New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2014. x, 368 pp. US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-81-321-1385-0.
Interest in India’s system of education has greatly increased across the world over the last two decades. The opening up of the Indian economy—i.e., its “liberalization”—marks a change in earlier policies, both economic and educational. No new framework of state policy in education has yet evolved, and the recent political developments do not offer much hope that a new policy will be formulated with consensus. In the meantime, the National Policy on Education formulated in 1986 continues to be used as a point of reference by scholars who want to make sense of the bewildering diversity of schools and the systems that govern them. Those interested mainly in studying India’s economic liberalization often raise older, more familiar questions, such as: Is literacy going to remain a public agenda? Can universal schooling coexist with child labour? Such questions have returned because economic development and social change since independence from British colonial rule have not changed the larger picture of India as a country of sharp inequalities and hierarchies. Scholarship in different social sciences has enhanced common awareness of the complexities of this picture, by demonstrating how gender disparity is deeply implicated in older understandings of caste as a key axis of hierarchy and basis of class inequality. The role of religion too is now somewhat more candidly accepted when problems and policies of social justice are discussed. Compared to three decades ago, there is greater global interest now in studying India’s attempt to modernize itself which in turn creates a demand for deeper perspectives and descriptions of the different institutions shaping the socio-economic and political ethos.
For this purpose, the school is a prime institutional site. Meenakshi Thapan’s anthology of six long essays responds to this demand by offering ethnographic accounts of different types of urban schools. Citizenship is a common focus of these essays. The values that constitute citizenship supposedly form the basis of the socialization that takes place at school. The interplay between these values and the wider culture that shapes children’s life at home naturally interests social anthropologists. The scholars whose writings are presented in this volume are especially interested in gender-related values and practices. These scholars follow the ideas and methodological practices now widely appreciated in educational theory, specifically on the matter of observing children in the school setting. The editor and other authors of this volume regard children as participants in the creation of the school ethos. Imparting agency to children is an important decision, given the climate of both society and policy in India wherein children are perceived as objects or targets.
The other emphasis in these studies is on looking at schooling as experience. This is also an important decision, but the writers of this volume could have gone further than they have in defining the term “experience.” This is important because social categories like caste, class, and gender play a major role in shaping a child’s classroom experience. Experience also has to do with learning, both in terms of “what is learned” and “who succeeds in learning.” But schools are not merely venues for teaching; they are also dispensers of opportunity—to proceed beyond the school towards higher institutional and occupational destinations. How this role of the school is shaped by history—of society, community, politics, and policies—does figure in this book but not as much as one might expect. It figures most richly in the essay about a school for Muslim girls in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The three writers of this essay, Tanya Matthan, Anusha Chandana, and Meenakshi Thapan, construct a much larger explanatory framework than the other essays for analyzing the meaning that schooling acquires for the young. This essay fulfills the high expectations that the volume, as a whole, arouses. Here we learn how complex an institution a school is, straddling its traditional role as a social institution, on the one hand, and its modern incarnation as a state institution, or one that the state must “recognize” through codes of legitimacy, on the other.
The title and all the essays in this volume demonstrate the potential of ethnography for delving into the world that schools contain within them. There is plenty of ethnographic literature on education that establishes its scope and potential for application in educational studies. As all six essays included in this volume show, the ethnographer’s contribution to the study of education lies in drawing attention to the culture that life at any school embodies. Schools, however, are not self-contained sites. Life in a school is shaped as much by systemic forces, located in history and the political economy, as by interactivity within its four walls. Some of the authors acknowledge this wider affiliation but do not engage with it. The paper cited earlier stands out because it situates experience in a palpable systemic reality. It also shows why it may be useful to redefine and refurbish anthropological approaches to educational research by making provision for the historical dimension in human affairs.
Citizenship education is a major focus of this volume. Under this focus, the authors note the plurality of practices used in schools to nurture a civic identity and some of the contradictions in these practices. Surprisingly, a major policy shift is ignored. This shift involved the replacement of the old subject, called “Civics,” by “Social and Political Life” in the junior secondary classes. The epistemology of this new curricular area would have provided interesting material for inquiry into teachers’ efforts to negotiate critical pedagogy which was alien to the old subject of civics, but is central to the idea of a politically active citizen that informs recent curricular initiatives. How this new idea copes with wider political changes in the near future will be a matter of interest to those following India’s economic and political fortunes.
Krishna Kumar
University of Delhi, Delhi, India
pp. 694-696