetoric of hard work and merit. Studies have shown that learning outcomes vary for middle-class children as opposed to the poor. Studies have also linked parental engagement and out-ofschool factors to understanding differential educational outcomes for children from different classes. This chapter helps highlight how social

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  81 and physical space is manipulated to optimise conditions in which children and adults prepare themselves to perform better in educational and occupational outcomes, respectively.

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82  Smriti Singh Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95–120. Crozier, G., Reay, D., James, D., Jamieson, F., Beedell, P., Hollingworth, S. and Williams, K. (2008). White middle-class parents, identities, educational choice and the urban comprehensive school: Dilemmas, ambivalence and moral ambiguity. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(3), 261–272. Furlong, A. (2005). Maintaining middle-class advantage. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26(5), 683–685. Gandin, L. A. (2010). The democratisation of governance in the Citizen School project. In M. W. Apple, S. J. Ball and L. A. Gandin (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education (Vol. 349). London: Routledge. Ganguly, S. (2018). Social construction of a segregated urban space and its effects on education: A case study of the Balmikis of Delhi. Contemporary Education Dialogue, 15(1), 51–72. Jeffery, C., Jeffery, R. and Jeffery, P. (2007). Parham ka mahaul? An educational environment in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh. In G. de Neve and H. Donner (Eds.), The Meaning of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India (pp. 116–140). London: Routledge. Kumar, N. (2005). Mothers and non-mothers: Gendering the discourse of education in South Asia. Gender and History, 17(1), 154–182. Kumar, N. (2011). The middle-class child: Ruminations on failure. In A. Baviskar and R. Ray (Eds.), Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle-Classes (pp. 220–245). New Delhi: Routledge. Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley, CA: University of Cali- fornia Press. Liechty, M. (2003). Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lockwood, D. (1995). Marking out the middle-class(es). In T. Butler and M. Savage (Eds.), Social Change and the Middle-Classes. London: University College. London Press.P.1-12. Lupton, R. (2003). Poverty street: The dynamics of neighbourhood decline and renewal. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Majumdar, M. (2014). The Shadow School System and New Class Divisions in India. London: German Historical Institute, Max Weber Stiftung. Matthews, P. and Hastings, A. (2013). Middle‐class political activism and middle‐class advantage in relation to public services: A realist synthesis of the evidence base. Social Policy and Administration, 47(1), 72–92. Parke, R. D. (2013). Future Families: Diverse Forms, Rich Possibilities. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Paulsen, R. (1991). Education, social class, and participation in collective action. Sociology of Education, Vol. 64, No. 2, 96–110. Power, S. (2000). Educational pathways into the middle-class(es). British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(2), 133–145. Power, S., Edwards, T., Whitty, G. and Wigfall, V. (2003). Education and the Middle-Class. Buckingham: Open University Press. Prieur, A. and Savage, M. (2013). Emerging forms of cultural capital. European Societies, 15(2), 246–267.

Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage  83 Radhakrishnan, S. (2011). Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reay, D. (2005). Mothers’ involvement in their children’s schooling: Social reproduction in action? In G. Crozier and D. Reay (Eds.), Activating Participation: Parents and Children Working Towards Partnership. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books​.pp​.23​​-33 Reay, D., Crozier, G. and James, D. (2011). White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling. London: Palgrave. Savage, M. (2005). Local habitus and working-class culture. In F. Devine, M. Savage, J.Scott and R. Crompton (Eds.), Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyles: Cultures, Identities and Lifestyles (pp. 95–122). London: Palgrave. Smart, S., Hutchings, M., Maylor, U., Mendick, H. and Menter, I. (2009). Processes of middle‐class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme. Journal of Education and Work, 22(1), 35–53. Thompson, R., Russell, L. and Simmons, R. (2014). Space, place and social exclusion: An ethnographic study of young people outside education and employment. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(1), 63–78. Thrupp, M. (2007). Education’s ‘inconvenient truth’: Persistent middle-class advantage. Waikato Journal of Education, 13(1). pp 253–272. Toft, M. and Ljunggren, J. (2016). Geographies of class advantage: The influence of adolescent neighbourhoods in Oslo. Urban Studies, 53(14), 2939–2955. Vincent, C. and Ball, S. J. (2007). ‘Making up’ the middle-class child: Families, activities and class dispositions. Sociology, 41(6), 1061–1077. Vincent, C., Ball, S. J. and Kemp, S. (2004). The social geography of childcare: Making up a middle-class child. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(2), 229–244. Vincent, C., Braun, A. and Ball, S. J. (2008). Childcare, choice and social class: Caring for young children in the UK. Critical Social Policy, 28(1), 5–26. Whitty, G. (2001). Education, social class and social exclusion. Journal of Education Policy, 16(4), 287–295.

5

Samaj and Sangat Parental Construction of Children’s Poor Educational Attainments in a Caste-Based Segregated Settlement1 Sriti Ganguly

Introduction The spatial and social segregation of Dalits has been both a reflection and reinforcement of their social and economic conditions. While this form of exclusion is largely assumed to be a characteristic of rural India, the urban spaces have not completely eroded these patterns of spatial segregation (Dupont 2004; Singh and Vithayathil 2012). It is evident from the castebased clusters such as mohallas, bastis, and colonies found across the metropolitan cities of India. Balmikis,2 a socially marginalised and stigmatised group, not only continue to be recruited as sanitation workers in the cities owing to the imposed caste–occupation link3 (Prashad 2000) but also continue to be spatially concentrated in caste-based bastis and mohallas spread across the cities like Delhi. In one such small, low-income, segregated colony of Balmikis in the capital, the parents spoke often about the effects of their socio-spatial context. Parents frequently spoke about the effects of ‘samaj’ (society) or ‘sangat’ (company/peer group) in which one lives, on the learning outcomes and educational trajectories. The attempt to understand these notions brought forth many social and economic aspects that continue to shape the lives of this marginalised group living in the city. Education emerged as a defining element of ‘sangat’ and ‘samaj’ as both the absence and presence of education were perceived as not merely shaping these contexts, but they seem to impact the learning conditions and outcomes of those children living in such a segregated space. Drawing upon the qualitative data from fieldwork, this chapter aims to explore the parental constructions of factors that shape learning outcomes. A combination of surveys and in-depth interviews was used to collect data over 6–7 months. From a larger sample of 40 households for the survey, a subsample of ten individuals including men and women was chosen for in-depth interviews which included four persons in the age group of 20–30. The names of the respondents have been changed in this chapter to protect their identity.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-6

Samaj and Sangat  85

The Field Setting A small neighbourhood of Balmikis is located in a well-known commercial area of central Delhi. This was set up a year before the Independence of India by the Delhi Municipal Corporation for its sweepers and therefore continues to be remembered as an ‘angrezon ki basai hui colony’ (a colony set up by the British). The original, single-room structures have today evolved into three-storied houses and multiple partitioning into smaller households has also taken place. A network of kinship and extended family continues to exist. While it is a predominantly Balmiki neighbourhood, some migrants from Bengal and Bihar have also moved in as tenants living in the portions sublet by the owners, making rent a good source of income. Similarly, there is some diversity in terms of housing quality, occupations, and incomes. In the present generation of working men (25–39 age group), one notices a diversification of occupations. A majority of men in this age group are engaged in jobs in the informal sector as drivers, mobile technicians, and shop assistants which indicates a shift from the traditional sanitation jobs. However, these are highly irregular and low paying in nature as compared to a permanent job in the municipal corporation which might be in the lowest division (Grade IV) but comes with certain employee-friendly benefits and a sense of security. In the case of Dalits,4 Jodhka (2015) explains, ‘much of the mobility appears to be merely horizontal, from traditional caste occupations or agricultural labour in the village to insecure jobs at the lower end of India’s vast informal economy’ (Jodhka 2015: 10). Therefore, many with low levels of education are left with a difficult choice between stigmatising traditional scavenging jobs and non-traditional but low-paying and insecure economic activities in the informal sector. In the age group of 40 and above, a majority of men in the sample were involved in sanitation-related jobs as sweepers, supervisors, and sanitary inspectors in municipal bodies. However, there were some noticeable shifts in the kind of employment from first- to second-generation men, particularly, a shift from the traditional occupation. For example, two male respondents whose parents worked as safai karamcharis themselves held positions as a cashier in a nationalised bank and assistant manager in an insurance company, respectively. The kind of shifts and diversity present in the case of men is, however, absent in the case of working Balmiki women who continue to be largely engaged either as sweepers or domestic workers, providing services in the surrounding neighbourhoods. This was also noted by Karlekar (1982) in her study on Balmiki women in Delhi. The association of the Balmiki community with sanitation jobs nevertheless continues and is reflected in the way the neighbourhood is derogatorily labelled and known as the colony of ‘Jamadaars’ (sweepers/supervisors) or ‘Bhangis’5 among the surrounding neighbourhoods although the influence

86  Sriti Ganguly of the city has weakened the caste link to some extent and as mentioned before many occupational shifts have also taken place.

Changing Status and Attitudes towards Education Inter-generational change can be seen in the education levels in the Balmiki neighbourhood. The oldest and original settlers did not have access to education. The successive generations of city-born Balmikis in the neighbourhood have received a minimum of six to seven years of schooling. When this colony was established, its surroundings were rural, but over the years rapid urbanisation and growth have taken place, including the emergence of schools that enabled access to formal education for successive generations. One adult respondent said about his grandparents: ‘us zamane mein kaun padta tha, madam’ (who used to study in those days). While this statement has a generalising tone, it rings particularly true for the Dalits and more so for a community like that of Balmikis whose entry in the educational scene has been late due to caste barriers and poverty. This is reflected more clearly in another respondent, Smita’s statement: ‘aaj kal toh yeh kafi padha likha samaj ho raha hai’ (nowadays it is becoming an educated community) which reflects the changing status of the community as a whole. She has been married for around 15 years: In today’s generation, the ones who were born in the past six-seven years are all studying. They think about progress. And today all the children in our colony are studying … when I came after getting married, I used to see young boys going for a collection of garbage to other localities. (Mohalla-basti karna) Few in the newest generation of school-going children from families with better economic status were also attending English-medium private schools. Rani made an important remark about these changing socio-economic conditions and choice of schooling: ‘You will not believe that these parents may not even have thought that one day their children will go to schools like New Bloom6 or Bal Bharti’. This statement is a significant one as it captures the economic mobility and aspiration of a select few to access what the urban educated, privileged middle class defines as reputable or ‘good quality’ education (for a discussion on differentiated schooling market and urban education for the marginalised, see Nambissan 2021). Several respondents shared that today every parent in the neighbourhood is willing and trying to get their child educated particularly with the feeling of ‘hum nai pade toh humare bache toh pade’ (we did not/could not study so at least our children should get educated). Highlighting the importance and power of literacy, a female domestic worker in her late thirties said: ‘Dekho har jagah kalam chalta hai, kalam chalega toh paisa milega’ (see

Samaj and Sangat  87 everywhere the pen works. If the pen is working, money will keep flowing). She studied only up to the primary level but her two school-going teenage daughters asserted that they will not pursue the same occupation as their parents7 and instead aspired for careers as doctors and teachers. Similarly, two other respondents emphasised the role of education in the progress of Balmiki community and other Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the absence of any other social and economic capital. Hopeful about the potential of education to redefine a stigmatised caste identity, Abhishek (age 27) repeatedly emphasised that discrimination was a thing of the past. It used to happen in my father’s time. Not even when we were growing up. Now we stay in Delhi and own property here. Nobody can say anything to us. Now our community has progressed a lot. People are educated. Somebody is a judge/wakil, people from our community have also entered Delhi Police.8 There is SC quota for us. All we want is for our child to get educated. Only if he is educated, he can progress in life. Madam, when one becomes educated, nobody sees his/her caste. If my child becomes a judge or a doctor nobody will call him an SC. They will call him by his name. What appears from this response is that there has been some inter-generational change and instances of stigmatisation and exclusion may have diminished over the generations in the urban context. One also sees the belief in the promise of urban education to redefine a stigmatised identity. Importantly, Abhishek’s response reflects the belief that the city is a space where the individual is given more importance and the achieved status of an ‘educated person’ can surpass the ascribed ones. The overall educational status of Balmikis is still low and they lag behind other Dalit communities. In Delhi, Balmikis have the second-highest population after Chamars in the capital, above five lakhs. According to the Census of India (2011), Balmikis in Delhi have a 67.4 per cent literacy rate whereas the recorded literacy rate of the community in the 2001 census was 68.5 per cent, showing barely any change in this one decade. Among the literate population, 4 per cent are literate without any educational level. In terms of educational levels attained, 16 per cent are below primary, 31 per cent in primary, 23 per cent in middle, and 15 per cent are in the secondary level. Only 7 per cent have gone up to the higher secondary level. As it has been the general scenario of education of Dalits, as they move up the ladder the figures keep declining. Srivastava (2012) in her exploratory study on Balmikis in Trilokpuri, West Delhi, reveals that parents as well as children aspire for alternative occupations and see education as a pathway promising this occupational and social mobility. However, schooling experiences did reveal few instances of caste- and occupation-based prejudices towards Balmiki children. Ramanujam’s (2016) study on the educational disadvantages faced by children of communities engaged in so-called

88  Sriti Ganguly unclean occupations (namely manual scavengers) in the two cities, Panipat and Faridabad in Haryana, reveals that among those in the ‘continuing education’ category the percentage drops from 58.5 per cent to 19.2 per cent at middle primary, further dropping to 11.8 per cent at secondary. Only 3.4 per cent were in the graduation and above level. Their data shows that the ‘percentage that discontinues education at primary level is equally high (48.7 per cent) indicating that the drop-out sets in at the primary level itself’ (Ramanujam 2016: 264). The continuing low levels of education indicate that the community faces several economic and socio-cultural barriers to completing schooling. The next section, therefore, delves into parental perceptions and explanations of why the residents think the children continue to lag.

Notions of ‘Samaj’ and ‘Sangat’ Despite having a positive outlook towards education, many among secondand third-generation parents continue to complain of dropouts and low levels of education. When asked to explain the reasons for discontinuation and lack of interest in schooling, parents frequently blamed the surrounding sangat (peer group), samaj (society),9 and mahaul (environment). These three terms, often used interchangeably, were also embedded in their spatial context. For example, the term samaj or society was often used to denote the Balmiki community in general and their immediate neighbourhood in particular as well. The term ‘sangat’ was used to refer to the peers and network of friendships in the neighbourhood. In the following sections, the chapter attempts to unpack and discuss these two notions and what the respondents meant when they employed them to explain their children’s educational journey. Peer Influence, Role Models, and Aspirations Sakshi (22 years) has two brothers aged 19 and 17 who dropped out of school after ninth standard. She was only four years old when their father passed away, leaving the mother (Sonam) as the sole bread earner in the house. Sonam was employed in the municipal corporation as a temporary sweeper10 and often complained of delays in the disbursement of salaries. Sakshi studied up to tenth in a regular school, remained out of school for about a year due to illness, and finally completed higher secondary via open schooling later. She explained that her brothers dropped out under the influence of what she called ‘society or friend circle/company’ that her brothers11 keep and this, according to her, holds for many adolescents in the neighbourhood. She further elaborated that all the boys in their circle do not attend school and engage in what she called ‘awaragardi’ which entailed idleness, loitering in and around the colony, gambling, alcohol, and substance abuse in broad daylight. Prevalence of alcoholism among

Samaj and Sangat  89 fathers was pointed out by many others and untimely death due to this reason was not uncommon in the colony. Two female respondents shared that their husbands were alcoholics and passed away leaving behind their wife, children, and parents to fend for themselves which also impacted the education of children. One 29-year-old male respondent who is a graduate and currently employed as a parking manager said: ‘Earlier everyone used to come back from their sweeping/cleaning jobs … drink alcohol and engage in physical violence at home’. It is important to mention here that scholars have drawn attention to the link between alcoholism and the menial and inhuman nature of scavenging work Balmikis have been tied to12 (Gorringe 2006; Franco et al. 2004). Another middle-aged domestic worker shared: ‘yaar-dost aise hai ki khel khud mein lag jaate hain bache. Mauj-masti mein bigad jaate hain’ (Peer group is such that children get more involved in playing and having fun. This is how they get spoilt). She complained about her nephew studying in the fourth grade, who runs away from his school and comes back home almost every day. Here, however, an exploration of the role of school becomes equally important. Although this chapter does not delve into school-related factors, it is worth exploring schools’ efforts in retaining children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially first-generation learners, which include both ensuring their regularity and supporting their interest in learning and other activities of the school. School-related aspects worth exploring include classroom interactions, perceptions and attitudes of teachers and fellow classmates as they are seen as shaping the everyday schooling experiences of Dalit and tribal children (Kumar 2006; Nambissan 2000). For instance, when Sakshi was asked if her brothers’ schooling experiences had anything to do with their dropping out, she explained that the school they were studying in is a minority institution run by a Sikh trust. It is heavily dominated by Sikligars who often mocked children belonging to ‘SC community’. It is important to mention that Sikligars themselves are listed as Scheduled Castes in Delhi. However, what she perhaps was indicating is that since the school is dominated by one particular community, the children from other communities feel marginalised. Even within the Dalits, Balmikis are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy owing to their association with ‘unclean’ work. It is quite possible that they might be discriminated against by those who consider themselves ‘above’ the Balmikis. Similarly, Shruti, a seventh-grade student, claimed that her class teacher’s behaviour towards her changed after the former’s identity of a Scheduled Caste was revealed. Shruti also added that the use of labels like ‘Bhangi’ was part of ‘hasin-mazak’ (jest) in the peer circles in classrooms. This is an important point to remember in the context of the city because it is often believed that cities offer a sense of anonymity where caste identities take a backseat. If one recalls, respondent Abhishek opined that caste was a thing of the past and is eclipsed by the identity of being urban educated. However, this incident reveals the persistence of caste-based labelling and stigma. Such claims

90  Sriti Ganguly about classroom and schooling experiences of children from disadvantaged communities are, therefore, important and merit further study. Another respondent, Raja (27 years), dropped out of school due to the influence of peers, after studying till seventh grade. He was working as a paper distributor in a mill at the time of fieldwork. He aspired to grow successful and shared his dream of settling in London one day. My parents tried a lot to get me educated but what happened was that all my friends turned out to be gundas (hoodlums). So we used to leave our home for school but after getting our attendance marked we would leave. My parents tried hard but I was the one who did not work hard. Then they saw that this child cannot study. And I realised that I didn’t want to study. I wanted to become a bada aadmi (rich, successful person). Interestingly, the absence of a matriculate degree was not perceived by him as a barrier to realising this dream of becoming a ‘bada aadmi’. The presence of a large commercial market around the neighbourhood, as Raja opined, was an attraction for the young boys of this colony, where success may not be dependent upon educational credentials which makes it worth exploring how much education is valued vis-à-vis opportunity that is both available and accessible for such communities. Ogbu (1987) also argues that schooling and educational experiences of minority children have to be seen in the context of the community’s perceptions of the ‘post-school opportunity structure’ (p. 313). Drury (1993) argues that ‘the degree to which families invest their time, money, and effort in schooling is not only a function of their resources in an absolute sense, but of the importance attached to formal education’ (p. 96). He further points out that in working-class families, economic constraints or a ‘jaded view of the hiring process’ might prevent them from relying on education as a mobility channel or seeking jobs for which it is essential. Scholars note that Dalits, even educated ones, may face difficulties in finding alternatives to their traditional jobs due to persisting discrimination in the job market (Jodhka and Newman 2007; World Bank 2011). Jeffery et al. (2005) explore the state of ‘educated unemployment’ among Dalit young men in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh, where formal education, the authors write, ‘had not compensated for Chamars’ lack of money and social capital’ (p. 270). Therefore, not only the barriers that shape the schooling careers of children in the colony, it equally becomes important to gain further insight into the aspirations and worldviews of youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and the importance attached to formal education to achieve them. It is important to note that although the residents largely complained of negative peer influence, peers can exert a positive influence as well in the form of role models. Role models can be present in the family and among peers both in the neighbourhood and in school. In a Balmiki colony where

Samaj and Sangat  91 several residents continue to engage in sanitation-related jobs, a shift in the nature of occupation, particularly to a high-status one, becomes exemplary for others. Interestingly, in a few cases, these examples of mobility often translated into visible status markers such as a nameplate or a better-maintained house. The researcher noticed two nameplates with ‘Reserve Bank of India’ and ‘Air India’ engraved upon them where one member from each of these households had been an employee in these organisations. Two more houses had a nameplate with ‘advocate’ printed on it. However, what was noteworthy in this neighbourhood was the popularity of law as a profession as several respondents labelled ‘judge/wakil’ as the ‘padhe-likhe log’ of the colony. One 45-year-old woman who had never been to school said: ‘There are educated people too in this colony. Somebody is judge … somebody a lawyer’. When asked to identify some role models, some respondents hinted at a few families where children were preparing for law. The fact that an old and former resident of the colony went on to become an accomplished Additional Sessions Judge at a district court in Delhi explained this popularity. However, some respondents were of the view that educated persons may not serve as role models, particularly for the young Balmiki boys. In the case of boys, many opined that the competition is more about material possession of bikes and gadgets and education figures marginally. On the other hand, a more complex picture emerged in the case of girls. Some of the well-educated girls in the settlement were also asked to identify role models in their settlement and whether they are seen as role models by their neighbours. Priya, one of the few girls to have entered the profession of law, was asked how she is perceived in this colony and whether others look up to her as an educated person (importantly as an educated female). Her response to this question raised a crucial point which was later reinforced by two other respondents. In her opinion, educated persons, especially girls, were not seen as worthy of emulation. In fact, their freedom of speech, manners, and choice of clothes were negatively associated with education. For example, she stated:13 ‘woh sochte hain ki jeans pehena hai, ya English bol rahe hain toh zyada ban rahe hain’ (They believe if the girl is wearing jeans or speaking English then she thinks highly of herself). Jyotsna added that if a school-going girl ever leaves her hair unbound or wears make-up, some parents infer that she is getting ‘spoilt’ and hence she should be withdrawn from school. Similarly, Prakash Kumar, holding a managerial position in an insurance company, made a similar comment about how his educated daughters cannot serve as role models. If a girl wears trendy clothes and make-up, people ridicule her saying: ‘yeh toh model bani hui hai ladki, yeh kya padhi likhi hai. Humare bacho pe galat asar padega’ (She behaves like a model, what kind of an educated person she is. Our children will get badly affected). How the gendered expectations come into play, shaping attitudes towards education of girls, is not only reflected in these statements, but also in how

92  Sriti Ganguly boys and girls are supervised and their movement in the neighbourhood is regulated. The act of loitering in the streets was a heavily gendered activity. Parenting Practices The influence of neighbourhood and peers was also linked with inadequate supervision and monitoring on part of the parents. A recurrent complaint of the residents was that children kept playing in the streets of the colony during/or after school hours as there was nobody to monitor them. Rajni, who has lived in the colony for ten years, pointed towards a group of children playing on the street and said: ‘Look at these children. They have just returned from school and started playing with marbles. And they will keep playing till 9 o’ clock at night. Throughout the day one only hears exchange of abuses’. Parents were blamed for the lack of supervision of their children’s activities and an attitude of indifference towards their education, resulting in the peer influence becoming stronger. For example, Asha, a domestic worker, said: If we will not focus on our children then what will they do? Parents should keep a check on whether the child is regularly going to school or not, whether the child is going on time or if he is missing classes. If he does all this and goes with society then how will he take interest in studies? Then his sangat only becomes different. If we are sending the child [to school] but he goes somewhere else then it is a waste. Another respondent, Pramod Kumar, added that it is the mother in the household who has a greater responsibility of monitoring children’s activities: ‘It depends … not so much on the father as on the mother as she is the one who stays at home. The mother has to see how the children are to be raised (parvarish)’. The commitment and devotion of the mother in bringing up the child is a discourse that is constantly popularised by the media, policymakers, and general populace (Donner 2008; Vincent 2010). Scholars have drawn attention to the increasing emphasis on maternal involvement in middle-class families where an educated mother is particularly desired so that she can help with everyday routines associated with schooling, tuition classes, and homework for children (Drury 1993; Nambissan 2010). Donner’s (2008) study on urban middle-class families of Calcutta reveals how ‘mothers were seen as key facilitators of their children’s education’ (p. 131). Vincent (2010) argues how the values and practices associated with ideal mothering are class specific but often extended and standardised to include all mothers irrespective of race and class categories. When viewed from such a ‘standard’, a working-class mother’s child-rearing practices may be criticised as falling short. In the case of manual labourers or working classes, most women may be working for long hours to support the family. Owing to low levels of education, they might not also be in a position

Samaj and Sangat  93 to assist perhaps beyond the primary level in academic work. Among the Balmikis in this colony, what respondents like Pramod Kumar laid more emphasis on was the supervisory and disciplinarian role that mothers can play as most of them had low educational levels. This would entail keeping children at home and restricting their interaction with relatives and neighbours to avoid undesirable influences. Rajni situated the indifference of parents towards education in a particular idea that she believes prevails among some community members. She (derisively) opined: ‘these people know we belong to Balmiki caste. Till what level will our children study – 8–9th grade? After that they too will take up the job of a sweeper’. There were references to networks that existed in the community and the neighbourhood which were activated to secure jobs in the municipal bodies. Pramod Kumar, however, disagreed with this idea and argued that ‘those days are gone when a safai karamchari’s son would become a safai karamchari’. Firstly, this social change was attributed to the weakening monopoly14 of Balmikis over scavenging jobs and increasing competition from other communities for getting these jobs, and secondly to the influence of education and growing awareness in the Balmiki community (jagrukta), especially in the urban context. Family ‘Background’ For another set of respondents, it was the existential struggles of many parents that rendered it difficult to supervise children’s activities and dissociate them from negative peer influence. For instance, one 45-year-old female domestic worker, whose husband was unemployed and stays at home due to illness, shared that she provides a regular source of income for the household. Her three sons were also working in the informal sector where job insecurity looms large and they witnessed sporadic phases of unemployment. In the course of the everyday struggle to single-handedly sustain the family, her sons’ education got neglected and she was unable to protect them from negative peer influences. In such families, under difficult financial circumstances, while one member struggled for sustenance children eventually withdrew from school (what they termed as ‘padhai chut gai’). Drury (1993) writes that there were ‘fundamental differences between manual and non-manual workers’ school histories’ (p. 63). A ‘stable family environment’ was one thing that was taken for granted in the middle class and business families where a financial crisis could lead to a reduction in expenditure but there was hardly any impact or compromise on the schooling of children. Drury (1993) adds that at the most a shift from private to government school could take place in such circumstances but it never leads to withdrawal from school. In a similar spirit, two female respondents said: ‘ma-baap ki koi majboori hoti hai aur dusra yeh ki bacha “weak” hota hai. Padhai mein bhohot paisa waste hota hai’ (There are two reasons. One the parents have some

94  Sriti Ganguly compulsion/necessity and second the child is weak in studies and hence a lot of money gets wasted). They further added that ‘dimag nai hota hai bhohot se bache mein’ (A lot of children lack intellect). What emerges from such a response is that in families with economic limitations a child’s low educational outcome or failure might be perceived as a waste of monetary investment and can easily lead to withdrawal from school. It came to light that in many cases when a child failed a grade, he or she never went back to complete school. In such circumstances, the child’s inability to perform may be attributed to or interpreted as a lack of ‘inherent ability’ or ‘intellect’. Two crucial points need to be noted in this case. Firstly, disadvantages in the form of the absence of economic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) in Dalit families continue to shape the schooling experiences of the children. Secondly, here the role of the school again merits our attention. Stereotypes about Dalit and tribal children lacking ability or intelligence are also sometimes perpetuated by the teachers and school administration (Nambissan 2000). In such cases, children from dominant classes who already come with a set of acquired skills, language, and dispositions that the school favours whereas those lacking the necessary capital from working-class families might be labelled as lacking ability. Thus, making ability and intelligence seem like something ‘natural’ rather than socially acquired. Kavita remarked that non-Dalits or privileged upper castes have a ‘background’ because in these families, parents and in some cases grandparents too are educated. Whereas in the case of Balmikis, she said: ‘Even if they [parents] want their children to go to the school it is difficult because they do not know how to support or sustain it’. This indicates that even if parents want their children to study and have adequate financial capital, they may not have social networks, knowledge, or information to supplement what is being taught in schools. This also indicates that apart from schooling there is a range of other kinds of support that the families, where children are first-generation learners in school or where parents have limited education, have to provide. The family as a site is important in Bourdieu’s (1986) analysis of capitals because it is the middle-class family that transfers the cultural capital to the new generation that often translated into success at school. Bourdieu (1986) distinguished between three types of cultural capital whose transmission and possession reproduced advantages for the dominant classes while putting the working classes at a disadvantage. First is the embodied cultural capital in the form of dispositions of mind and body. The second one, i.e. the objectified capital or ‘cultural goods’, includes pictures, books, paintings, etc. The last form of capital is institutionalised capital like educational qualifications. It is from the family the child internalises dispositions, knowledge, and linguistic skills, which the school later recognises and legitimises when it is brought to the classroom. The absence of a mentor at home was highlighted by another respondent who said: ‘Actually learning can take place when there will be a parent

Samaj and Sangat  95 or headmaster at home. Here most parents are involved in their rozi-roti (livelihood). Nobody focuses on what the child is doing’. It emerges that several of these issues raised here are intertwined with each other. The financial limitations and instability keep the parents more focussed on the struggle for sustenance and they are unable to dissociate from some undesirable influences from peers. Moreover, due to the low educational levels of parents, it is difficult for them to supplement and support what the child is learning in school. Thus, a combination of poverty and low educational status in many families continues to reproduce these disadvantages. Ramanujam (2016) writes: ‘Inequalities in terms of income, caste, occupation, education of parents are forces that are built in the social system that severely circumscribe any room for change in the status of “unclean occupation” households’ (p. 269). In the colony, most respondents situated the factors that shaped the educational trajectories of children within the family, peers, and neighbourhood. Reflection on the quality of education provided in schools came forward only from a few. Some respondents like Asha emphasised that government schools provide support in terms of books, uniforms, meals, and so on for weaker sections like Scheduled Castes and all a child has to do is study. This is similar to the point of view of the privileged, such as teachers, middle and upper class, and policymakers, that the government provides learning for free and all one has to do is send the child to school. Prakash Kumar, on the contrary, expressed strong dissatisfaction with the government’s schools and teachers, hinting at how the poor children become further segregated and disadvantaged due to poor quality of education. He argued that the hierarchy between the poor and the nonpoor was getting reinforced by the hierarchy of government and high-end English-medium private schools. Rani and her daughter Jyotsna supported this opinion: ‘government [schools] mein toh bhohot khasta halat hai’ (The state of government schools is very fragile). Complaining that teachers have a careless attitude towards children, they also made an important comment on the government’s No-Detention provision [Section 30(1)]15 under Right to Education, 2009, holding it responsible for children’s lack of effort and seriousness in studies and consequent failure and dropouts.

Discussion and Conclusion From the perspective of the policymakers, school functionaries, and privileged citizens, low educational attainment is often explained in terms of parental apathy. What this chapter tries to do, by exploring parental perceptions and worldviews, is to give insight into a more complex picture. The notion of samaj is used not only to point at the effects of living in a neighbourhood where school dropouts are high but also to how the accumulated disadvantages of the Balmiki community, in the form of existential struggles and low levels of parental education, continue to influence the education

96  Sriti Ganguly of the present generation. We see a complex interplay of factors like the inability of some parents, caught in their existential struggles, to dissociate children from the undesirable influences which again feeds back into this cycle. We see that the city provided educational opportunities to subsequent generations. Not only this, the fact that some parents were accessing English-medium private schools also reflects the desire to access what the middle class of the city defines as ‘good education’. While the city offers hope for mobility and in some cases, the possibility of reconfiguration of a stigmatised identity with the help of education, we also see instances of stigmatisation manifesting in schools and classrooms. Labels and stereotypes for Dalits and Dalit neighbourhoods persist, even if not in a very overt manner. A large number of studies exist in the United States that examine the influence of the residential context on health, education, adolescent/youth behaviour, and other outcomes. In a study conducted on parental perceptions about how the neighbourhood impacts educational achievement in Denver, Colorado, Galster and Santiago (2006) found peer influence to be the second most cited mechanism by the parents. However, they noted that ‘parents were aware of both the positive (e.g., good friendships) as well as negative (e.g. exposure to undesirable behaviours) aspects of their children’s relationships with peers’ (Galster and Santiago 2006: 220). Similarly, Sharkey (2006) based on studies in Chicago neighbourhoods stresses a distinction between ‘imposed environments’ and ‘selected environments’ where the former is the given neighbourhood setting over which s/he has little control while the latter is the one where neighbourhood actors choose their exposure to peers, interaction, and actions. It is also important to mention that since this chapter largely discusses parental perceptions about peer influence, further research that captures the perspectives of youth themselves and how peer influence operates is needed. Winship et al. (2010) demand more in-depth research about ‘who those peers are, which peer attachments are more common among young people in poor neighbourhoods, and what is transmitted through peer networks’ (p. 9). This could give a sense of their worldviews and ideas about formal education, success, and failure. Peer influence may vary with factors such as age or gender, for example, older children are more likely to be exposed to peers than the younger ones whose mobility and interactions may be limited to the family. Similarly, complaints including alcoholism, gambling, loitering, and frequent fights indicate how gendered these descriptions of the environment are as they point more towards behaviour of male members of the colony. The expectations from daughters were different and there were restrictions on their movement and choices. The role of the school also needs to be studied simultaneously. Schools have the potential to bring break the cycle of disadvantages produced by social, economic, and spatial contexts by being more inclusive, supportive, and sensitive to the needs of children

Samaj and Sangat  97 from marginalised backgrounds. For instance, Rendon (2014) argues that schools have the potential to provide positive role models as peers or teachers to counter the negative, if any, influence existing in the neighbourhood. At the same time, they may be exposed to negative peer influence in schools as well, not just in the neighbourhood.

Notes 1 Acknowledgement: I am thankful to Prof. S. Srinivasa Rao (Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University) for his ideas and insights that helped in developing this chapter. I am also thankful to the respondents of this study, without their contribution this chapter would not have been possible. 2 Balmiki/Bhangi community’s social-spatial segregation has its roots in the hierarchical caste system where Balmikis are relegated to the bottom and associated with polluting occupations such as scavenging/sweeping. Manual scavenging refers to the inhuman practise of removing human excrement from dry latrines using bare hands or brooms and carrying them to the dumping ground. Scavengers/sweepers are employed in a range of similar tasks including cleaning private and public latrines, sewers, sweeping, and garbage collection. 3 When the Chuhras from Punjab migrated in the early twentieth century to Delhi, they were heavily recruited as sweepers by municipality, working on the caste– occupation stereotype (Prashad 2000). 4 The term Dalit here refers to the ex-untouchable castes in India. Used in 1928 for the first time by Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the term was popularized by the Dalit Panthers of Maharashtra in the 1970s who broadened it to include other oppressed groups such as women and tribes. The official term used is Scheduled Castes. 5 It is important to mention that the stigma attached to the term ‘Bhangi’ is so intense that it is very often used as an invective in common parlance (Deshpande 2013). 6 A privately owned preschool is located nearby. 7 Their father is a temporary employee in New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC). 8 His father has retired from Delhi Police. 9 Sometimes the English equivalent was used by the respondents themselves. 10 As opposed to a permanent employee in the municipal corporation who earns around 25,000 per month, a temporary worker gets merely 7,000–8,000 a month. Additionally, it may take up to ten years for a worker to become a permanent employee. 11 Despite my repeated efforts, her brothers could not be contacted for informal interaction. The lack of an account of their experiences perhaps remains a limitation. 12 According to Gorringe (2006), ‘workers and activists argue that the nature of this [sanitation and cleaning] work accounts for the high incidence of alcoholism among Dalit men’ (p. 50). While the municipal employees in cities may be comparatively better than manual scavengers, Franco et al (2004) argue that the former too struggle for better working conditions and many are forced to resort to alcohol to mentally escape from the abominable nature of work involving filth and stench. 13 This brief interaction with her took place in English. When she first met the researcher, she enquired in English about the area of research and continued to

98  Sriti Ganguly speak in the same language. It is important to mention that research participants in the sample, those who had some command over the language, always initiated the conversation in English and continued the interaction in the same language. 14 Malavika Karlekar (1982) used the term ‘monopoly’ in her study to denote that since there is no competition from other groups owing to the ‘degrading nature of this job’, it is easily available, particularly to Balmiki women who have limited choices for mobility due to low educational status (Karlekar 1982: 94). Some residents in the Balmiki colony themselves referred to an existing ‘tendency’ among some people in the community who use networks to get jobs in the corporation, sometimes due to a lack of alternative and steady employment opportunities. The alternatives that are available to them in the city, in the face of low educational attainment and job market discrimination, are mostly in the informal sector where job insecurity and low income prevail. However, the usage of the term is not to suggest that there has not been any change in occupational choices of Balmikis or to obscure the fact that there has been a strong external force of the caste system which has kept this association alive. Pramod Kumar’s quote as well as responses of several others indicated both an effort to resist and move away to diverse occupations. 15 Under this provision, RTE Act states that ‘No child admitted in a school shall be held back in any class or expelled from school till the completion of elementary education’. The No-Detention provision (NDP) of RTE has been a subject of intense debate among educationists, policymakers, parents, teachers, and media houses. The critics of NDP argue that it creates a lack of seriousness and ‘low levels of learning achievement’ among students and leads to overall ‘dilution of the quality of education’. Scholars who are against taking hasty and extreme positions such as removal of this provision urge that this should be seen in conjunction with Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE, another provision under RTE) which calls for a continuous engagement with the child’s learning and development in a stress-free and supportive school environment.

References Bourdieu, Pierre (1986): “The Forms of Capital”, in J. G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research in the Sociology of Education, 241–58. New York: Greenwood Press. Census of India (2011): Individual Scheduled Caste Primary Census Abstract Data and its Appendix for NCT of Delhi. Available at http://www​.censusindia​.gov​.in​ /2011census​/PCA​/SC​.html. Deshpande, Ashwini (2009): “A Matter of Name and Shame”, Economic and Political Weekly, 44(44), pp. 20–21. Donner, Henrike (2008): Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, Globalization and Middle-Class Identity in Contemporary India. Aldershot and London: Ashgate Publishing. Drury, David (1993): The Iron Schoolmaster: Education, Employment and the Family in India. New Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation. Dupont, Veronique (2004): “Socio-spatial Differentiation and Residential Segregation in Delhi: A Question of Scale?”, Geoforum, 35(2), pp. 157–175. Franco, F. J., Macwan, J and Ramanathan, S. (2004): Journeys to Freedom: Dalit Narratives. Kolkata: Samya.

Samaj and Sangat  99 Galster, G. C. and Santiago, A. M. (2006): “What’s the ‘Hood Got to Do With It’? Parental Perceptions about How Neighbourhood Mechanisms Affect Their Children”, Journal of Urban Affairs, 28(3), pp. 201–226. Gorringe, Hugo (2006): “‘Establishing Territory’: The Spatial Bases and Practices of the DPI”, in Geert De Neve and Henrike Donner (eds.), The Meaning of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India. London: Taylor & Francis. pp. 44–67. Jeffery, C., Jeffery, R. and Jeffery, P. (2005): “Broken Trajectories: Dalit Young Men and Formal Education”, in Radhika Chopra and Patricia Jeffery (eds.), Educational Regimes in Contemporary India. London: Sage Publications. pp.256–275. Jodhka, S. S. (2015): “Ascriptive Hierarchies: Caste and Its Reproduction in Contemporary India”, Current Sociology, 64(2), pp. 1–16. Jodhka, S. S. and Newman, K. (2007): “In the Name of Globalisation: Meritocracy, Productivity and the Hidden Language of Caste”, Economic and Political Weekly, 42(41), pp. 4125–4132. Karlekar, Malavika (1982): Poverty and Women’s Work: A Study of Sweeper Women in Delhi. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Private Limited. Kumar, Ravi (2006): “Educational Deprivation of the Marginalized: A Village Study of the Mushar Community in Bihar”, in Ravi Kumar (ed.), The Crisis of Elementary Education in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Nambissan, Geetha B. (2000): “Dealing with Deprivation”, Seminar 493. September. Nambissan, Geetha B. (2010): “The Indian Middle Classes and Educational Advantage”, in Michael W. Apple, Stephen J. Ball and Luis Armando Gandin (eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education. Abingdon: Routledge. pp.285–295 Nambissan, Geetha B. (2021):The Changing Urban and Education in Delhi: Privilege and Exclusion in a Megacity. Education & the Urban in India I Working Paper Series, MaxWeber Stiftung India Branch Office. Ogbu, J. U. (1987): “Variability in Minority School Performance: A Problem in Search of an Explanation”, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 18(4), pp. 312–334. Prashad, Vijay (2000): Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ramanujam, Renuka (2016): “Educational Disadvantages of Children from Households Engaged in Historically ‘Unclean Occupation’”, Social Action, 66(3), pp. 261–275. Rendón, M. G. (2014): “Drop Out and ‘Disconnected’ Young Adults: Examining the Impact of Neighbourhood and School Contexts”, The Urban Review, 46(1), pp. 169–196. Singh, G. and Vithayathil, T. (2012): “Spaces of Discrimination: Residential Segregation in Indian Cities”, Economic and Political Weekly, 47(37), pp. 60–66. Sharkey, P. T. (2006): “Navigating Dangerous Streets: The Sources and Consequences of Street Efficacy”, American Sociological Review, 71(5), pp. 826–846. Srivastava, Anshika. (2012). Educational experiences and aspirations among the Balmikis in Delhi : an exploratory study. Unpublished MPhil Dissertation. Jawaharlal Nehru University.

100  Sriti Ganguly Vincent, Carol (2010): “The Sociology of Mothering”, in Michael W. Apple, Stephen J. Ball and Luis Armando Gandin (eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education. Abingdon: Routledge. pp.109–120. Winship, C., Harding, D. J., Gennetian, L., Sanbonmatsu, L. and Kling, J. (2011) Unpacking Neighborhood Influences on Education Outcomes: Setting the Stage for Future Research. in Duncan G and Murnane R Whither (eds.), Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools and Children’s Life Chances. Russell Sage. World Bank (2011): Poverty and Social Exclusion in India. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

6

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’ Marginalising Textbooks and Teachers’ Strategies of Subversion1 Kishore Darak

Textbook at the Centre Stage It is well established that paper-textbook2 has a central place in school education in India for more than a century now. Most of our learning and teaching processes and practices revolve round the textbook so much so that teaching and inculcating ‘desirable’ competencies among students have in fact come to mean ‘covering’ of topics (in the sense of finishing teaching them) in the textbook. Examinations are strongly memory based and are designed to test the extent of rote learning that students receive from the textbook. Krishna Kumar (2004: 23–41) captures this importance acquired by paper-textbook and its relation to the general nature of Indian education in the following words: In the ordinary Indian school, the textbook dominates the curriculum. The teacher is bound by the textbook since it is prescribed, and not recommended, by state authorities. … At all levels of school education, the textbook acts as a substitute syllabus or rather as the operative part of the syllabus. In different parts of the world, textbook is acknowledged as the important medium of knowledge transfer and knowledge creation. In the context of a typical Indian school, it is the only source that enjoys the status of what Michael Apple famously named and also criticised as the ‘valid knowledge’. Textbooks design, develop, describe, devise, and prescribe what qualifies to be worthy knowledge. Therefore, cultural practices that are mentioned in textbooks receive ‘automatic’ sanction or validation as being valuable and worth cherishing while those that have not become part of textbooks acquire subordinate and doubtful status in the ‘schooled minds’ of learners. Regarding such association of greater or lesser status, we need to reflect that textbooks are outcomes of various processes of negotiation, compromise, tussle, and conflict among various interest groups. Characterised by constant negotiations over selection of contents of a textbook, the process

DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-7

102  Kishore Darak is deeply political and is affected by dynamics of power in the society. In Michael Apple’s (1993: 222–241) words, The curriculum is never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge, somehow appearing in the texts and classrooms of a nation. It is always part of a selective tradition, someone’s selection, some group’s vision of legitimate knowledge. It is produced out of the cultural, political, and economic conflicts, tensions, and compromises that organize and disorganize a-people. (Emphasis in the original) Students accept and internalise authority of textbooks by training and at a very early stage of their schooling. For instance, a group of students debating over any issue of ‘academic’ nature, resorting quickly to textbook for judgement of correctness of their claim or for resolving the debate, is a common site. Their assumption of correctness of the printed text clearly shows submission to authority of textbook. Thus, textbook as the central artefact of formal education has acquired highly sacrosanct status in the minds of students, teachers, parents, and the society at large.

Patterns of Marginalisation in State Textbooks in Maharashtra Similar to many other parts of the world, the Indian government is also required to provide for mass education at least till the elementary level (eight grades), owing to its constitutional obligation. Production and distribution of textbooks are a part of this provision. As textbooks produced or prescribed and distributed by the state represent the ‘official knowledge’ that is eventually disseminated, the state assumes role of custodian of textual knowledge. While the state has been obligated to provide free textbooks, only recently in the history of Indian education, production or prescription of textbooks has largely remained with the state and dates back to the colonial times. At present, most of the Indian state governments have autonomous bodies responsible for the development and production of textbook. Typically, these bodies appoint committees of experts to accomplish the task on behalf of the state. These experts are ‘approved’ by the state. Considering the post-colonial history of formation of such committees and the restricted nature of autonomy3 enjoyed by textbook-producing bodies, one may claim that the content of textbooks reaching millions of students happens to be directly or indirectly under the ultimate control of the state. When the textbook is looked at as a prime educational medium, Iyesha Jalal (quoted in Kumar 2002: 65) sounds apt in stating, ‘[W]ith the help from the state-controlled media the lessons learnt at school and college serve as the alphabet and the grammar that makes psyches literate in the idioms of national ideology’.

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  103 It cannot be negated that textbook has its own uses as a medium of education, for instance its nature as an accessible, physical object. Billions of children across the world use textbooks as mandatory and prime educational medium. For the majority of school-goers in India, textbook is the first encounter with any type of printed media. Considering such importance of textbook as pedagogic or teaching-learning aid, its content, the way of presentation of that content, and pedagogy defined by it should invite extensive critical analysis. As described by Heather and Porfilio (2012: xix), Despite the needed insight of how the political and economic elite demonizes, trivializes, and miniaturizes the Other through media culture in order to garner consent for their policies, structures, and practices, critical scholars have generally failed to investigate how they use traditional artifacts in K-12 schools to perpetuate their interest at the expense of minoritized social group. The critical scrutiny becomes important because of the various sociological and cultural perspectives applied in content analysis that raise questions like whose knowledge, whose culture, and whose way of life get reflected in textbooks. Depending on local cultural nuances, studies across the world show patterns of dominance and subordination through textbooks. This is important since textbook defines the content of education; it is the operative part of curriculum and it appears that it is employed for safeguarding the interests of the dominant groups in society. Employing analytical categories like gender, caste, class, and religion, previous researches of various Indian textbooks have also shown that they are by and large carriers of the upper caste, urban, male-centric values.4 NCERT’s (National Council of Educational Research and Training) National Focus Group on Problems of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Children (NFG-SCST) has also echoed similar concerns while discussing the nature of post-colonial curriculum and textbooks: In India, curriculum and the content of education have been central to the processes of reproduction of caste, class, cultural and patriarchal domination-subordination. In post independence educational policy, modification of content supposedly aimed at indigenisation resulted in Brahmanisation as a key defining feature of the curriculum. (Velaskar 2005: 24) On this backdrop, I propose to look critically at Marathi language textbooks (First Language) and its strategic use by teachers. These textbooks are known as Balbharati textbooks and are produced by the Maharashtra State Bureau of Textbook Production and Curriculum Design (hereinafter referred to as the Bureau or the Balbharati). Established in 1967 as per the

104  Kishore Darak recommendation of the Kothari Commission (1964–1966), Balbharati produces textbooks for grades 1–8, reaching them to more than 80,000 schools and more than 15 million children every year. They are used as the only set of textbooks in schools of Maharashtra since 1970. After the enforcement of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE), Balbharati has been appointed as the academic authority for textbook production and distribution in Maharashtra.5 Balbharati produces textbooks in eight of the scheduled languages and in English, but the highest number of textbooks is produced in the Marathi language. More than 80 per cent of the school-goers in elementary grades get these textbooks free of cost under various schemes and entitlements. Balbharati textbooks typically undergo a decennial revision. Right from its beginning, Balbharati has received praise from different agencies in the country, including the NCERT for producing superior quality textbooks using decent thick paper, four-coloured frames and pictures, and high quality of printing. Its distribution network is one of the most efficient networks in the country. Thus, Balbharati earns good credit for producing quality textbooks and reaching them to children in all corners of the state of Maharashtra. Nevertheless, it can be argued that these textbooks fare poorly on account of socially responsible content. They cannot be credited for being inclusive and for presenting a fair representation of gender, caste, class, race, minority religions, ethnicity, etc. For instance, Vrushali Dehadroy’s (2002) study, which focused on aspects of gender construction in Marathi language textbooks by Balbharati between 1970s and 1990s, shows that representation of women in the textbooks is negatively skewed if one considers frequency of occurrences and roles assigned to girls or women. She did a quantitative analysis of the representation of women in textbooks on parameters like percentage of women authors, pictures of women and girls, role assigned to women or girls, etc. Table 6.1 shows findings in her study. Table 6.1 Presence of girls and women in textbooks on different parameters (all figures are in percentage) Parameter

Series 1 – 1969

Series 2 – 1979

Series 3 – 1990

Woman author Main character is female Pictures of women Pictures of girls Some role to female characters

11.79 15.82 21.16 33.9 20.84

15.71 22.68 23.26 27.37 22.97

15.47 25.73 19.06 36.7 20.92

Source: Dehadroy (2002).

In another study, Manjiri Nimbkar has shown that Marathi language textbooks of grades 1–6 between 2006 and 2007 performed poorly on the count of representation of children from SC, ST, poor, Muslim, and other minority communities. Marathi textbooks of grades 1 and 2 had no

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  105 representation of children from any of these categories and the percentage was maximum (at about 37 per cent) in the fifth grade (see Darak 2012). Though these kinds of quantitative studies and analysis have limited use in understanding pattern of dominance and subtleties of subordination that occur in textbooks, the numbers mentioned in both the studies demand attention. They clearly show that women and members of other marginalised groups are either not represented at all or their representation is disproportionately low. While low and less visible representation of socio-culturally ‘backward’ groups is one aspect of textbook-borne further marginalisation of the socially marginalised groups, how they get represented is another matter of concern. It is here that I pitch my ground. I argue that whatever is the existing representation, it does not seem to be in complete agreement with the framework of values enshrined in the Indian Constitution when in fact, it should be. The following pertinent questions can be raised with the possibility that they may lead to complex understandings of the process and product of the textbook: Do they employ useful pedagogies rooted in the cultural milieu of the young learners or subtle ways of safeguarding interests of caste-laden, patriarchal, feudal traditions of India? Are there instances of overt and covert discrimination against the marginalised sections? One also needs to bear this in mind while asking these questions that reception of textbooks may happen differently with different kinds of social and educational backgrounds of children, irrespective of answers to the above questions being in a clear affirmative or negative. It is observed that sometimes, as with the case of language textbooks, Balbharati may register substantial gradual improvement in representing the marginalised sections along each of the categories of analysis (gender, caste, class, ethnicity, religion) over a period of five decades of institutional establishment. This phenomenon is evident in terms of a number of pictures, stories depicting different lives, and the cultural milieu of marginalised section. In terms of quantifiable components like number of girls and women in narratives, the number of prose and poetry lessons portraying Dalit, tribal, or rural lives textbooks appears increasingly inclusive. Yet, closer examination may undermine the claim as subtle ways of under-representation, mis-representation, or co-option of representation of the marginalised sections appear to surface. For example, Prakash Burte (2001) has observed that textbooks from grades 1 to 5 show a clear prejudice in favour of urban versus the rural, rich versus the poor, fair skin colour versus dark skin colour, standard language versus local varieties of language, majority religion versus minority religions, male gender versus female gender, and upper caste versus lower castes. My own earlier study (Darak 2013) shows that the apparent inclusiveness, on scratching a little, yields not very sensitive portrayals of girls or women, members of lower castes or tribal communities, and members of minority community. The problem being that these textbooks carry a fixed image of an ideal, normative child,

106  Kishore Darak usually the male child who is supposed to build the nation and hence is subjected to the upper-caste samskaras and ways of life (Darak 2015). In this relation, language textbooks are found to be reiterating stereotypes, assigning fixed roles to members of marginalised communities through an urban, upper caste, male gaze. They impose Brahmanical worldview as normative, prefer standard dialect of Marathi language over all other dialects thus causing ‘linguistic wipe-out’ at best or ‘linguistic violence’ at worst, and invisibilise real problems faced by the rural, the poor, and the members of the marginalised communities. Thus, they project the urban, middle-class life and culture as the most common, valid, and worthy culture and project it as the most generalised way of life (Darak 2012). In case of Balbharati, making of textbooks, their importance as underlined by evaluation and assessment processes, and their content and structure – all involve dominance of Brahmanical ideas. Textual narratives as well as exercises meant for thinking and reflection of students shun away from confronting reasons of socio-cultural and economic exploitation. They remain away from any direct mention of practices, pushing the marginalised communities into further marginalisation. International discourse on textbooks shows that experts may differ on grade levels when ways of exploitation, oppression, and marginalisation can be introduced in textbooks but by and large suggestions of brushing the ‘inconvenient truths’ under carpet are fading out. For instance, textbooks of Political Science produced by NCERT after 2005 take the practices of social exploitation head-on and discuss openly about them with the learners. But textbooks in Maharashtra seem to be away from such ‘boldness’. In short, they manifest what NFGSCST has named as Brahmanisation of content of education. It is evident in emphasis on (1) ‘pure’ language, (2) literature and other ‘knowledge’ of society, history, polity, religion and culture that is produced by higher castes which reflects Brahmanical world view and experiences and Brahmanical perspectives on Indian society, history and culture, and (3) high caste, cultural and religious symbols, linguistic and social competencies, modes of life and behaviour. (Velaskar 2005: 25) Therefore, right from the government bodies, textbook writers to the teachers there prevail certain viewpoints that can be debated, questioned, and examined for their understanding of caste, gender, class, ethnicity, and minority. Given the above situation, how does one understand academic performance of pupils? Particularly, in the special context of the emphasis given by the National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCF) on connecting life inside school to the life outside, to lived realities of learners, and to local culture? (NCF 2005: viii). Since textbooks are treated as the most sacrosanct source of school knowledge, depending on the kind of connection or bond

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  107 they establish with the learners; they are bound to affect scholastic achievements of the learners conventionally measured in terms of memory-based quantified reproduction of the content of textbooks. NCF emphasises that if learning experiences are not connected to learner’s lives or experiences, school may be an alienating experience and may adversely affect learning achievements. When learning achievement is directly or indirectly related to learning experiences provided by schools, socio-cultural scrutiny of textbooks becomes all the more crucial.

Teachers’ Strategies of Subversion While the state may directly or indirectly subscribe to patterns and forms of marginalisation in terms of the ‘prescribed’ textbooks, teacher’s role is crucial as she is the medium of transaction of textual knowledge to young learners. Though the textbook-centric systems of education as in India are rigid and firm on the prescribed content and leave little to teacher’s discretion, one should remember that a textbook is re-written when it is taught in classroom. Through their interpretations and carefully chosen pedagogic strategies, teachers may devise ways and means to either challenge the patterns of marginalisation or simply bypass those. They almost act as a ‘protecting wall’ between textbook-borne marginalisation and the young learners coming from marginalised communities. Even though pre- and post-colonial education imposed external content on teachers taking a toll on their academic autonomy and deskilling them as mere ‘technical transactor of prescribed textbook’, the thought that practically the teacher is the ultimate custodian of content and therefore can use it flexibly is not new in Indian educational discourse. Mohandas K. aka Mahatma Gandhi famously called textbooks as an ‘article of commerce’ and opined that If text books are treated as a vehicle for education, the living word of the teacher has very little value. A teacher who teaches from text books does not impart originality to his pupils. He himself becomes a slave of the text books and has no opportunity or occasion to be original. It therefore seems that the less text books there are the better it is for the teacher and his pupils. (Gandhi 1939) Some teachers in Maharashtra seem to understand and imbibe the essence of Gandhiji’s message and in this they appear as a silver lining in the system of textbook-centric education. In the following discussion, I intend to present strategies used by teachers to map textbooks onto reality and local milieu of learners. In their hands, textbooks are either partially bypassed when they just keep the book aside and take equivalent but different content for teaching or partly used and extended to let learners feel connected

108  Kishore Darak to learning experiences and processes in school. My argument is based on semi-structured interviews of nine teachers from government schools of local bodies (Zilla Parishad, ZP) and two teachers from private-aided schools.6 All the teachers possess qualifications as prescribed by the RTE and a teaching experience of 12–20 years. While all of them take efforts for their own professional up-gradation by being receptive of different experiments and theories in education, none of them have received any special training from the state education department or SCERT. Thus, they may be perceived as a representative group as far as their working conditions, qualifications, and access to new developments in the field of education are concerned. But on many other counts, they form a special group of teachers unlike other ‘typical’ teachers. Interviews and discussions with them suggest that while their age, sex, additional qualifications, years of experience, socio-cultural background, and even the type of marginalisation faced by their students differ on many parameters, there are some interesting commonalities among them. They are ‘special’ teachers in terms of (i) explicit articulation of their practices and concerns; (ii) assertion of their professional identity; (iii) acknowledgement of need of appropriate pedagogies; (iv) understanding the marginalisation children experience due to difference between their own living cultures and the dominant culture that gets reflected through schooling in general, and in the compulsory curricula and textbooks in particular; (v) their capacity and readiness in learning new approaches of teaching, pedagogy, evaluation, and assessment; (vi) insights expressed through relatively multipronged critique of decisions and policies that may potentially affect children adversely; (vii) their belief in the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution; (viii) unequivocally considering quality education as a fundamental right of each and every child; (ix) creating a conducive classroom for unhindered and spontaneous expression of students; (x) realising that the system-borne attitude of ‘one jacket fits all’ is not suitable for teaching their students whose ways of learning are different than what is prescribed; (xi) accepting directly or indirectly that ownership of knowledge lies with the learners as they create or produce knowledge instead of merely ‘consuming’ it; (xii) consciously creating an academically meaningful and psychologically caring scaffold, especially for children coming from socioculturally, economically, and linguistically marginalised communities; (xiii) understanding the level of academic autonomy they can claim inside their classrooms; (xiv) recognising limitations of a single textbook per subject prescribed for all students in the vast state like Maharashtra. Teachers from this group recognise pedagogic and socio-political shortcomings of content of textbooks, and at the same time, they are committed to facilitating learning of the marginalised children who form majority in their classes. The degree of these teachers’ understanding of marginalisation evident in social prejudices embedded in textbooks varies, yet they unanimously view textbook as a tool of school knowledge which, by its very existence, can cause marginalisation of one or the other group. While no

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  109 teacher denies the importance of textbook as the only link with print culture for majority of children, they do express dissatisfaction about prejudices embedded in textbooks with acknowledgement that these prejudices, at times, may be unintentional. In the following sections, I discuss strategies used by teachers without compromising with expected learning competencies so that culturally conducive and academically meaningful learning experiences can be constructed for their students. Strategies mentioned below do not claim to be grand or ‘innovative’ ideas. Rather their strength lies in the way in which simple ideas are used to combat marginalisation in prescribed textbooks.7 For instance, the use of electronic gadgets is becoming increasingly common in many schools8 but the way some of the respondent teachers use this new technology makes it a tool to explore and visibilise marginalised voices muted in the textbook. From the Horse’s Mouth (Use of Electronic Gadgets and Digital Media) The language textbooks in Maharashtra are not ‘written’ separately. All these years they have been produced as compilations of different literary pieces, including prose and verse pieces. As textbook committees have the power of selection, their preferences – which many times are according to personal interests – naturally play a major role. The process of editing that these committees undertake has several purposes, for instance, selection of age-appropriate literature for students, bringing down level of difficulty of the language, observing desirable word limit for a piece, etc. But what also surfaces during such editing is the tendency to shrewdly overlook, reduce or erase the marginalised voices, turn a blind eye to awkward realities and truths, and thus leave out the areas of social tension or conflict.9 Tensions and conflicts emerging due to caste, gender, ethnicity, religion, and class exploitation are conventionally considered to be uncomfortable truths. They are uncomfortable usually for the dominant classes and for the state. Textbooks appear as inclusive if one simply counts the presence of the marginalised, yet it cannot be called inclusive for it does not cater to their interests and causes. For example, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s struggle against caste, and striving for an egalitarian society, is always under-mentioned compared to the celebration of his love for books. Another instance worth noting is about the class 6 Marathi First Language textbook (2005). It carried a story from the autobiography titled Taral Antaral by the famous Dalit writer and thinker, Shankarrao Kharat. Highlighting the exploitative nature of the caste system, the original story described how an illiterate Dalit labourer (Kharat’s father) is exploited when he requested a Brahmin teacher in the village to read a letter. The process of editing the story not only changed its title but also transferred the blame to illiteracy instead of exploitative caste system. The edited version shifted the original focus on

110  Kishore Darak caste exploitation as the reason for the underdevelopment of a social class to a personal shortcoming. The third example is found in a recent edition of grade 4 textbook (2014) which carefully removes the reference to burning of Manusmriti by Dr Ambedkar in the poem that describes his agitation at the Chavadar Lake in order to obtain the basic human right to water. One of the respondent teachers talked very specifically about these editorial ‘skills’. He understood that the textbook generates a disconnect between the students’ understanding and real-life situations. Respondent teachers are found to perceive that with such kind of editing the textbook that claims to be a means of visibilising the marginal sections in fact further invisibilises them by masking their past and present concerns. To overcome this ‘shortcoming’ of the textbook, some of the teachers contact the original writers or poets and invite them to talk to the students on the mobile phone, or sometimes even on the video phone, thus helping ‘muted’ voices surface again, as described above. For students, the exercise goes way beyond the sheer thrill and excitement of talking to a literary figure or author. Teachers attempt to make students understand original narratives, perspectives, or statements of the writers and to get a different viewpoint than the one coming across in the ‘edited’ or ‘convenient’ perspective. In these attempts, they appear to control the content and build a new, different textbook from the prescribed one. I find the teachers’ disagreement with textbook content crucial and important since it renders agency on them. One of the teachers mentioned that a particular poem describing enjoyment of holidays (Grade 3 Marathi Language, 2014) was alienating for his students because they cannot identify with it as their reality happens to be different. Most of such students would have to help their parents in their family occupations or work as child labour during vacations. Realising this, the teacher determined to ask the students to write about the way they spend the vacation, including the kind of work they do. He also showed and discussed with them short videos of how young children have to work in different conditions. As a result of this process, the students gradually began to question the absence of representation of their situations in the textbook. I have mentioned instances of how with the help of technology respondent teachers ‘expand’ content of textbooks,10 address issues of deprivation upfront, and exercise their autonomy. This happens to be a novel and fruitful use of tech-based devices because promotion of the digital media by the Department of School Education and Sports in Maharashtra state does not envisage this. It looks up to more routine activities leading to mundane learning. But in our instances, the strategic use helps students establish connections between what is taught in school and what is experienced as lived reality. Students, after listening to authors about their difficult past, also feel motivated as they can establish a connection between their present condition and the author’s past as narrated by her or him. Thus, the typical middle-class tendency of textbooks of maintaining complete silence on

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  111 ‘issues of trouble’ is challenged by teachers in exposing students to their own reality. It is significant to see the teachers emphasise that acknowledgement of social realities should naturally be considered a prerequisite if our schools are expected to inculcate constitutional values like equality, social justice, and democracy. Approach Challenging Linguistic Hierarchy (Involving Local Language in Classroom) Textbooks across India generally use standard dialect of the state language. The practice assumes standard language to be ‘pure’ and ‘superior’ to the other varieties of the same language, and thus appears to be a part of power politics of dominant classes. As Krishna Kumar (2003: 81, my translation) suggests, There is a whole history of hatred of and distancing from Urdu in the development of modern Hindi … The teacher of Hindi today is a pawn in politics soaked in that history. A legacy of the same politics is abstaining from or boycott of dialects of Hindi by the standard version of Hindi used in formal education. Kumar’s observations about Hindi are applicable to Marathi too. Given the clear textbook projection of dichotomy between standard and non-standard varieties of the same language as shuddh (pure) and ashuddha (impure),11 the very existence of textbooks as the main teaching aid may potentially cause pedagogical marginalisation of children coming from socially and linguistically marginalised groups. An aware teacher deals with the problem by using all local varieties of language during classroom transaction. A respondent teacher works with conviction that the standard variety is not automatically superior to other varieties. She avoids the term ‘dialect’ due to its implication of an inferior status. Children are free to use their own variety of language in her classes. The actions of letting free conversations happen in all varieties of Marathi, of giving equal score to answers written in non-standard language by the teacher, help consolidate the students’ belief that their language is equally sweet and important. As her students move to higher grades, she discusses the need of a common language for communication at large scale and creates consensus on standard language. She captures the process as follows: By the time my students enter grade 6 or 7, they are convinced that many people in Maharashtra may not understand the way they speak. So they show a readiness to prepare themselves to communicate or express in the so-called ‘standard’ variety of Marathi seen in textbooks and newspapers. These students coming from marginalised communities must learn the standard language otherwise they will be at a loss in

112  Kishore Darak the world outside school. But this learning need not come at the cost of their own language causing loss of their own identity.12 The textbooks under scrutiny have interesting ways of inculcating the idea that non-standard ‘dialects’ are lesser languages. Linguistic exercises are constructed to underline this idea. They usually are worded as ‘Convert the words/sentences from the dialect to the standard language’ whenever they appear after a literary piece containing non-standard Marathi. The social status of speakers of ‘lesser’ varieties is quite obviously that of various marginalised communities. Some of the respondent teachers ask their students to do a small exercise that transforms as a subversive strategy. They ask their students to do a similar but reverse exercise in which the standard language from textbook is converted into their own local variety of language, thus putting the standard languages and other varieties on equal footing. Most importantly, the exercise suggests that language of the textbook and language of students’ surrounding are inter-convertible without necessarily creating notions of linguistic superiority or inferiority. While ‘official’ exercises suggest that non-standard language has to be ‘corrected’ as it is not desirable, the reverse exercises strategically constructed by teachers help students build linguistic competencies without any linguistic victimhood. Another typical and hierarchical exercise reported by respondent teachers is as follows: ‘Discuss/Describe linguistic beauty of given sentences’. Interestingly, all sentences chosen for such exercise for aesthetic pleasure are chosen from the standard variety of Marathi, with authors coming mainly from upper caste. Some of the respondent teachers make students do the same exercise also with non-standard sentences. One of the respondents had a clever argument. He said that he makes students discuss linguistic strengths, beauty, and possibility of spoken language too: I teach a group of students with more than 70 percent coming from non-Marathi speaking communities. Learning local variety of Marathi itself is a struggle for them in the initial school years. If I go on teaching them aesthetic beauty only of the standard language, effectively I am suggesting that their language and hence their expression is worthless and is devoid of any beauty. Such behaviour if practiced by a teacher, is not only against the goals of RTE and NCF but it also silences the children coming from the most marginalised backgrounds. There is a risk of young students internalising perceived worthlessness of their language and effectively their identity which may lead to their dropping out from school. If one is not able to see any connect with school, how long is one supposed to engage with it in a totally meaningless way? Language is the basis for this connect and imposing standard languages right from the beginning of schooling is violent.13 It is clear that the respondent teachers do understand the importance of standard language and also realise that depriving marginalised children of

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  113 the standard language may permanently push them into social margins. But they want to teach standard language by building confidence among learners that their language also matters, that it is equally important, and that knowing standard Marathi is an addition to their linguistic repertoire rather than wiping out their own language, and consequently their identity. Education Is a Process Rooted in Context (Introduction of Familiar Context in a Familiar Language) Another kind of marginalisation occurs in making students learn unfamiliar language in unfamiliar context. Students with non-Marathi languages as their home language find it difficult to cope up with Marathi schools. The State Learning Achievement Survey (SLAS) conducted by the Maharashtra State Council of Educational Research and Training (MSCERT) shows that as high as 28 per cent of school-goers have home language different than the medium of instruction (SLAS 2014). A substantial number of these children attend schools run by tribal department and social welfare department. Given their different social milieu and cultural background, language of textbooks as well as situations elaborated in them remains unfamiliar to them, causing a double disadvantage of unfamiliar context in unfamiliar language. Many of the cultural specificities in terms of food, housing, celebrations, and festivals carried in the textbooks appear alienating to these students. On the other hand, their homes, clothing, food, festivals, surrounding hardly find any representation in the textbooks. Whenever they do, the representation originates from the much known upper-caste, middle-class gaze that tends to pity their situation instead of recognising their rights or rightful social place and thus imposes ‘otherness’ on them. Even in representing cultural symbols, textbooks show a clear prejudice in favour of the urban, middleclass, and upper-caste sections of society. For example, for years Science textbooks of Balbharati meant for different grades have been illustrating a particular, normative food-plate that is usually identified in reality with eating practices of the Brahmin caste. The illustration goes beyond prescribing what constitutes a ‘balanced diet’ to validating vegetarian food served in a particular cultural way. Since such message comes in pictorial terms, young children, particularly from grades 1 and 2, feel the alienation even before they start reading or deciphering the written code (Darak 2013). Thus, it is not only the printed text but illustrations too that contribute to the urban, middle-class values embedded in textbooks and can cause marginalisation when the young learners find them culturally unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity of situations makes it highly challenging for marginalised students to make sense of illustrations and text. One of the respondents felt that It is the problem of ‘one jacket fits all’ tendency. So we need to have multiple textbooks catering to the local milieus of students coming from different geographies. If we had created textbooks suitable for the tribal

114  Kishore Darak and nomadic children, urban children would find those alienating. In any case interest of tribal, nomadic or rural children is not our priority.14 The strategic response of four of the respondents to the situation included similar practices. They encouraged students to speak about their homes, cultures, lives, festivals, food, etc. and recorded their narratives as small reading-lessons in school. These hand-written texts, sometimes carrying illustrations by older students or parents or local artists, are filed together or displayed in classrooms. These narratives use a mixed language constituted by the medium of instruction and the local languages. Depending on the chapter of the textbooks under discussion, they used these texts carrying familiar context in a not-so-unfamiliar language. It proved not only useful in encouraging children to write or speak about their own lives and issues closer to their hearts but also created a sense of success. As was told by one of the respondents, Younger children are happy reading about what is familiar. Their own stories are seen displayed on the walls. Familiarity and the feeling of ownership of the stories and pictures add impetus to their willingness to reading and they too get a taste of being a successful reader.15 Thus, on a strategic basis, the teachers put students in the roles of authors of the texts and they are encouraged to decide the content and what constitutes as ‘valid’ knowledge. This strategy helps them establish a stronger bond between what is taught and what is experienced. Since language is the foundation of connecting to the world as well as identity formation, carefully chosen strategies of teachers for going beyond language textbooks and trying to overcome their shortcomings result into, what one of the respondents categorically called as ‘overflow of enthusiastic and spontaneous expression’ by young learners in the classroom who may otherwise have remained silent.16 Discussions with the selected teachers show that their attempt is to create, what Lisa Delpit (2012: xix) calls, ‘classrooms that speak to children’s strengths rather than hammering them with their weaknesses’ and try to understand the importance of ‘good teaching especially for the “school dependent” children’. Their commitment to quality education as a fundamental right of children makes them thinking, autonomous teachers who ‘control’ the prescribed curriculum and textbooks in the larger interest of education of children coming from marginalised communities.

Concluding Remarks The above discussion and examples show that these teachers understand textbooks not merely as a teaching aid but at times a hindrance in teaching the marginalised students. Apart from the particular strategies discussed

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  115 above, the teachers take help of parents, invite elderly people from nearby locality of their schools, maintain a record of local festivals, invite alumni to schools to help younger students from the same communities, encourage students create new phrases and idioms in their context, so on, in which their prime concern being establishing learning achievement possible in terms of some measurable learning outcomes. My experience of two decades of in-service teacher education programmes suggests that many teachers understand the marginalising nature of textbooks they teach, though with varying capacities and to different extents. In spite of this, most of them prefer to conform to the prescribed textbooks. One can rightfully raise the question: If teachers are not satisfied with the content of the textbooks, if they can feel the meaninglessness of some of the textual narratives in the context of their students, why can’t they teach beyond textbooks or why can’t they ignore textbooks partly or fully wherever required? The answer is not very simple and easy. While performance in examinations based on textbooks remains to be an important concern, it is not the only consideration that affects teachers’ pedagogic decisions. From teachers’ point of view, teaching against textbooks may be viewed as hostile, negative, or even as one of the respondents said ‘revolutionary’17 by their superiors in the system as well as many of their colleagues. As argued by James Loewen (2007), ‘teaching against the book is hard. … [S]tudents have been trained to believe what they read in print. How can teachers compete with the expertise of established authors backed by powerful publishers?’ Suggesting that teachers foresee some kind of tension or conflict in going against the textbook, he further argues that ‘many teachers anticipate that powerful forces will pounce on them … so they relax into what Kenneth Carlson called the “security of self-censorship”’ (ibid.). Since textbooks are considered as artefacts voicing the state’s concerns, bypassing or ignoring textbooks is also viewed as going against the omnipresent ‘state’. One of the socially important and pedagogically noteworthy commonality among the teachers participating in this study is that they are ready to confront the state in interest of learners coming from marginalised communities. While on one hand the regime of textbooks causes further marginalisation of the marginalised children by making marginalisation a sort of ‘compulsion’ for teachers, these teachers are shifting the focus of education from textbooks to learning and from rote learner to an active participant. Teachers who take independent decisions with a sense of responsibility and accountability play the role of facilitators for students. Michael Apple probably considered these type of teachers when he stated that However, it is also possible—and I have witnessed this personally more than once—for teachers to use the text in ways undreamed-of by either the publishers or the state textbook adoption committees that provided the ‘avoid-controversy-at-all-costs’ outline of the content to be covered. While we must not be romantic about this, texts can be and

116  Kishore Darak are subjected to oppositional readings. They can be and are made the subject of analyses in real classrooms of their silences, of whose stories are included and excluded, of their ways of looking at what counts as a ‘real world problem,’ and many more. (Apple 2003: 14) Similarly, if ‘[t]extbooks are part of the curriculum found in today’s classrooms’ providing ‘a framework for thinking about what will be tested and taught, to whom, when, and how’ (Foster 2012: 3), teachers using various strategies to subvert them in the interest of the marginalised children are probably the ‘transformative intellectuals’ Henry Giroux looks for (Giroux 2010: 35–40). Such teachers, with their strategies, combat ‘teacher-proof curriculum’. Strategies of ‘subversion’ used by these ‘intellectual’ teachers are important and significant from a socio-cultural perspective. They need to be studied further in comparison with learning outcomes of students under the teachers who believe in regimented transaction of textbooks. In this way, impact of these or similar strategies on level of classroom participation and learning achievement of students can be understood. While experiences and practices of the sensitive and active teachers mentioned above create hope and are encouraging from the perspective of the marginalised students, we ought to remember the word of caution by Michael Apple in advising about not being ‘romantic’ about multiple readings of the textbooks. We must remember that if classrooms can do a progressive reading of textbook and expand the content in an appropriate manner, they are equally capable of producing a regressive reading of it. A further study is therefore needed to locate possibilities of generalisable, multiple readings of textbooks without bypassing the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on pedagogic strategies of 11 teachers from Maharashtra. The author sincerely thanks all these teachers for their participation. The author would also like to thank Madhuri M. Dixit, professor and head, Department of English, Pemraj Sarda College, Ahmednagar, for her patient reading of the earlier drafts and suggestions. 2 Though the term ‘textbook’ does not necessarily imply a text printed on paper with arrival of digital technology now in different parts of the world, it means paper-textbook in the Indian context used in this chapter. 3 Usually textbooks are products of work of autonomous bodies, but non-academic political influences and policies overpower their decisions. For instance, in the famous Cartoon Controversy in 2012, deletion of the controversial cartoon in the Lok Sabha was declared by the then Minister of Human Resources Development without any prior academic consultation. In another case, the Minister of Education of Maharashtra state announced in a press conference that a chapter on cricketer Sachin Tendulkar’s life would be included in textbooks to

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  117 honour the award of the Bharat Ratna rendered on him. Accordingly, fifth grade textbooks of Maharashtra published in 2014 carried such a chapter. 4 A recent study from a feminist perspective undertaken by the Delhi-based organisation Nirantar analyses textbooks from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh along with NCERT textbooks (for details, see Bhog: 2009). Prakash Burte has done a similar but relatively older study of textbooks from Maharashtra (2001). 5 Until March 2017, the State Textbook Bureau developed, printed, and distributed textbooks in Maharashtra. With a Government Resolution passed in October 2016, the state of Maharashtra decided to relieve the bureau of this responsibility and restrict its role only to printing and distribution of textbooks across the state. Henceforth, academic development of textbooks will be a responsibility of MSCERT. 6 Out of these 11 teachers, 8 come from an informal group known as Active Teachers’ Forum (ATF). This group comprises mainly of teachers and a few teacher educators, pedagogues, members of NGOs, journalists, and independent researchers. ATF started in 2012 but was in a relatively dormant state until 2014. With the arrival of WhatsApp, interactions among these teachers geared up, resulting in sharing ideas, classroom practices, policy decisions, and problems on ground on a daily basis. The group is neither a teacher union nor any formal body of teachers or even a structured community of practice, but acts as a pressure group, think-tank, and pedagogic power-house with strong commitment to quality education. ATF has impacted some important decisions of the state in the past seven years. 7 Schools affiliated to national and international boards use textbooks published by private publishers. But many of these textbooks exhibit rather direct and stronger patterns of marginalisation as they do not face regulation like textbooks of the bureau. 8 It may be noted that this research was done much before Covid-19 pandemic. 9 As a member of Language Textbook Committee of Balbharati during 2013– 2015, I witnessed and experienced these aspects of the process of textbook production. During interviews I conducted as a part of another research, I found that members of some committees before 2013 also reported similar experiences. 10 It may also be noted that textbooks discussed in this chapter are published before the idea of ‘energised textbooks’, i.e. textbooks with Quick Response (QR) codes took off. 11 One of the recent textbook of Marathi Language by Balbharati is for grade 7. This textbook, published on 28 March 2017, also addresses students about the importance of shuddh (pure) language. 12 Personal Interview, 16 August 2016. 13 Personal Interview, 20 January 2017. 14 Personal Interview, 18 August 2016. 15 Personal Interview, 30 November 2016. 16 Ibid. 17 Personal Interview, 12 December 2016.

References Apple, Michael (1993): “The Politics of Official Knowledge: Does a National Curriculum Make Sense?”, Teachers College Record, 95(2), pp. 222–241. ——— (2003): The State and the Politics of Knowledge, New York and London: Routledge Falmer, p. 14.

118  Kishore Darak Bhog, Dipta, Disha Mullick, et al (2009): Textbook Regimes: A Feminist Critique of Nation and Identity - An Overall Analysis, New Delhi: Nirantar. Burte, Prakash (2001): Maharashtratil Marathi Madhyamachi Shaley Pathyapustake - Ek Moolyatmak Abhyas, Bhopal: Ekalavya Prakashan. Darak, Kishore (2012, October): “Prescribed Marginalization”, Seminar, 638, pp. 63–68. ——— (2013): “Visualisation and Validation: Textbook Knowledge in Western India”, paper presented in International Summer School at Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research Brunsweig, Germany, 23–27 September. (unpublished). ——— (2015): “Textbook Narcissism : Representation of Childhood”, paper presented at International Conference on Contested Sites: Construction of Childhood organised by Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimal, India, 26–28 November (unpublished). Dehadroy, Vrushali (2002): “Critical Study of the Themes Reflected in Marathi Language Textbooks of the Primary Level Over the Last Three Decades”, Occasional Paper, Pune, Indian Institute of Education, September. Delpit, Lisa (2012): Multiplication Is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other People's Children, New York: The New Press, p. xix. Foster, Sandra (2012): “A Qualitative Understanding of Preservice Teachers’ Critical Examination of Textbook Curriculum Units as Political Text”, in Hickman Heather and Brad Porfilio (eds.), The New Politics of the Textbook Problematizing the Portrayal of Marginalized Groups in Textbooks, Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, p. 3. Gandhi, Mohandas K. (1939): “Text Books”, Harijan, VII(31), p. 1. 9 September. Available at: https://damitr​.org​/2015​/03​/05​/gandhi​-on​-textbooks/, accessed on 27th August 2016. Giroux, Henry (2010): “Teachers as Transformative Intellectuals - A Call to Teachers to Change Our Schools and the Culture”, in Kevin Ryan and James M. Cooper (eds.), Kaleidoscope Contemporary and Classic Readings in Education, Belmont: Wadsworth Cangage Learning, pp 35–40. Hickman, Heather and Brad Porfilio (eds.) (2012): “Introduction”, in The New Politics of the Textbook Problematizing the Portrayal of Marginalized Groups in Textbooks, Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, p. xix. Kumar, Krishna (2002): Prejudice and Pride - School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan, New Delhi: Penguin Books, p. 65. ——— (2003): “School Ki Hindi”, in School Ki Hindi - Shiksha Aur Sanskriti Vishyak Nibandh Chayan, 2nd edition, New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, pp. 72–81. ——— (2004): “Origins of the Textbook Culture”, in What Is Worth Teaching, 3rd edition, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, pp. 23–41. Loewen, James W. (2007): Lies My Teacher Told, Me, New York: Touchstone, pp. 331–332. National Curriculum Framework (2005): National Council for Educational Research and Training, New Delhi: NCERT, p. viii.

Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’  119 Nawani, Disha (2010): “School Textbooks: Understanding Frameworks for Analysis”, Contemporary Education Dialogue, 7(2), pp. 175–192. State Learning Achievement Survey (2014): Maharashtra State Council for Educational Research and Training, Pune: MSCERT. Velaskar, Padma et al (2005): Report of the National Focus Group on Problems of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Children, New Delhi: NCERT.

7

Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Adivasi Students and Their Effect on Children’s Classroom Engagement Mini Shrinivasan She pushes back her two long plaits which have crept over her shoulders, and looks more closely at the book in front of her. The book is open at her favourite page which has a picture of gaudily coloured flowers and butterflies. From time to time she looks up at the teacher, but quickly looks down at her book if she happens to catch her eye. ‘Savitribai fought for the right of girls to get an education,’ lectures the teacher in Marathi. She shows the children a photo of Savitribai Phule that she has brought in from the headmaster’s office. The girl in the last row looks up with a spark of interest, which soon dies out as the teacher goes on with her discourse. The class in Maharashtra’s Thane district, in a village where 5 out of the 20 children in each class are from the Katkari tribe. Unusually for a rural school, Class 2 has desk and benches, donated by a local manufacturing company. All 5 Katkari children in this particular Class 2 are seated in the last row. The girl I am watching is slightly older than the others, with a serene maturity on her face that is way beyond her years.

Later when I spoke to the teacher, I was told, in the child’s hearing, that she is the slowest of the class, hardly speaks, and like all the Katkari children, speaks in an ‘impure’ language and is not interested in education. None of this matched with my perception of a neatly dressed, self-contained, and intelligent young child obediently sitting through a 40-minute lecture that would have tried the patience of a much older scholar. What exactly is happening in this classroom, as in thousands across the country? Why is this solemn little girl, and millions like her across the country, not learning in spite of attending school regularly and sincerely? The following analysis is based on classroom observations and teacher interviews over the last 25 years, as part of various studies not necessarily focussing on Adivasi children, and projects attempting to improve the teaching-learning process and learning outcomes in government-run rural primary schools. However, my observations here are specifically about Adivasi children, given their unique issues of cultural as well as language alienation in most mainstream schools. DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-8

Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Adivasi Students  121 I shall first describe a few of classroom observations like the one above. I shall then analyse these to understand the dynamics in play and the overt and hidden effects they have. The interactions are analysed from the point of view of both pedagogy and social interactions, specifically from the point of view of the child. Discussions with the teacher illustrate what their thought processes and attitudes are. Some tentative conclusions are then drawn about the Adivasi child’s experience of education, of self-image, and ultimately of success or failure at school. Finally, some observations are made about the ways in which change in this situation may be brought about by the changes in teacher preparedness at the pre-service and in-service level, in the overall school climate, and in the classroom dynamic, to help teachers and children to recognise and overcome prejudice and preconceived stereotypes and to create an atmosphere that would enable Adivasi children to better access mainstream education on a more level playing field.

What Is Going on in This Classroom? To go back to the little girl in the Thane school. The lecture the teacher was giving to the little seven-year-olds was supposed to be a Marathi teaching lesson, which is not the home language of the Katkari children. The lesson was about the social reformer Savitribai Phule and her struggle to get acceptance for the education of girls. Whether this is a suitable reading topic for any seven-year-old is itself a moot point. For the little Katkari girl who did not seem to understand Marathi in the first place, it was certainly not. However, if we accept that national priorities dictate that children be taught about the lives of great people of the past, an examination of the textbook gives some pleasant surprises. The instruction to teachers suggests that the teacher discusses with children and encourages them to find out from their mothers and grandmothers about their experience of schooling, if any. The teacher is then asked to discuss what the children have found out, to create a context where children understand that there was a time when schooling was not available for all girls. In this context Savitribai’s brave struggle is to be introduced. None of these preparatory activities were conducted by the teacher, who cited lack of time as the reason. When the teacher started the lesson, she asked all the children to open their books to the relevant page. Most did. The last row did not. They all had their books open to the same page as the girl I was watching, a random page with a picture that held some appeal for her. The other Katkari kids watched her and did whatever she did. She was, in her quiet way, their leader. After showing the photograph and a line of introduction, the teacher went on to read the lesson aloud sentence by sentence and explain it in more or less the same language as the text. For example, she read in Marathi: ‘People could not tolerate her actions and so began to trouble her’. She then looked up at the class and said, ‘What did the people do? They began to

122  Mini Shrinivasan trouble her’. The lesson went on in this way, with about half the class understanding the teacher’s words and about one-third actually following in the textbook when she read. We cannot go too deeply here into the textbook or the pedagogy of the lesson as that would take another whole paper to analyse. Suffice it to say that there was no teaching of language or reading going on, merely some decoding and conveying of factual information. Far from mother tongue, even school language was not being taught. When we look at this entire class from the perspective of the children in the last row, it appears to us as 40 minutes spent listening to an incomprehensible narration in Marathi, a language we understand somewhat, possibly about the woman whose picture was shown in the beginning. We are constantly under tension of being ‘found out’ by not being able to answer a question or read a sentence, and so we stay under the radar, looking at the pretty picture in our textbook. At the end of the lesson, when the teacher asks one of us to read, we cannot, and the teacher knows it, so she does not insist too much. She turns to one of the other children in the front rows, who proceeds to read confidently and loudly. We look from the corner of our eyes at the stranger sitting in the back corner who looks at us all the time. Later we hear the teacher telling the stranger that all of us are dullards and our parents are drunks. Well, it’s true. We know it. The other picture I want to present tells another but not dissimilar story but from a very different physical context. Here the setting is urban, where the children are second-generation city dwellers from a community categorised as nomadic tribe but no longer actually nomadic. Located in an erstwhile construction labour colony set up about 30 years ago during a massive defence construction job, the colony is now an established settlement, deemed to be deserving of a government school. More than a third of the children in each class come from this community, with a home language that has no relationship to the school language, Marathi. However, the children, like the parents, have picked up Marathi over the years and speak it fluently as a second language from early childhood. Here the teachers are feisty urban middle-class women, sensitive to the deprived background of the children and determined to help them to compensate for it through education. A language lesson in Class 1 is in progress. Once more the children from the nomadic tribe are all bunched towards the back of the class. When I ask the teacher about this later, she informs me that the children choose where to sit at the beginning of the school year and tend to stay in those places. She democratically allows them to do so. The children are asked to open their textbooks to a fullpage picture. All the students do so, as it is a large picture in a large-size textbook and they can easily find it by looking at each other’s books. In the group I am observing, there is initially a lot of flurried turning of pages and leaning over in front to see what the frontbenchers are looking at. The teacher calls out the page number but none of the backbenchers looks for it. Finally, when everyone finds the page, there is a flurry of

Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Adivasi Students  123 excited whispers as they point out a truck, a house, a cow, to each other. However, the excitement is dampened when the teacher draws their attention to the other picture which shows a bird’s-eye view of a full dam and the hills and streams that feed it. At age six, this group of Class 1 children has never travelled out of the semi-slum they live in. The extent of their world knowledge is the massive new constructions coming up nearby, where many of their parents are labourers. This picture of a rain-filled dam does not mean anything at all to them. The teacher, a kind and gentle soul, proceeds to tell them the names of all the objects seen in the picture. She then points to each part of the picture and asks them to say the word. Dutifully, they chorus: dam, stream, lake, waterfall, cloud, rain. Looking at this interaction from the point of view of the children, we see the teacher making an apparently random choice between a picture we like and one we don’t and choosing the latter. We then learn the names of things we have not seen and do not know the use of. Some of the words we know already, as for example we have seen clouds and rain. The other words we forget as soon as we learn them, but we manage to repeat them by watching the other children and approximating their mouth movements. We forget those words again by the time the lesson ends and suffer the consequences in the test at the end of the week.

‘I teach, they don’t learn’ I have gone into some detail to describe only two classroom interactions. But these are not isolated incidents, as anyone with experience in schools will agree. And they are not restricted to language classes. A math lesson that does not take into account the knowledge children have gained in the weekly market transaction, but where in fact they are scolded for having missed school on market day; a science lesson that does not take into account the children’s knowledge of local trees and plants but makes them draw the parts of the plant and criticises their sketching ability; a physical education class that puts children into competition against each other in a sprinting race, when what they do every day is run together joyously as they go home – these and other examples further illustrate the stark reality – that the school does not take into account the life of the Adivasi child. Language is just one part of it, albeit an important one. What the children are experiencing is a total lack of understanding of what they are all about. And this applies not exclusively but most glaringly to Adivasi children. A teacher in Chhattisgarh, in a government primary school where the children are 100 per cent Adivasi, had this to say about his students: I also think, like the government, that all children have the right to study. But the thing is, they should be capable. What are these people capable of? They eat, they drink, they enjoy life. If they have to work, they work. Even that is not necessary for them now as the government

124  Mini Shrinivasan rice is cheaper than the cost of growing it. They are not bothered about education. If I give homework, the parents don’t insist that the children do it. I don’t expect them to help, just make children sit and study. They don’t do it. I have learned their language, and I use it in class. It is my duty to teach, so I teach. They don’t learn. Not all teachers are this negative. A majority of teachers I have met are in fact very serious about their responsibility towards their disadvantaged learners, especially first-generation school-goers. A teacher in Maharashtra says, I don’t expect the parents to help them, as they are uneducated. I think it is our job to do that. If we don’t, these girls have no future. But the problem is that they (the particular tribe we are discussing) all stick together. They don’t mix with the other children. We have some children here from quite educated families. If these girls mixed with them, they would get some better sanskar. But they only play and eat with each other. In class too, they sit near each other and copy from each other’s books. Then when they reach Class 8, the whole group decides not to go to the high school. That’s the end of their education, even of the smart girls who have potential. A teacher in Rajasthan says, I have gone myself to their houses. I have spoken to the parents. The parents want the children to study and get government jobs. I also want that. There are reserved jobs for them, but the posts are not filled. But when these kids come to school, they are so blank. They don’t even understand how to turn the page of a book. And if I don’t speak in their language, they don’t understand anything, even in Class 5. We can see that the teachers are actually articulating the issues themselves, but not recognising that there is an action point implied in what they observe. For example, most teachers teaching Adivasi children remark that they all stick together and work together. In fact, this is one of the aspects of tribal life that could be put to good use pedagogically, by setting group tasks and goals.

Teachers’ Pedagogic Decisions Social and moral judgements based on ignorance of a cultural group most often result in pedagogical decisions and moves that are uninformed, inappropriate and therefore ineffective. (Purcell-Gates, 1995) Pedagogic decisions as such are not a very common aspect of teaching in the Indian classroom. Each new trend that is imposed on teachers by

Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Adivasi Students  125 the state is implemented as they are instructed to do, with little agency or introspection. However, even within those limitations, teachers’ make social and even moral judgements about their learners and their communities, as seen above. Teaching strategies are bound to be informed by these judgements. That the teaching is not translating into learning is something they are aware of but seem unable to do anything about. Teachers’ perceptions and judgements are compounded by a lack of insight into what social deprivation means in terms of understanding the ‘hidden codes’ of literate societies. Lisa Delpit (Delpit, 2006) talks of the ‘power’ that the dominant culture has and the codes of power that they use casually and effectively. She describes the home life of black children who not only do not have an environment of reading and learning at home, but lack even an understanding of the codes that underlie this environment, for example, the understanding of printed matter as a source of information, entertainment, and success. She contrasts this with the home life of middle-class white children whose parents are better educated, but, more significantly, have imbibed the codes from birth. In the context of Indian rural schools, the power lies almost entirely with the teacher. Most of the children come from fairly deprived backgrounds. But the Adivasi children usually come from homes where literacy is not likely to be above primary school, and a literate atmosphere is usually absent. To open a book, to understand that it reads from left to right (or right to left in the case of Urdu), to know that pages are numbered and where these numbers are printed, even these basics are codes that children from literate homes do not need to be taught, but most Adivasi children do. The teacher is not unaware of this reality, but none of the teachers I met had of actually helping children to imbibe these codes. They begin their teaching exactly as they would for children from middle-class educated families. The little girl at the beginning, who opened the book to her favourite page, had no idea how to find ‘page 14’ when the teacher told the class to do so. What is disturbing is that the teacher did not consider this. In Other People’s Words, Victoria Purcell-Gates (Purcell-Gates, 1995) reminds us that children from literate homes already come with the conventions of written forms. For example, she observes a pre-literate child from a home where she is regularly read to playing with her doll. She is pretending to read to her doll and uses forms like: ‘“Oh no!” said the princess’, which is not a spoken form but a written one. This puts her at an advantage when she actually encounters the written form in school. The problem, then, that Adivasi children are left with is twofold – on the one hand the teacher, due to a lack of understanding, has decided that they are incapable of excelling at school work due to the background they come from, and on the other hand, she is unaware of the actual gaps in their experience that she needs to help them to negotiate.

126  Mini Shrinivasan

Understanding Who the Learner Is The National Curriculum Framework (2005) gives a wonderful example of the disconnect between the teachers’ perception and the child’s reality: ‘These students don't understand science. They come from a deprived background!’ We frequently hear such opinions expressed about children from rural or tribal backgrounds. Yet consider what these children know from everyday experience. Janabai lives in a small hamlet in the Sahyadri hills. She helps her parents in their seasonal work of rice and tuar farming. She sometimes accompanies her brother in taking the goats to graze in the bush. She has helped in bringing up her younger sister. Nowadays she walks 8 km. every day to attend the nearest secondary school. Janabai maintains intimate links with her natural environment. She has used different plants as sources of food, medicine, fuelwood, dyes and building materials; she has observed parts of different plants used for household purposes, in religious rituals and in celebrating festivals. She recognises minute differences between trees, and notices seasonal changes based on shape, size, distribution of leaves and flowers, smells and textures. She can identify about a hundred different types of plants around her – many times more than her biology teacher can – the same teacher who believes Janabai is a poor student. (Ministry of Human Resources, National Curricular Framework, NCF 2005) Pre-service training for primary school teachers has not ignored this aspect of a teacher’s preparation, at least on paper. For example, look at some of the suggested issues to be included in the National Curricular Framework for Teacher Education 2009 (NCTE NCFTE 2009) An engagement with issues and concerns of contemporary Indian society: pluralistic culture, identity, gender, equity, poverty and diversity would provide a social, cultural and political context to locate education and its practice. This is likely to help student teachers understand the classroom as a social context where learning is greatly influenced by the social context from which learners and teachers come. Not a single one of the teachers I have had discussions with could recall having done any such discussions, projects or field work related with these topics, though they did recall answering questions in their written examinations. Many recall lectures on contemporary Indian society, inclusive education, Adivasi education, relationship between cognition and social background, mother-tongue education, and so on. But none had had any hands-on experience with the communities of the children they were currently teaching.

Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Adivasi Students  127 Many teachers expressly stated that the D Ed prepared them for teaching in urban private schools, not in rural government schools. This leaves them with a poor appreciation of the diversity and rich variety of experiences, talents, and interests that exist in their classrooms. They end up trying to ‘solve the problem’ of diversity by imposing uniformity. In one of my observations this expectation of ‘standard responses’ even applied to drawing. When asked by the teacher to draw something on their slates (in order to fill in time that she spent on some paperwork), the children from the nomadic tribe that is famous for intricate embroidery drew complex and beautiful designs, while the other children drew two hills, a sunset, a house, and a tree, which possible they have drawn before and seen siblings draw. The teacher praised the sunset drawings, while shrugging noncommittally at the intricate designs because the children could not answer the question ‘What have you drawn?’ A powerful message was sent: conform or fail. Teachers look on their task as making the Adivasi children more like the other students, helping them to speak more ‘pure’ language and convincing or coercing them to attend school regularly. They expect Adivasi parents to be more like ‘other’ parents, ensuring that children attend school more regularly, do not miss school for market day and festivals, and study at home after school hours. That brings us to the second issue: that Adivasi children, as all other children, but perhaps more so, need to learn how to learn in the context of school.

Teachers Need to Teach Lisa Delpit argues that children from deprived backgrounds need to be specifically taught basic literacy skills, where children from more affluent homes may come to school with these basic skills already in place or at least the preparatory work already done (Delpit, 2006). The child who comes to the class with some amount of the cultural capital required to understand what the culturally powerful teacher and textbook are saying and demanding of her will naturally be at an advantage. By this reasoning, Adivasi children come to school very ill-equipped to take advantage of the learning that is on offer. This is not to say that Adivasi children should be segregated and given special training as such, but that the regular classroom itself must involve some good old-fashioned teaching of basics along with the more open, self-driven, process-oriented learning experiences that are now being tried in many government schools. With the current ‘flavours of the month’ like Constructivism, ABL, Nali Kali, teachers are more and more being told that they are not expected to teach, only facilitate. This leaves the sincere teacher slightly on the defensive. On the one hand, she can see that the children are not learning, on the other she is told in training after training that she should not teach, but facilitate and let children ‘construct knowledge’, ‘discover’, etc. With the half-baked understanding that these training programmes develop, we are

128  Mini Shrinivasan finding classrooms where children come without the basic understanding, for example, of which side is up in scripts like Kannada, while teachers are interpreting constructivism as leaving children to teach themselves.

What Does This Imply for Policy and Action? Firstly, in teacher preparation, both at the pre-service and in-service level, lectures on ‘Indian society’ and ‘tribal education’ are clearly not having the desired effect. More fieldwork and contact with Adivasi children and their communities have to be a part of teacher preparation. This would help the teachers to understand not only the cultural background but also the particular learning needs of the children and develop teaching materials and pedagogy accordingly. It would also help the teacher in the long run by bringing him or her closer to the community and thereby getting more support from them, both in and out of school. In schools where the children come from both Adivasi and non-Adivasi families, efforts have to be made to give the Adivasi children due importance and not make them feel that they are ‘outside the mainstream’ of school culture which tends to be Hindu and nationalistic in its celebration of festivals and national holidays. Education departments of states will have to face up to the fact that not every innovation that works in a small, deeply committed and introspective school or project can be universalised without dire consequences on the weakest and most vulnerable students. I have spoken to scores of teachers in Maharashtra who interpret constructivism as painting specific teaching aids on the floor. I have observed scores of ABL and Nali Kali classrooms in Chhattisgarh and Karnataka where children are picking up a card, copying everything on it (sometimes in the case of single letters, even upside down!), replacing the card in the tray, and getting a tick against that card on their charts. And that little girl with her book open at a random page that we encountered at the beginning – she is not alone, in classroom after classroom I have seen children disengaged, lost, ignored. And they are most often the most in need of being taught. Teachers need to be brought back to the basic task of teaching and ensuring that children are learning. CCE, ABL, and constructivism are all valuable and effective only if this basic task, not some empty ritual, is at the centre of it all. And finally, we need local and recent data specifically about literacy acquisition of Adivasi children in mainstream schools; comparative learning levels of Adivasi and non-Adivasi children attending the same schools; classroom processes and teacher–child interactions in classes with all or some Adivasi children and Adivasi children’s attitudes to school and schooling. Research into these and related fields would yield a wealth of insight into how we can make school for Adivasi worth the effort they make to attend it.

Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Adivasi Students  129

References Delpit, Lisa: Other People’s Children, New Press, 2006. Ministry of Human Resource Development, National Curriculum Framework, 2005. National Council for Teacher Education – National Curricular Framework 2009: National Curriculum Framework, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, 2005. Purcell-Gates, Victoria: Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy, Harvard University Press, 1995.

8

Understanding Comprehension Classroom Problems with English for the EWS Child Peggy Mohan

What Is Comprehension? Think back to the last time you phoned your Internet service provider to register a complaint about your broadband not working. Attending your call would be a techie whose job was to repeat, probably for the thousandth time, a list of routine questions and instructions. The spiel would have come in a fast undifferentiated monotone, maybe in a language you didn’t know well, on a sub-optimal phone connection, and it would have included technical jargon and concepts unfamiliar to you, ending with something that seemed ominously to mean: ‘Can we now cancel your complaint?’ Slow down! That would be your first response. Repeat what you just said! Then, after one more failed attempt you would throw up your hands and pass the phone over to someone calmer, someone more technically confident, certain that you were about to say something catastrophically wrong. It wasn’t just the speed that had thrown you or the individual words. What you couldn’t get was a picture in your mind of what the techie wanted to know. A picture. Not a single word, or string of words, but a totality. At the heart of comprehension is something known as isomorphism, which is a match between the information being conveyed and the frames of reference that are in place in your receiver’s mind. Simply put, you can understand something you already know about or close to what you already know about. Understanding is basically a process of recognition, which means that it depends crucially on what you already know. The information stored in our mind is in frames, which correspond to the frames in our peers’ minds. We think and speak in the same language, using the same words and the same grammar. We share a large number of experiences and have learned to talk about them in very similar ways: after all, ‘community’ and ‘communication’ do come from the same root. This sameness is important, as it makes it easy for the process of recognition to work: things meant to be similar also have to look similar, so that they are more easily sensed and decoded by the receiver’s mental ‘software’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-9

Understanding Comprehension  131 Understanding, then, is an active process. Much as we need to know the words that will drift by us, it isn’t the words themselves that reconfigure into meaningful content in our minds. No. The listener actually has to engage with these words, these sentence frames, recognise the propositions encoded in them, using some top-down guesswork, mind reading, and even probability, to intuit what they might mean. (‘The guard bit the snake’, said the student. What? Didn’t he mean: ‘The snake bit the guard?’ No: it was a Bengali student speaking: he had pronounced ‘beat’ as ‘bit’!)

The ‘Tunnel’ An unknown language is the most obvious barrier to comprehension. Children who do not know English attending Vasant Valley School, the English-medium school I teach in Delhi, a diverse group that includes middle-class Indian, Korean, and Japanese children as well as EWS1 students, all start out facing the same blank wall. They all go through a phase in which they are, so to speak, inside a tunnel, with teachers unable to guess at what might be going on in their minds. What is interesting, though, is that the middle-class Indian children and the middle-class foreign children emerge from their tunnel within a matter of months, transformed into fluent English speakers, while our EWS students often remain underground at least until Class 4 or 5. This tunnel that swallows our children for months, or years, is the same tunnel that, in an earlier paper of mine,2 rendered them mute in Englishmedium classrooms. While their lack of verbal response might have seemed strange, given children’s natural ability to extricate words and phrases out of pure gibberish and playfully try them out, when it comes to comprehension this blackout phase makes a lot of sense. It is not easy to extricate words and phrases from a flow of speech in English and build meaning around them. At best the children would get whiffs of meaning from the short phrases they recognise, but as they cannot connect them to the larger argument being made, and certainly not in real time, there is no ‘mindlock’ with the speaker. Why do middle-class Korean and Japanese children in our classrooms learn English faster than our EWS children? It is hard to imagine Korean and Japanese parents, even ones who know English, immersing their children in a rich English-language environment at home just to help them cope better at school. More likely they are busy duplicating the English-medium school education with parallel mother tongue instruction, in preparation for returning one day to school in Korea or Japan. And this parallel education would involve setting up frames in the home language that match the frames in which new information is passed on in the English-medium classroom. There seems to be the sameness of middle-class knowledge in the modern global world, one that transcends differences in language. For the Korean

132  Peggy Mohan and Japanese children in our classrooms, just knowing the same things, presented similarly in the home language, would hasten the ‘aha’ moment when what they are learning in English would begin to make sense. For the middle-class Indian children, the shortcut out of the tunnel would be different. It would entail a gradual replacement of the home language, in the manner of an exotic plant being grafted onto a hardy local root.3 Growing up involves a slow transition to English-medium discourse at home, with the same middle-class agenda that is being imparted at school and in their Korean and Japanese classmates’ homes, and all the explanation and discussion from parents that they would need to truly ‘own’ this knowledge, given both in English and in the earlier home language. This middle-class knowledge is extremely verbal. It is full of words and concepts, and parents discussing all the new information with a lot of questions and answers, almost revising as they go. In literate homes, this goes way beyond the environment the child can naturally perceive: a child in a tropical climate learns what snow is, for example, and that it is cold, and means you have to wear warm clothes. This information is often packaged into frameworks where information is nested and from which children extract what is new out of a familiar wraparound. There is nothing crucial in any of this information, but for the fact that it fits in neatly with a body of knowledge shared by middle-class children the world over (and which is ultimately codified into school curriculum). Nursery rhymes and songs also package this kind of information, with the bonus that they are easy to repeat and reinforce. Singing with parents means that many middle-class children enter school already able to hear and follow a tune: the EWS children in my music classes are usually not able to follow a tune at the outset, though most do eventually pick this up. This suggests that singing, while by no means a crucial skill, is strongly associated with the kinds of interaction between parent and child that pass on and reinforce middle-class knowledge.

Diglossia Information about comprehension is harder to come by than speech data, as speech is output and easy to observe and analyse. But the problem with restricting ourselves to studying speech is that in a diglossic situation like ours, where the home language and the high-status language are different, is that a simple tallying of errors does not tell us anything, because diglossic children typically do not make mistakes. They stick to saying only what they know how to say, and this gives a false impression that they understand everything they hear and read (or that they say and understand nothing). While people do at times experiment with using phrases in languages they do not fully understand, during travel, for momentary fun, or for making themselves understood in emergencies, in natural situations speech in a foreign language follows comprehension, which, we have seen, is a total package,

Understanding Comprehension  133 at least for one full domain of activity. To treat observable speech data in a diglossic situation as something independent of comprehension is to wish away the roots when studying the tree. There is no getting away from digging deeper to find out the secrets of the tunnel. Diglossia (see note 3) is a situation where two or more languages are spoken within the same community. It differs from classic bilingualism, which is about a duplication of the speaker’s competence in two (or more) languages. Bilinguals are often good translators because they know more or less the same things in the two (or more) languages they have mastered. Most of them are not exotic hybrids, with two ‘first languages’, but people who have learned a second language in the classroom and learned it well. The Korean and Japanese children in our classrooms are bilingual. Diglossia, by contrast, is about a social division of labour between the languages in play, with the scope of the first language being limited to trivial tasks and the other language(s) learned later on and used for more highstatus activity, including literacy and technical work. When languages like Hindi and English share space in modern urban India, it is fair to say that Hindi is actually being eased out in favour of English. When EWS children pick up English in English-medium schools, they tend to learn it not by translating words and concepts they know, or one grammar rule at a time, but scene-wise, one situation at a time. Conversation and fitting in with their peers come first and competence to handle academic situations comes much later. The same child who confidently asks ‘Where’s my Mom?’ may be staring out the window in class, exhausted and unable to cope with the deluge of information coming at him all day long in English. Some EWS children even keep falling asleep in class. What goes on in their minds as they try to understand situations they have not yet mastered? One place where I get to observe comprehension is in my Western Music classes. My EWS students in Classes 2–5 have to engage with English as they read and sing song lyrics written on posters on the wall, keeping up with the rest of the class. I try to choose songs that most children in the class can understand, with topics interesting to their age group, but I know this still leaves most EWS children at a loss. Not only is reading English from posters difficult, going at the speed of the singing, but even singing the same song many times does not bring familiarity. The children move their mouths earnestly in an attempt to be like the others, but their mouth movements do not match the words of the song. When I get children with reading problems to recite the songs line by line, or give cues for the line to come, students with dyslexia find it helpful, but the EWS students do not. It is only when each line is explained in Hindi, word for word, that they are comfortably able to repeat it. To ‘spare’ EWS children the trauma of being singled out in class, some schools have a policy of not allowing the teacher to speak to them in Hindi, confident that if they are only spoken to in English they will eventually ‘pick up’. In other words, the system is deciding on behalf of these children, without consulting them, that the trauma we adults might feel, singled out and

134  Peggy Mohan associated with a down-market language like Hindi, should outweigh the wish to simply know what is going on all day long in the classroom. Could it be that our blindness to these children’s fidgeting, falling asleep in class, being disruptive, or simply looking lost, is simply a lack of empathy? I have spoken to adults who were sent as small children to Englishmedium schools, who now tell of going to school in the morning and coming back in the afternoon without ever understanding a word. Most of us mercifully do not recall this phase, or how stupid we thought ourselves, but the tales told by those with memories should shock us into a sober rethinking of ‘banning Hindi’ from the classroom.

Introspection An important source of information on comprehension is personal introspection. Some of us still have, as adults, incomplete knowledge of a language we have to use and that provides valuable insight into what EWS children might be going through as they try to understand. A few months ago I went to an academic conference that was in Hindi. The first presentations were by young activists, all faced with time limits and determined to share all their findings. The microphone had a reverb that garbled the sound. The presenters spoke fast in normal Hindi sentences, incorporating a few technical words that I did not know, and by the time I had found out what they meant I had missed the next sentence. The presentations were crammed full of facts and figures that did not add up to a consistent picture, at least not for me. The most I could get was a sense of individual sentences, but I could not connect them to the larger whole. After a valiant attempt to follow, I could feel myself winking out. At this point someone I knew well, a professor in the field, began to speak in Hindi, taking the young activists to task for not having ‘prepared’ their talks properly, pitching her voice clearly into the faulty mike, and resummarising their findings in a logical sequence that made complete sense. All of a sudden I understood every word. What had hampered my comprehension in the first presentations was a combination of speed of speech, lack of clarity in the sound, words that I did not understand, an over-abundance of what seemed like random facts and figures, and, in the end, simply not expecting to understand. Then the last speaker came and gave it all a consistent storyline, and instantly I knew how to place each item of information and engage actively with what I was hearing. This was a close friend, someone whose research papers I had read in English. Being a good teacher she was conscious of her listeners and knew what was new in the findings, what was likely to be more difficult for newcomers like us to grasp, and so she gave that information extra time and focus. She was, most of all, able to appeal to our shared mental frames

Understanding Comprehension  135 so that I, at least, could make sense of the same information as soon as I heard it. What is remarkable is that after the first presentations I was left with a sinking feeling that I had not understood anything, while after the last speaker I suddenly felt that I had understood everything! There were, of course, many others in the room who had no problem with the young activists: mainly, their Hindi was better, and they were familiar with this sort of presentation. Or if they did not fully understand it all, they were satisfied. If you had asked them to tell you exactly what they had understood, most would not have been able to cut past the undergrowth and tell you. But unless you actually asked, the problem would not have arisen. They recognised, without really understanding, and that was enough. There seems to be a tipping point above which an incomplete picture suffices and below which it doesn’t come into focus. This impressionistic response takes us back to the idea of a tunnel, a period of dark gestation, and suggests that it isn’t just the teacher who is unable to see the children’s competence until it is fully formed: the children too cannot form a coherent picture of what is being said because their competence is still ‘unviable’! Comprehension is, after all, a recognition of a bundle of components that make up a larger picture. Removing one element from the bundle (say, one word) might not affect the final outcome: indeed, we might even fill in a small blank unconsciously. But removing more elements from the bundle would bring a flip, such that recognition, and ultimately comprehension, would fail. Unlike our EWS children, I at least know what it is like to understand this sort of material in another language, even if I still despair at having failed to follow it in Hindi. What must it be like for young children to expect not to understand any of the discourse in the classroom, for them to be resigned to passing all their school days in a fog?

Frames In an ideal world, little EWS children would be able to grow up seeing their first language not as an obstacle to comprehension, but as the facilitator it was meant to be. In an ideal world, all children would gain knowledge from the world around them, their community, their families, instead of being driven towards something as dubious and alien as ‘middle-class knowledge’. In an ideal world, Indian languages would not be limited to just providing rootstock for an exotic graft like English to feed on and bloom, until the day the old roots were no longer needed as a starter. In an ideal world, poorer children would not find themselves speaking a totally different language from children whose families were richer. But EWS children and their families have to make their way in a very different world. And we as teachers are duty bound to help them acquire

136  Peggy Mohan middle-class knowledge, and English, to do this. What are these ‘frames’ of knowledge? An easy way to understand ‘frames’ is to think of analogy, which requires a vast store of general knowledge that might not seem to be related to the curriculum at hand. Parents, and good teachers, are always straying off the topic to give examples, to illustrate something obscure that they are talking about. (Why don’t people, for example, stop smoking when they are told that it causes cancer? Well, do you always do what you are told is good for you? Don’t you continue to do things even when you agree that they are harmful? Well, then). All this background knowledge helps the recognition process: this is like something else we know about: maybe not exactly, but enough for us to cut through a lot of underbrush in the comprehension process, by finding isomorphisms. Even physicists find themselves describing light as like a wave and at other times like a particle. Our foreign children and our middle-class Indian children are able to learn quickly because they already have much of the general knowledge they are being exposed to in English in school. They also come from the same highly verbal culture that classroom teaching is modelled on, with the bonus that at home they can easily stop their parents to ask questions and digress as needed. This is a point that transcends the question of language medium, and it cannot be underlined too strongly. If not being exposed to English at home were the problem, we would be finding the children of Hindi teachers and other teachers who live their lives in Hindi like Sanskrit teachers, Indian music teachers, art teachers, drama teachers, and sports teachers not able to pick up English easily, not able to blend into the culture of the Englishmedium classroom, so much so that they would show up in a search for children with language problems. But even with Hindi as their home language, these teachers’ children fit the pattern of our Korean and Japanese children. Whether this makes them bilingual (like our foreign children) or diglossic (like our middle-class Indian children who learn English at home) is not clear. And that, in itself, is an interesting research question. This finding further minimises the sense of urgency for adopting English as the medium of instruction for our EWS children. Clearly, what these children need, in order to fit in with a world not of their making, is not more English introduced even earlier, but time spent mastering the basic concepts that make up general middle-class knowledge, and becoming more verbal, in a language they truly understand. When teachers, in the interest of saving time, omit the little digressions that one-to-one dialogue with parents provide, comprehension suffers, especially if the children do not get this sort of interaction from their overworked parents at home. Hindi teachers caution against seeing the Hindi language as an undifferentiated whole. The Hindi spoken at home by EWS children may be strikingly different from the Hindi spoken in Hindi teachers’ homes.4 EWS children often enter school speaking non-standard varieties of Hindi which

Understanding Comprehension  137 do not conform, teachers say, to middle-class Hindi usage. While some children have problems with things like Hindi grammatical gender (if, say, Bhojpuri is the home language), and with pronunciation, the difference cannot always be put down to structure. It is something else. In 1971, the sociologist Basil Bernstein came up with the construct of restricted and elaborated language codes as a way of accounting for the relatively poor performance of working-class children in Britain in languagebased subjects. The elaborated code was the more verbal variety used by middle-class and elite children, while the restricted code was a variety optimised for vernacular discourse in poorer communities. As the elaborated code matched the kind of language used at school, children who only knew the restricted code would find themselves at a disadvantage in the middleclass culture of the classroom. To rush EWS children straight into speaking English, then, would be tantamount to skipping a key intermediate phase in their language development: the acquisition of the elaborated variety of Hindi or standard middleclass Hindi. Without passing through this pit stop on the way to English, EWS children would be forced to make a double jump that was more than just linguistic. They would be missing out precisely that experience that had enabled Hindi teachers’ children to become good English speakers without speaking English at home. The best way to give the children this exposure would be via elementary schooling in Standard Hindi, with English being taught as a separate subject, and then integration into English-medium schools in Class 6. That way our EWS children would end up much like our Hindi teachers’ children, with the added bonus of not being forced to abandon their first language in order to get a good education. But even if we are constrained to put them into English-medium elementary education with remedial classes after school, we should have in place a system of teaching Science and Social Studies in Standard Hindi to EWS children for the first few years, covering exactly the same syllabus as in English-medium classes. The result would not be children ‘dependent’ on Hindi until Class 12, but EWS children brought up to the standard of the Hindi teachers’ children and prepared to merge into English-medium instruction by Class 4. In our haste to have our EWS children speak in English, we promote a shallow training that pays too little attention to meaning. To learn English more efficiently, what these children need is their lessons explained and discussed, with the kind of relentless question and answer that middleclass parents use, in a language they can understand. This is what builds up the frames in their minds that link to what is being taught in the Englishmedium classes. Once this framework is in place, the river between the two languages is narrow enough for them to cross without even getting their feet wet. In Vasant Valley School we give importance to integrating our subject material. What is taught in science, or social science, or a story in an English

138  Peggy Mohan comprehension, or a concept in mathematics is something I would try to recap in my Music classes. We might write a song with Urdu lyrics about the Taj Mahal, as a class exercise, we might write and learn a song on the rain forest to a Brazilian tune, or a song with a Marwari chorus on Rajasthan, or a song about the rain cycle giving water and clouds a personality, or a song on the different branches of science. What if we also integrated our English and Hindi classes in the primary classes, so that similar topics were covered, with the same concepts learnt in both the languages simultaneously? What if, since we already learn songs that recap lesson material, we used those songs as course material for after-school EWS classes, to enable the children to read and sing along with the rest of the class, and, as a bonus, know in English the concepts they would be encountering in class?

Story Grammar One way children learn comprehension is stories: they have a predictable start; characters are introduced; a problem comes to throw things off balance; there is a struggle between good and evil; the hero has to grow to fit what the role demands; the problem is solved and the world is back in balance, but a little bit better than before. That is the meaning of ‘happily ever after’. This standardised structure does not make stories boring for children. On the contrary, what it does is help them recognise the usual milestones along the way, so that they can follow the story efficiently. It sets up expectations in their minds, allowing them to guess ahead and calculate probabilities about what must be going on. Lessons, too, and most human discourse has a fairly predictable structure, because comprehension has to happen fast: listening and reading are not about poring over esoteric messages, but about locking onto the speaker’s frequency, as it were, and running in step with him as he speaks. There is a real-time clock ticking away. Any message that cannot be interpreted at the speed of speech is a badly constructed message. This is not as strange as it seems. Reading, too, is not about dissecting words and putting them back together one letter at a time. It is about wholeword recognition. More than that, it is about recognising larger chunks, and even whole story outlines, and being able to guess ahead. Reading, like comprehension, is something we do ‘top down’, more often than not keeping an eye on the text just to see if we have been guessing right. Musicians, too, often find ourselves accompanying a song we are hearing for the first time, but soon we are able to guess ahead and predict the chords, and then the melody, when it gets repeated, and even when it is poised to take a leap. It is all there in the structure: once we have it, we can take it and (almost) run with it! It is almost as though we have heard it before! Think of the structure of popular songs: many songs are made up of verse and chorus, the chorus recycling the same tune and lyrics, and the verse taking the story ahead. The chorus gives a break, for the new information

Understanding Comprehension  139 to sink in, while bringing a sense of participation, as listeners are served familiar bits that they can join in with and sing. And then, if you still don’t get what the song is about, just before the end there may be a bridge, a verse that is different (maybe in a different key or rhythm) where the layers of metaphor are removed and the songwriter simply says what was on his mind that made him write the song. In fact, when we look closely, so much of what children engage in is full of structure and rules. Games. Puzzles. Drama. Art. These rules, far from constraining creativity, actually work with it to make it meaningful, so that instead of being just a pleasurable activity it evolves into something that can be communicated and shared.

One-way-ness A key feature of the communication that takes place in large systems, like schools, books, mass media, and performance, is that it is mostly one-way. The sort of dialogue that children can have at home with parents, at this scale, is inefficient: in a classroom, it is usually the teacher who speaks and the children who listen. Rare are the children who are ready to halt the flow of information to say that they don’t understand. And, given that classes, too, exist within time frames (the allotted class period), the teacher is also under constant pressure to keep going, and not encourage questions, unless that kind of digression is planned. And that takes us back to our young activists, whose presentations I had been unable to follow. They had collected together all their facts and figures certain, as all new teachers are, that the information told the whole story. They had proceeded to put this information across informally, speaking as though it were a simple two-way dialogue, stringing together sentence after sentence quickly but artlessly, when the picture in their minds was counter-intuitive or the very opposite of what the audience would normally expect. We were not prepared for our expectations to be so contradicted, and they had not prepared for the complexity of the picture they were out to convey. We needed … something. Clues. Pacing. Focus. Repetition. Redundancy: that padding that is built into human communication that gives us more than one way to extract the same message. We needed the presenters to waste a little time and put themselves in our place and imagine what it might be like to not know the bigger picture. How many of us have had the experience of trying to call up a driver waiting in a parking lot? You phone and ask: Aap kahan ho? (Where are you?). Pat comes the reply: Main yehin hoon (I’m right here). Not wrong, but totally unhelpful. Speaking on the phone is not unlike the kind of displaced one-way communication a teacher has to do, seeing into the kids’ minds and constructing her lesson to suit what they know. When the class is homogeneous, it is no great problem. When a small number of the children

140  Peggy Mohan are radically different in terms of their background knowledge and grasp of the language the teacher is using, it is the teacher who needs to know more.

The Road Ahead This chapter is not the end of the road for the discussion on comprehension and the EWS child: it is not even a beginning. It is something more on the order of a tiny torch beam lighting our first steps along a dark tunnel that will not give up its secrets easily. In this chapter I have speculated on what seems to be going on in the black box, that is the mind of an EWS child in transit to competence in English, supported by my own observations as a teacher, and drawing on my experience as an adult with incomplete knowledge of a language important in my life. Comprehension, to me, feels as if it is governed by an on–off switch, such that I either ‘get it’ or feel it floats over my head, out of reach. What we need to do is think of ways to see inside the tunnel and find out what is happening, what comprehension consists of. Instead of looking to others to do this work for us, we need to brace ourselves to take on the research ourselves. There is a misconception that learning is supposed to be a gradual incline up a straight slope. What if it isn’t our fault as teachers? What if, as with most contrary things in nature, the path to comprehension is curved or irregular? Is it possible that learners need much more time at the outset to get basic knowledge in order, after which the ascent can be swifter? We are on uncharted territory and this is exciting. The little children sitting patiently before us, anxious about not understanding our classes, may well turn out to be our biggest assets! This is where the research starts. Research involves finding ways to see and measure comprehension, designing experiments that are replicable. We have only posed a few hypotheses here, and asked some questions, which give us our start. What we need to do now is return to what we were doing, integrating our classrooms, but now poised to learn as much from our EWS children as they hope to learn from us. Reversals, in the world of research, are often wormholes to new universes, where the weak turn out to be the strong ones, the ones with the stories to tell. It is time to turn the tables and let them gain confidence as they lead us on the grandest journey of all.

Notes 1 EWS stands for Economically Weaker Section and refers to the quota of children from poorer families admitted into elite English-medium schools as affirmative action, in return for the land for the schools having been made available to the private sector at subsidised rates. At present 25 per cent of the seats in elite schools have been reserved for EWS children. As elite schools admit students only at the pre-primary stage, there is no provision for absorbing EWS students later, after primary school.

Understanding Comprehension  141 2 This tunnel has been discussed at length in an earlier paper, ‘The road to English: The slow migration of the EWS child to elite India,’ presented at a previous Deshkal conference on Inclusive Education. 3 This situation of two or more languages sharing the same speech community, with a functional division of labour, is one I call diglossia. The term was first used by Ferguson (1959). Ferguson, however, restricted its use to closely related dialects and just two of them. Many linguists now disagree that the languages in question need to be related or even similar, as the division is one of function, where form plays no important role (indeed, we are not convinced that the varieties Ferguson chose as illustrations were closely related). We also do not see any conceptual difference between there being two and more than two languages in the mix. For simplicity, then, we use the terms bilingualism and diglossia to refer to two or more than two languages. 4 I am indebted to Poonam Tomar, a Hindi teacher in Vasant Valley School, Delhi, for this insight about EWS children’s Hindi being something of a restricted code, and the view that what EWS children needed first was not so much English as a language, but a change of register to an elaborated code: specifically, standard classroom Hindi.

References Bernstein, Basil. 1971. Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 125–152. Ferguson, Charles. 1959. ‘Diglossia’. Word, 15(2): 325–340. ———. 2009. ‘Invisible development: How English as a second language gestates and grows’. Psychological Foundations, XI(II): 43–46. ———. 2014. ‘The road to English: The slow migration of the EWS child to elite India’. The Economic and Political Weekly, 49(7): 19–24.

9

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar Contemporary and Historical Perspectives Manoj Kumar Tiwary

The attention of educationists and policymakers in India has recently shifted from concerns about the reach and extent of school education to its inadequate quality, as can be read from the many reports and studies about the status of poor learning in Indian elementary schools.1 While commendable progress has been made through the enrolment of students supported by the expansion and the strengthening of infrastructure and recruitment of teachers (NUEPA, 2016), the improvement of the quality of education has not kept pace. Like in many Indian states, the education system in Bihar has long suffered from the problem of poor learning outcomes and continues to do so. Especially the academic achievements of first-generation learners2 from marginalised communities continue to lag behind those of their more privileged classmates from dominant social groups. In Bihar, it was only in the first decade of the twenty-first century that huge numbers of children of marginalised communities were enrolled throughout the state. These children, often from lower caste and poor families, became first-generation learners. Of the many problems they have to contend with, the biggest surely is that their often illiterate, poor parents cannot support them with their schoolwork or finance private tutors. First-generation learners continue to lag behind in present-day Bihar, as can be judged from their poor learning achievements and the high dropout rates among them. The educational renaissance, which the founders of Indian independence dreamed of in the last century, has sadly taken a long time in coming. In this chapter, the long history of Bihar’s caste-based educational system is discussed in the light of the learning opportunities and practices in colonial as well as independent India. To do so, we will first uncover the roots of the current deplorable state of school education in Bihar by looking at the connections between education and other aspects of society, in particular social class or caste-related patterns of access to education. It will be argued that the adverse consequences of educational policies of successive Indian governments as well as colonial policies are still being felt today. First, the earliest known surveys about the education of children in rural areas in Bihar will be examined. These nineteenth-century surveys of the state school system by colonial administrators DOI: 10.4324/9781003387442-10

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar  143 give us a better understanding of the social backgrounds of the students that were enrolled in schools, the kinds of teachers they had, and the learning goals that were set. Subsequently, the educational policies of the modern Indian state will be examined, including the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and the Right to Education Act of 2009. In the second half of this chapter, we will detail the ramifications of these educational settings and policies for the educational chances that children from different social groups have in present-day Bihar.

Caste, Class, and Education in Nineteenth-Century Bihar In the early decades of the nineteenth century, two significant studies into the school system were carried out in Bihar. The first was by Francis Buchanan Hamilton, who undertook wide-ranging researches in the districts of Purnea, Bhagalpur, Behar (present-day Gaya and adjoining districts), Patna, and Shahabad in the period between 1809 and 1813. His study addresses various aspects of the respective districts, including topography, the natural produce of the region, agriculture, arts and commerce, religions and sects, as well as the state’s demography and educational system. Buchanan’s studies comprise detailed accounts and summaries of his interaction with the people of Bihar and of other resources available at the time. His conclusions offer insightful observations into the educational status of the various districts of Bihar and shed light on the kind of teachers, students, and school structure that existed during the period. From Buchanan’s study, it becomes clear that in the surveyed districts of Bihar, there often was a dearth of teachers (Gurus) and that many boys were taught at home by their fathers, grandfathers, and uncles. Even if there was a teacher available, he generally just taught the most rudimentary aspects of basic arithmetic and writing, and the fathers and guardians themselves took care of their boys’ further education. Only a few schools were run as public schools and they were mainly found in the principal towns of nineteenth-century Bihar. Such schools were generally attended by no more than 15–20 boys. In most cases, however, economically well-off people, who could afford to hire private tutors, had their boys educated at home. The teachers came to their houses to teach in return for a modest salary and meals. Often, these teachers, with the consent of their patrons, would also teach some of the sons of their patrons’ neighbours to increase their income (Buchanan, 1928: 169–70; 1934: 169; 1936: 292; 1939: 198). The second and very comprehensive study of education in Bihar was undertaken by William Adam, a member of the Baptist Missionary Society, who had come to India in 1818. Upon his arrival, Adam immediately learned Bengali and Sanskrit and acquired commendable expertise in these languages. In 1829, his interest and inclination for indigenous languages and education prompted him to write to William Bentinck, the governor general of Bengal at that time (and later of the whole of India), requesting him to

144  Manoj Kumar Tiwary institute a survey on the status of education in the country to facilitate the imminent educational reforms. His plea was ignored initially, but Adam persisted and submitted his request again in 1834. This time his request was granted, and the survey was commissioned under his supervision. Adam set out to gather detailed information in six sampled districts of Bengal and Bihar. Following, we will discuss Adam’s findings in some detail, in particular the data gleaned from his third and main report of 1838, which is a survey of two districts of the province of Bihar carried out in 1837: (1) South Behar (present-day districts of Gaya, Jehanabad, Aurangabad, Nawada, and adjoining areas) and (2) Tirhut (present-day districts of Muzaffarpur, Vaishali, Darbhanga, Supaul, Sitamarhi, and adjoining areas). Adam surveyed the Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and English schools in the region, listing the number of schools, teachers, and students as well as their castes. These two sampled districts represented the two regions south and north of the river Ganges, which bisects present-day Bihar. According to Adam, South Behar had 604 schools: 285 Hindi schools,3 27 Sanskrit schools, 279 Persian schools, 12 Arabic schools, and 1 English school. These schools were attended by 5,013 scholars in total. For the 285 extant Hindi schools, he listed 285 teachers (284 Hindus and 1 Muslim), the same number as there were schools. The Hindu teachers were of different castes, but overwhelmingly dominated by the Kayastha or writers’ caste. Apart from 278 Kayastha teachers, Adam also listed 2 Magadha, 1 Gandhabanik, 1 Teli, 1 Kairi, and 1 Sonar teacher. It was estimated that the 285 Hindi schools had a total number of 3,090 students. According to these figures, schools in South Behar would, on average, have had approximately 10.8 students per Hindi school. Adam noted that in South Behar schools, most students came from the middle and higher castes. Thus, Gandhabanik students were predominant, numbering 540 boys, followed by 468 Magadha, 271 Teli, 256 Brahmin, and 220 Kayastha students. In addition, these schools also enrolled 23 Dosad and 22 Pashi students. Of special interest for this chapter is that Adam also listed the attendance of 1 student from the Musahar community, traditionally one of the most marginalised castes of Bihar (Long, 1868: 171–73). South Behar also had 27 Sanskrit schools, which employed 27 teachers, all of them were Brahmins. These schools were attended by 437 students, and they all exclusively belonged to the Brahmin community as well (ibid.: 191–92). In addition to Hindi and Sanskrit schools, the district of South Behar also had 279 Persian and 12 Arabic schools. The number of teachers was equal to the number of Persian schools and, except one teacher who was a Kayastha, all other 278 teachers were Muslims. In the Arabic schools, all 12 teachers were Muslims. There were 1,424 students of Persian and 62 students of Arabic receiving instruction in the Persian and Arabic schools, respectively. In Arabic schools, only two students were Hindus (Kayastha) and the remaining 60 were Muslims. In Persian schools, on the other hand, 865 students were Hindus and 559 were Muslims. Among

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar  145 Hindu students, there were 711 Kayastha students, 55 Magadha, 30 Rajput, 13 Kshatriya, 11 Brahmin, 11 Gandhabanik, and 10 Kairi4 students. The other 24 students belonged to 12 different castes (ibid.: 205–7). In his May–June 1837 survey, Adam counted 374 schools in the district of Tirhut: 80 Hindi schools, 56 Sanskrit schools, 234 Persian schools, and 4 Arabic schools, which were attended by 1,319 students in total. Each Hindi school had one teacher, totalling 80 teachers with different caste backgrounds: 77 Kayastha, 2 Gandhabanik, and 1 Brahmin. They had 507 students, out of which 502 were Hindus and 5 were Muslims. Among Hindu boys, the numerically predominant students were from the Sunri caste, totalling 72. The remaining higher and middle caste students numbered 62 Rajputs and 51 Kayastha. Of the lower castes, among others, 9 Luniar, 6 Mahla, 5 Kairi, 5 Dhanuk, and 5 Pashi students were taught in the Hindi schools. In addition, Adam listed 25 Brahmin students, who were enrolled in Tirhut’s vernacular schools (Long, 1868: 173–75). The district of Tirhut also counted 56 Sanskrit schools. These were managed by an equal number of teachers, i.e. 56 instructors, who all were Brahmins. These school were attended by 214 students, and they also belonged exclusively to the Brahmin caste (Long, 1868: 194–95). Besides 80 Hindi and 56 Sanskrit schools, there were 234 Persian and 4 Arabic schools. The number of teachers who teach Persian was equal to the number of Persian schools, though the number of Arabic teachers was 6 because one Arabic school counted 3 teachers. Except one Hindu Kayastha teacher, all remaining teachers in Persian and Arabic schools were Muslims. There were 29 students in Arabic schools: 27 Muslim students and 2 Hindus (one Brahmin and one Kayastha). Persian schools in the district, which far outnumbered the total of the other languages schools combined, were attended by 569 boys. Only 126 students were Muslims and the rest (443) were Hindus. Like in South Behar, the Hindu student numbers were made up of the higher and middle castes, among others, 349 Kayastha, 30 Brahmins, 22 Rajputs, and 20 Magadha students (Long, 1868: 208–10). Adam’s data underline that, bar a few exceptions, children of marginalised communities, in particular Dalit students, were hardly taught in these schools. And, all students were boys. Clearly, girls were not allowed to study in any of the schools. Unlike Adam’s description of schools in Bengal, Bihar’s Sanskrit schools appear to have been populated solely by Brahmin teachers and students. Though most teachers at Sanskrit schools in Bengal appear to have been Brahmin too, Adam also lists a small percentage of teachers hailing from other upper castes, mainly teachers from the Vaidya section of Bengali society. Likewise, the nineteenth-century student population in Sanskrit schools of Bengal was comparatively more diverse than in Bihar’s Sanskrit schools (ibid.: 180–95). These figures underline the exclusionary nature of the education system in nineteenth-century Bihar and suggest that education was organised along very strict caste divisions, especially when compared to the figures available for the same period in Bengal.

146  Manoj Kumar Tiwary Interestingly, Adam draws a link between the teaching profession and social prestige that the people of Bengal and ‘Behar’ (Bihar) bestowed on their teachers: As another point of comparison, it is worthy of note that in each of the Bengal districts a greater or less number of the teachers bestow their instruction gratuitously, and even teachers who are paid instruct many scholars who pay nothing; while in the Behar districts I did not discover any instance in which instruction was given without compensation. The greater poverty of the people in Behar than in Bengal may, in part, explain this fact; but the principal reason probably is that the same religious merit and social consideration are not attached to learning, its possession and diffusion, in the former as in the latter province. (Ibid.: 177) Adam’s observation may to some extent explain the lower number of schools and students in nineteenth-century Bihar. There could be many reasons why the majority of people in Bihar did not attribute much importance and status to the acquisition of education. Poverty, the inability to pay for education and the limited prospect of social mobility through education in a society riddled by caste, may have been the main among these reasons. If Adam was right, this attitude – in combination with poverty – may be the principal reason why comparatively few children were attending school. This impression is further documented when we coalesce Adam’s survey data for Bengal and Bihar. The average number of students who attended either a vernacular, Sanskrit, or Persian/Arabic school in the two surveyed districts of Bengal was 15.56.5 In the sampled districts in Bihar, on the other hand, this number was only 4.89.

Population Base Adam’s figures paint a bleak picture of educational status in early nineteenth-century Bihar. These figures become even bleaker when we study them in the light of the population density of the state. Bihar’s districts in the Ganges valley and the adjoining regions, like the districts of South Behar and Tirhut discussed above, have historically been known for their high population density. If we take a closer look at Adam’s data about all schools (vernacular, Sanskrit, and Persian/Arabic) and compare them with what is known about the population density of nineteenth-century districts of Tirhut and South Behar, we cannot but conclude that there were staggeringly few schools. Nineteenth-century Tirhut was one the most fertile and most densely populated districts of Bihar. In 1850, Revenue Surveyor Alex Wyatt estimated that the majority of this district was under cultivation and that it had a population of roughly 320 people per square mile (Ganguli, 1938: 114).

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar  147 Adam (Long, 1868: 247) estimated the population of Tirhut at 1,697,700.6 Despite this relatively dense population, Adam only counted 374 schools in the whole of Tirhut. According to him, there were a total of 1,319 students in all of Tirhut, which meant that, on average, each school had 3.5 children. Even if we allow for some errors in these figures, and take them as a general estimate rather than factual data, this appears to be an extremely meagre tally on a total population of almost 17 lakhs. A similar scenario existed in the district of South Behar. According to Adam, the estimated population of South Behar stood at 1,340,610 (ibid.: 247). The district nonetheless had only 604 schools with 5,013 students. In other words, each school was attended by only 8.3 students on average. It seems rather poignant that a district populated by more than 1 million people counted only around 5,000 students, a number that further illustrates the lack of educational infrastructure in nineteenth-century Bihar.

Past and Present Levels of Literacy To assess the predicament of first-generation learners in Bihar, who faced, and still face, the disadvantage of lack of educational support at home, the literacy landscape of India, and of Bihar in particular, from the nineteenth century onwards till the present day will be discussed here. The lack or prevalence of literacy to a great extent determines whether a student is a first-generation learner or not. As described in the Introduction, the families of first-generation learners are not able to support their children in the learning process, which is one of the reasons for poor learning outcomes. Judging from the above historical data available on education in the state, it is not difficult to imagine the lacklustre educational landscape of nineteenthcentury Bihar and, as below literacy figures indicate, this landscape took very long, far into the twenty-first century, to change. From the nineteenth century onwards, data on education show that Bihar’s literacy attainment remained limited to a very small percentage of the population, and that this percentage almost wholly consisted of the privileged part of the populace. The crude literacy figures in the census of the year 1881 recorded 44 in 1,000 (4.4 per cent) men as literate in North Bihar division.7 The number of literate women in the division was only 1 per mille (0.1 per cent) (Gait, 1902: 307). At the turn of the century (1901 census), 66 men in 1,000 (6.6 per cent) had become literate, while 2 in 1,000 (0.2 per cent) women learned to read and write. The situation was barely better in the division of South Bihar8 where in the year 1881, the census counted 61 literate men per mille (6.1 per cent) and 4 literate women in 1,000 (0.4 per cent). The census of 1901 counted 82 literate men in 1,000 (8.2 per cent) and the number of women in that cohort was only 3 (0.3 per cent) (ibid.: 307). Compared to the overall literacy levels of the same periods in other parts of India, Bihar evidently lagged behind. In 1891, in India as a whole, 109 (10.9 per cent) men and 6 (0.6 per cent) women were listed as literate out of the

148  Manoj Kumar Tiwary respective population group of 1,000 (India Census Commissioner, 1893: 219). During the census of 1941, Bihar had become an independent administrative entity following the separation of Orissa in 1936. According to the census of 1941, the total literacy rate of the state was 9.2 per cent with 16.1 per cent men and 2.2 per cent women registering as literate (Archer, 1942: 94–5). The first post-independence census was carried out in 1951 and showed Bihar’s literacy rate to be 13.5 per cent. Among the male populace, 22.7 per cent was literate and 4.2 per cent of the female populace was classified as literate (Government of Bihar, n.d.: 1). In the year 1951, the literacy rate of the country as a whole was 18.3 per cent, with male literacy at 27.1 per cent and female literacy at 8.9 per cent (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 2016: 41).9 In sum, though it is clear that the literacy percentages did improve somewhat, the progress from 1891 to 1951 was very gradual indeed and did not catch up with the overall progress made during this same period in many of the other Indian states. This century, the situation has improved but the figures still do not give cause for optimism. At the turn of the last century, the majority of the population of Bihar continued to be illiterate. The census of 2001 registered 47 per cent people of Bihar as literate; only 33.1 per cent among women and 59.7 per cent men were classified as literates (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 2016: 43). During the same period, the overall data for India in its entirety indicate that 64.8 per cent of the general Indian populace could at least read and write. The disaggregated data show that 53.7 per cent of women and 75.3 per cent of men had reached some level of literacy at the beginning of the twenty-first century (ibid.). The second decade of this century did show some improvement in Bihar’s literacy rates as well. The most recent collection of literacy data (2011) shows that the majority of Bihar’s populace had become literate. 61.8 per cent people of the state now read and write; even a majority of women (51.5 per cent) can now be counted as literate and the percentage of men in this category was 71.2 per cent (ibid.). However, these figures continue to lag behind the pan India literacy rate which reached 73 per cent in 2011, with 64.6 per cent women and 80.9 per cent men recorded as literate (ibid.). To gain a comparative perspective on the above literacy data, we can weigh the percentages with those of England where, unlike in India, approximate literacy figures have been available since the eighteenth century. In England, these kinds of data came to be more systematically recorded with the Marriage Act of 1753 that required the signature or marks of brides and grooms to administrate their marriage. On the basis of these data, researchers have been able to show the increase of literacy rates in late eighteenthcentury England (Lawson and Silver, 2007: 421–22). A very significant attempt to measure the literacy rate during that period was done by W.L. Sargent in 1867. On the basis of a sample of 15,000, he calculated that 51 per cent people who got married between 1754 and 1762 could sign their names (Sanderson, 1991: 11).

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar  149 Though the ability to sign one’s signature into a marriage register does not give us much more than a very limited understanding of literacy in eighteenth-century England, the estimates for the nineteenth century are illustrative of the enormous difference in literacy figures between England and India, in particular when we look at nineteenth-century Bihar. The culled data for England show that the majority of people in England were considered literate in 1871 (80.6 per cent men and 73.2 per cent women) (Sanderson, 1991: 19). In India, on the other hand, only an estimated 9.8 per cent men and 0.7 per cent women were literate in the second half of the nineteenth century. The related percentages for Bihar were a meagre 7 per cent for men and 0.2 per cent for women (Risley and Gait, 1903: 178). The huge literacy gap that existed between England and India also shows up another worrying figure, that is, the extremely low literacy level among women in India. The literacy rates in nineteenth-century England were driven by technological and political advances, whereas in India as a whole, technological and political progress and literacy rates remained much lower until the last decades of the twentieth century (cf. Saberwal, 1995: 94). In England, from 1830 onwards, the progress of printing technology resulted in a rapid increase of literacy rates, making cheaper books and newspapers more readily available to more and more people in the second half of the nineteenth century. Reading and writing skills also spread quickly when more and more reading material became generally available to the common people, for instance due to the abolishing of duties and taxes on newspapers and paper, the enactment of the Public Libraries Act of 1850, and the mass production of low-cost steel-nibbed pens. In addition, improved communications due to the reform of the postage rates in 1840, the so-called Penny Post, also helped in creating an increasingly literate populace (Stephens, 1989: 15). This kind of technological progress never happened for the masses of nineteenth-century India, let alone Bihar. India’s technological and political progress in modern times, of course, has contributed to enhance literacy rates and improve the educational status of the country’s masses. This is particularly true in Bihar, but it has taken well into the twenty-first century before the majority of the populace could see the light of literacy. In fact, it took till 2011, before more than half of the populace could be considered literate. The census of that year lists 61.8 per cent of the state’s population as literate.

The Absent Present Nineteenth-century surveys of Bihar’s educational history and literacy figures hide the ‘absent present’: those social groups that have been traditionally excluded from the educational system and continued to be excluded till very recently. In Bihar, the paucity of available historical data on the subject gives us hardly any information about the educational experiences

150  Manoj Kumar Tiwary of marginalised communities. A few nineteenth- and early twentieth-century data about the attempts of lower caste students in Bengal and other provinces to receive an education can be gleaned from the works of administrators like Cotton (1898), Risley and Gait (1903), and Hutton (1933). Their accounts of the struggle of lower caste people, especially the scheduled caste population, to give their children an education further underline the exclusionary pattern of the education system. These marginalised classes faced consistent and determined resistance and discouragement from the privileged upper caste population. And this kind of resistance was all the more insurmountable in the face of the very scant opportunities for children of any caste to receive an education at all. As noted above, Adam writes about another dimension of the education process, especially in Hindu society, that undermined the desire and motivation of many segments of population to acquire education. During his survey, he concluded that in Bihar – more so than in Bengal – a great number of people did not attribute much importance to education and many considered any association with the acquisition of non-religious knowledge derogatory and beneath their caste status. Adam further notes: The reality of this social change in the one class of districts, and its absence in other, become further apparent by a consideration of the castes by which vernacular instruction is chiefly sought. Hindu society on a large scale may be divided into three grades: First, Brahmans who are prohibited by the laws of religion from engaging in worldly employments for which vernacular instruction is deemed the fit and indispensable preparation; second, those castes who, though inferior to Brahmans, are deemed worthy of association with them, or to whom the worldly employments requiring vernacular instruction are expressly assigned; and third, those castes who are so inferior as to be deemed unworthy both of association with Brahmans, and of those worldly employments for which vernacular instruction is the preparation. This would exclude the first and third grades from the benefits of such instruction, and in the Behar districts few of them do partake of it, while in the Bengal districts the proportion of both is considerable. (Long, 1868: 176–77) Leaving aside the essentialist tenet of Adam’s outlook, we can glean from his data that many Brahmin children did receive vernacular instruction, even in Bihar, despite the contrary views held by the general custom. In the Hindi schools of the district of South Behar, 256 students (8.3 per cent) were Brahmins in a total of 3,090 students. In the district of Tirhut, however, their percentage was only 4.9 per cent in a vernacular student community of 507. In addition, these data also once again underline that the number of students receiving instruction in any kind of medium, whether vernacular Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, or Arabic, was extremely meagre. If we

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar  151 take the case of the district of Tirhut, for instance, only 507 students were enrolled for vernacular Hindi education during the period of the survey, as well as 214 students in Sanskrit schools and 598 students in Persian and Arabic schools. Therefore, in all, only 1,319 children were students in an estimated population of 17 lakhs. In this preciously small segment of learners, children from the marginalised sections of the society were conspicuous by their absence. Only a few children managed to enrol in the listed schools but it is unclear what kind of treatment or education they received, since these kinds of data are not mentioned in the survey at all. Clearly, for administrators like Adam, the experiences of the majority of people were not part of the social history of learning in Bihar. This can also be derived from Adam’s detailed description of the logistics involved in his surveys. From his account, we can read that, as surveyors, he hired people with some education, who could read and write well enough to fill out the survey forms prepared by him. From this fact alone, we may infer that most of the surveyors were from the upper or middle castes, and we may surmise that they had little or no time for the experiences of lower castes and did not even consider making them part of their survey. It also seems probable that they did not consider studying (informal) methods of education among the lower castes either. Further, we may also imagine that those surveyors, when they went to villages to visit schools, contacted teachers, patrons, and perhaps students, the majority of whom would be from upper castes and, judging from Adam’s data, from some upper backward castes.

Poor Learning in Contemporary Bihar The above study of the social history of learning in Bihar mainly results in data about the history of the education of privileged students. The voices of the vast majority of uneducated people were not part of the colonial surveys and have only very recently become part of modern Indian educational studies and policies. The fact that the majority of the state’s population remained illiterate until 2001 (53 per cent) reveals how far and how long Bihar has lagged behind other parts of India. Today, this finding is underlined by the vast number of first-generation learners, children whose father and mother have no education at all, who have only recently enrolled in Bihar’s educational system. As a report by Deshkal Society (2014) shows, the majority of children from marginalised communities of the state can be classed as first-generation learners. And this phenomenon is more profound in the case of the most marginalised communities such as Scheduled Castes, which still carry the burden of the historical legacy that largely excluded them from advancing in the state’s educational system. The historical data show that education in Bihar was largely limited to a handful of boys from upper and middle castes. In addition, the data also make clear that the total number of students in the state remained very

152  Manoj Kumar Tiwary low, especially compared to the rest of colonial states in India, and that the majority of the higher and middle caste boys and almost all of the girls never underwent any kind of schooling either and remained uneducated as well. The situation was even more dismal for children from marginalised communities; Adam’s data make it abundantly clear that vernacular school teachers did not teach many lower caste students, let alone girls of any caste. Against this background, it is not surprising that the educational development of Bihar has lagged behind for such a long time. As trajectories of educational achievement from the West suggests, some European countries already made such headway in achieving literacy in the nineteenth century that, from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, data about literacy were no longer part of their census. These countries claimed little or no illiteracy in the second half of the last century (UNESCO, 1953). In the case of Bihar, on the other hand, the vast majority of children never became first-generation learners in historical times and only managed to achieve this status very recently. In Bihar, we have had to wait till the twenty-first century for huge numbers of children to become first-generation learners, especially those from lower castes. Just before and after independence, the country hoped for a renaissance of the Indian education system, especially in educationally backward states like Bihar. These high expectations and optimism for the future of independent India led many policymakers and educationists to criticise the 1944 report titled Post-War Educational Development in India. Headed by John Sargent, the researchers who compiled this report envisioned a 40-year period (1944–1984) to achieve universal free and compulsory primary education. At the time, its critics felt that the plan did not make enough haste with the necessary changes and that educational development could be achieved in a much shorter period of time. This high hope was duly reflected in the Constitution of India, in particular by Article 45 under the Directive Principles of State Policy, which aimed to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to 14 years old within a period of ten years (1950–1960). In 1966, several years after the ambitious deadline set by the Article 45 had lapsed, the Kothari Commission brought out another report on the development of education in India. The report showed how little had come of the high hopes in the post-war years. The commission again demanded that ‘strenuous efforts should be made for the early fulfilment of the Directive Principle under Article 45 of the Constitution seeking to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to the age of 14’ (National Council of Educational Research and Training, 1970: xii). The Kothari Commission’s report did emphasise the need to expand the enrolment drive and the provision of easy access to schools, especially to girls and children from disadvantaged communities. However, this advice never gained the urgency that should have been accorded to it. During the latter half of the previous century, a sizeable number of disadvantaged children

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar  153 continued to be forgotten by the school system and became part of the great number of early dropouts (Naik, 1997). The prevalence of short-term policy approaches persisted, and many impediments remained unresolved. As Adiseshiah observed, then as now, the Indian education system had to contend with many problems. To begin with, its elitist nature, which resulted in 80 per cent of high school and college graduates having a high or upper middle-class background, hailing from social groups that comprised the top 20 per cent of society. The system was also marred by large pushout and dropout rates: 60 per cent of pupils who entered Class 1 were pushed out or themselves dropped out before Class 5, by which time they had only acquired minimum literacy skills, if that. Of these students, 60 per cent derived from the poor sections of society. In addition, rural schools, which made up 80 per cent of our schools, were often housed in small, dark rooms. Sometimes five standards were taught simultaneously in one such room. The successive education policies also continued to fail the 70 per cent of Indian adults who remained illiterate. And very few people took note of the special claims and needs of firstgeneration learners either. Also, schools continued to offer minimal learning and deployed a substandard evaluation system. In many schools, passing examinations was often prioritised above learning, and above the acquisition of skills as well (Adiseshiah, 1977: 2021–22). In fact, it is only since the Indian government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) of 2001 and Right to Education Act policies of 2009 that the enrolment of children from marginalised groups in Bihar’s schools has made any real headway. An important factor behind the increase in this group of primary school students is the huge enrolment of first-generation learners from marginalised communities. This development shows that parents from these communities have become more and more aware of the importance of an education for their children and also appear to be in a better position to actually provide their children with an education. This positive development in quantitative terms has not, however, led to a similarly positive development with regard to the quality of education and equitable outreach. On the contrary, in Bihar, there continues to exist a yawning gap between the ambitions of parents and students, on the one hand, and the vision of policymakers on the other. The increased enrolment of children from marginalised communities has only served to highlight the glaring differences between the learning achievements of children from different social backgrounds. The primary education assessments of the last ten years continue to reveal appalling poor reading levels and mathematical skills in Bihar, especially among first-generation learners (Tiwary and Kumar, 2017: 106–20). In most cases, it is their status of first-generation learner that continues to hamper the learning achievements of students from marginalised communities. Government schools often prove to be sites of deeper levels of political and financial contestations, which continue to work against first-generation learners. In addition to their parents being uneducated and not being able to

154  Manoj Kumar Tiwary help them with their school work, first-generation learners also have to face language problems, caste-based discrimination, lack of role models, economic hardship in the family, lack of educational capital, and inadequate remedial support to help them bridge the gap between them and more privileged students with better educated parents and from financially more secure backgrounds. The Bihar government’s ad hoc and tentative efforts have not been sufficient to help the vast number of the first-generation learners, who have recently begun to join the education system, to achieve learning success (ibid.: 131–32). These contemporary circumstances will continue to hold back first-generation learners who critically, if not exclusively, rely on their schools’ abilities to transact the curriculum and to help them learn, since their parents are often illiterate and not in a position to offer them any help in achieving their educational aspirations.

By Way of Conclusion The contemporary social divides and traditional caste divides can be seen as one of the primary causes of educational exclusion in Bihar. This exclusion continues to influence the present learning outcomes in the state. The historical roots of these outcomes can be traced to the nineteenth century and probably earlier. To understand all the historical factors that influenced the lack of educational development in the state, further research is of course required. It is as yet unclear, for example, precisely to what extent Adam’s figures translate to caste-based educational politics in colonial and contemporary Bihar. The study also needs further data on the efforts undertaken by the excluded majority to provide learning to their children against all odds, since these kinds of data are almost absent from available historical and contemporary sources. Given the above sketch of the historical and present-day settings that shaped the educational system in Bihar, we can conclude, however, that it is no surprise that the agenda of optimum learning has taken a back seat in this state. And the consequences of this development are also evident: report after report reveals a highly unsatisfactory level of learning among school children, especially among first-generation learners. It is, therefore, essential that the state and all relevant stakeholders of education, including teachers, focus on the historical and contemporary educational disadvantages of these children and at long last begin to put in the maximum amount of effort to guarantee that they finally obtain a fair chance to participate fully in the present education system. The educational policies in colonial Bihar did nothing to alleviate the nineteenth-century caste-based system of education but, on the contrary, contributed to the present status quo by focusing on putting the educational structures in place for higher and middle caste groups and mostly ignoring the aspirations of marginalised communities. This, we may add, can also be said of the educational policies of independent India which,

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar  155 consciously or unconsciously, largely continued to overlook students from marginalised communities until the inception of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in 2001. Though the SSA has resulted in the enrolment of disadvantaged children in government schools, the highly unsatisfactory learning achievement by this group of children continues to be a matter of serious concern. Even if more well-trained teachers supported by an adequate school infrastructure would become available in the near future, this alone will not fix the present poor learning levels in Bihar as long as teachers, education administrators, and community members remain unaware of the historical and contemporary factors that have placed today’s first-generation learners in such a disadvantaged position.

Notes 1 A number of periodic reports and studies have been carried out in this direction. For details, please see Pratham (2017), NCERT (2018), OCED (2009), and Tiwary and Kumar (2017). 2 The term ‘first-generation learner’ here strictly denotes children who acquire learning in the formal school system. Our focused use of the term does not, by any means, exhaust its broader and inclusive application, which encompasses the traditional and indigenous mode of acquiring skills that has been ongoing for ages in any community. In addition, for the purpose of this study, the term ‘learning’ should be read as achieving a basic ability in reading, writing, and numeracy. 3 In the text of the report, one Hindi school was not counted. This might have been the result of an error. The number of schools in the tables differs: in the table that disaggregates thana-wise details of Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and English schools of the district of South Behar, the number of Hindi schools is 286 (Long, 1868: 158). However, in the detailed description of the status of Hindi schools the number was given as 285 (ibid.: 171). For this study, the latter figure has been used, since the elaborate description of these schools suggests that this is the right number and the number given in the table therefore appears to be a mistake. 4 There appears to be a typo regarding the number of students for caste Kairi. Respective documents edited by J. Long (1868) and Ananthnath Basu (1941) give the number of Kairi students as 90. But their number may be only 10, which is appropriate when the total number is taken into account, and the number of 10 is aptly situated in scheme of descending strength. 5 Though Adam has covered four districts of Bengal, he only surveyed two districts in their entirety, that is, Beerbhoom and Burdwan. The other two districts of Bengal, Rajshahi and Moorshidabad, were surveyed only partially. Likewise, Adam surveyed both districts of South Behar and Tirhut entirely. Therefore, for the sake of consistency, the data from those four districts of Bengal and Bihar that were surveyed completely have been coalesced for the purpose of this chapter. 6 This seems to accord well with later estimations. If we take Ganguli’s (1938: 114) rough estimate of 320 persons to the square mile in Tirhut around 1850, and an area of 6,343 square miles before 1874, this would tally up to a population of roughly 2,029,760 in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

156  Manoj Kumar Tiwary 7 North Bihar division included the districts of Saran, Champaran, Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga, Bhagalpur, and Purnea. 8 South Bihar division consisted of the districts of Patna, Gaya, Shahabad, and Monghyr. 9 Literacy rates for 1951, 1961, and 1971 included the population aged 5 years and above, whereas literacy rates for 1981, 1991, 2001, and 2011 counted the population aged 7 years and above.

References Adiseshiah, M. S. (1977, December 3). Opportunity to Face Basic Issues. Economic and Political Weekly, 12(49), 2021–2022. Archer, W. G. (1942). Census of India 1941, Volume VII: Bihar Tables. New Delhi: The Manager of Publications. Basu, A. (1941). Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (1835 & 1838) Including Some Account of the State of Education in Bihar and A Consideration of the Means Adapted to the Improvement and Extension of Public Instruction in Both Provinces by William Adam. Calcutta: University of Calcutta. Buchanan, F. (1928). An Account of the Districts of Purnea in 1809–1810. Patna: The Bihar and Orissa Research Society. Buchanan, F. (1934). An Account of the Districts of Shahabad in 1812–1813. Patna: The Bihar and Orissa Research Society. Buchanan, F. (1936). An Account of the Districts of Bihar and Patna in 1811–1812 (Vol. I). Patna: The Bihar and Orissa Research Society. Buchanan, F. (1939). An Account of the District of Bhagalpur in 1810–1811. Patna: The Bihar and Orissa Research Society. Cotton, J. S. (1898). Progress of Education in India 1892–93 to 1896–97. London: Darling & Son. Deshkal Society. (2014). Report on Social Diversity and Learning Achievement: The Status of Primary Education in Rural Bihar. New Delhi: Deshkal Society. Gait, E. A. (1902). Census of India 1901, Volume VI: The Lower Provinces of Bengal and Their Feudatories, Part I, The Report. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. Ganguli, B. (1938). Trends of Agriculture and Population in the Ganges Valley. A Study in Agricultural Economics. London: Methuen and Co. Government of Bihar. (n.d.). Census Statistics of Bihar. http://gov​.bih​.nic​.in​/Profile​/ CensusStats​-03​.htm (Accessed on 18 August 2017). Hutton, J. H. (1933). Census of India, 1931. New Delhi: Manager of Publication. India Census Commissioner. (1893). General Report on the Census of India, 1891. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Lawson, J. and Silver, H. (2007). A Social History of Education in England. Volume 481 of University Paperbacks. New York: Routledge. Long, J. (1868). Adam’s Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Behar: Submitted to the Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838. Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press. Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India. (2016). Literacy and Education. https://www​.mospi​.gov​.in​/documents​ /213904​/ 0​/ WM16Chapter3​ .pdf​ /0da530a6​ -6745​-fe8a​-cbb4​-380f6ee66f9b​? t​ =1651043096988 (Accessed on 23 May 2021).

Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar  157 Naik, J. P. (1997). The Education Commission and After. New Delhi: A. P. H. Publishing Corporation. National Council of Educational Research and Training. (1970). Education and National Development: Report of the Education Commission, 1964–66 (Vol 2: School Education). New Delhi: NCERT. National Council of Educational Research and Planning. (2018). National Achievement Survey: 2017 District Report Cards. New Delhi: NCERT. National University of Educational Planning and Administration. (2016). Elementary Education in India: Where Do We Stand? State Report Cards 2015–16. New Delhi: NUEPA. Pratham. (2017). Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2016. New Delhi: ASER Centre. Risley, H. H. and Gait, E. A. (1903). Census of India 1901, Volume 1: India, Part I, Report. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing. Saberwal, S. (1995). Wages of Segmentation: Comparative Historical Studies on Europe and India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Sanderson, M. (1991). Education, Economic Change and Society in England 1780– 1870. London: Macmillan. Stephens, W. B. (1989). Education, Literacy and Society, 1830–70: The Geography of Diversity in Provincial England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tiwary, M. K. and Kumar, S. (2017). Social Diversity and Learning Achievement: Contextualising Policies and Practices for Primary Schools in Rural Bihar. In M. K. Tiwary, S. Kumar and A. K. Mishra (Eds.), Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. pp. 105–135. UNESCO. (1953). Progress of Literacy in Various Countries: A Preliminary Statistical Study of Available Census Data Since 1900. Paris: UNESCO.

Index

abuse: physical 58–9; verbal 58–9 academic achievement 38–9, 41 academic underachievers 1, 5 academic underperformance 36–40 achievement gaps xi, xiii action research xii Adivasi children 120–1, 123–5, 127 affirmative action 140n1 analogy 24, 136 Article 45 152 Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) x aspiration 86, 88–92 Balmiki community 85, 87–8, 93, 95 Baptist Missionary Society 143 basti 84, 86 Bhagalpur 143, 156n7 Bihar 11–12, 142–56 bilingualism 133, 141n3 Brahmanical worldview 106 castes: Brahmin 109, 113, 144–5, 150; Dhanuk 145; Dosad 144; Gandhabanik 144–5; Kairi 144–5, 155n4; Kayastha 58, 144–5; Kshatriya 145; Luniar 145; Magadha 144–5; Mahla 145; Musahar 144; Pashi 144–5; Rajput 145; Sonar 144; Teli 144 child-centred education 2 child-friendly education 2 class habitus 67 classroom ethnography xii classroom learning 14–31 cognition 16–18, 21, 23–4, 26 cognitive education 26–7, 29–31 cognitivism 14, 16, 19 collective agency 45 collective identity 37, 44–6

comprehension 11, 18, 28–9, 130–41 constitutional values 111 constructivism 127–8 continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE) 2, 98n15 controlled environment 74, 76–7 critical pedagogy 45–6 cultural capital 64, 77 cultural practices 64, 66–8 democracy 54, 111 Department for international development (DFID) x Deshkal Society xii, xiii differentiated schooling market 86 diglossia 11, 132–4, 141n3 disadvantaged groups 36, 38, 40–41, 43, 45–6 discrimination 38–41, 44–5 dominant culture 108 economic mobility 86 educational administrators 2 educational psychology 14–17 educational theories 1, 16 educational trajectories 84, 95 enabling environment 64–80 England 148–9 English-medium private school 86, 95–6 English-medium school 131, 133, 137, 140n1 EWS children 11, 131–7, 140, 141n4 exclusion 84, 87 family-school relationship 53–62 family socialisation 53 first-generation learners 4, 12, 89, 94, 142, 147, 151–5 first-generation school-goers 124

160 Index formal thinking 17–19 frames 45–6, 104, 130–1, 134–9 gated enclave 65–6, 68–70, 73 Gaya 143–4, 156n8 gender and class roles 60 globalism 54 Government of Bihar 148 Grihastini (housewife) discourse 55 higher mental processes 22 home language xi home-school relationship 62 inclusive classroom xii inclusive education xii, xiii inconvenient truth 106 Indian classrooms xi, xii innovative practices xi inter-generational transmission of class-advantage 64 international school 75–6 introspection 125, 134–5 isomorphism 130, 136 Korean and Japanese children 11, 36, 131–3, 136 Kothari commission 104, 152 language alienation 120 language and learning foundation (LLF) vii, x language codes: elaborated 11, 137; restricted 11, 137 languages: Arabic 144–5, 150–1; Bengali 131, 143, 145; English 11, 58–9, 104, 131–4, 137–8, 140n1; Hindi 11, 58–9; Persian 144–6, 150–1, 155n3; Sanskrit 136, 143–6, 150–1 learning achievement. xi, xii learning advantage xi learning factors: cultural 21, 46, 64, 120, 124, 127–8; historical 2–3, 62, 142; pedagogic 4, 7, 12, 16, 124; psychological 6–7, 14, 23, 25, 27–8; socio-political 2–3, 7, 10, 43–4, 108 learning need 128 learning outcomes 14–6, 21 learning potential 27, 31 linguistically marginalised children 108, 111 linguistic hierarchy 111–13

linguistic victimhood 112 linguistic violence 106 literacy 6, 12, 26, 28–9, 54, 60, 86–7, 109, 125, 127–8, 133, 147–9, 152 literate atmosphere 125 living culture 108 low-status groups 7, 36, 38, 44 marginalised children xi marginality xi, xiii Marriage act of 1753 148 middle class 64–81 middle-class knowledge 11, 131–2, 135–6 middle classness 65, 67 Ministry of Law and Justice 2 Ministry of statistics and programme implementation 148 modernity 8, 59–61 mother-tongue education 126 multilingual classrooms xi National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) 103, 152 national ideology 102 National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) 3 National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) 142 normative child 105 occupational shift 86 official knowledge 102 Orissa 148 panoptic learning assessment 3 parents 2, 8–9, 12, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28–9, 54, 60–2, 66, 70, 72, 74–8, 84–96, 98n15, 102, 110, 114–15, 122–7, 131–2, 136–7, 139, 142, 153–4 Patna 143, 156n8 pedagogic decision 124–5 pedagogy 103, 108 peer influence 88–93, 96–7 Penny Post 149 performativity 65, 67 politicised collective identity 45–6 poor learners 1, 5 poor learning xi, xiii, 14–15, 18–19, 21, 26–7, 29–30

Index  161 Post-War Educational Development in India 152 Problems with English 130 progressive reading 116 prolepsis 20–21 protest 44 psychological tools 14–31 psychological tools approach to education 14–31 Public Libraries Act of 1850 149 Purnea 143 Pygmalion effect 39 Qur’an 57 Ramcaritmanas 57 regimented transaction of textbooks 116 regressive reading 116 religious: communities 5, 7–9, 104–5; minorities 104 resistance 37, 43–4, 46 Right to Education (RTE) 2, 143, 153 role model 88–92, 97 rural 38 samaj 84–97 sangat 84–97 Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) 143, 153, 155 scholastic performance 68, 70, 79 school curriculum 27, 132 school dropouts 1, 5, 95 schooled mind 101 school effectiveness xii secularism 54 self-fulfilling prophecy 39 shadow education 65

social context 14–15, 18–31, xi social diversity xi, xii social identity 36–46 social identity theory 37 social psychology of protest 44 South Behar 144–7, 150, 155n5 spatial and social segregation 84 standard language 105, 111–13 stereotypes 37–46 stereotype threat 40–6 stigmatisation 87, 96 stigmatised caste identity 87 stigmatised group 84 teacher education xi, 12, 115, 126 teachers 2–7, 9–12, 14, 20, 22, 24, 30–1, 38–9, 56, 61–2, 76, 87, 89, 94–5, 97, 98n15, 101–17, 120–8, 131, 133, 135–7, 139–40, 143–5, 146, 152, 154–5 teachers’ perception 120–8 teaching-learning aid 103 textbook 101–16 textual narrative 106, 115 Tirhut 144–7, 150–1, 155n6 transformative intellectuals 116 tribal/scheduled tribes 39 unclean occupation 88, 95 UNESCO 152 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) x upper-caste samskaras 106 valid knowledge 101, 114 Varanasi 53 Vasant Valley School 11, 131, 137, 141n4