Sarada Balagopalan

Rationalizing seclusion: A preliminary analysis of a residential schooling scheme for poor girls in India

The increased focus on issues of gender and schooling in India over the last decade has produced several gains that include more incentive schemes to make girls attend school, greater employment of women teachers and improved efforts to incorporate female protagonists in textbooks. However, a closer reading of this ‘gender’ focus reveals an inordinate concern with numbers, i.e. enrolment. The instrumentalism that underlies these efforts is revealed through a double-move effected by existing discourses. The first is to locate the reasons why girls are out of school strictly within a reading of cultural and familial practices and (secondly) to therefore fail to recognize normative practices of schooling and State policies as already deeply ‘gendered’. This double-move is epitomized in the Indian State’s more recent efforts to set up residential elementary schools for girls (Kasturba Gandhi Vidyalayas) in each district of the country; an effort that has been publicly lauded as the most effective way to overcome cultural barriers to girls’ schooling. Through a focus on policy documents that discuss this scheme, the article will interrogate the existing conflation of ‘gender’ with a biological/culturalist reading of the ‘girl child’. In what ways does this narrow focus naturalize a binary frame of reference around the traditional family/community and the empowered girl child? Why have State efforts around educating the ‘girl child’ not been subject to greater critical analysis amongst feminist scholars in India?

Does ‘Gender’ Exhaust a Feminist Engagement with Elementary Education?

A recent article I wrote (2010) asked the question ‘Why have state efforts around educating the “girl child” not been subject to greater critical analysis by feminist scholars in India?’ This question had emerged from a specific example that I was using to provocatively interrogate the broader terrain of elementary education around issues concerning the schooling of girls. Over the past two decades, the increased focus on issues of ‘gender and schooling’ in India has produced several undeniable gains. A few of these include more incentive schemes to encourage girls to attend school, greater employment of women teachers and improved efforts to incorporate female protagonists in textbooks. However, a closer reading of this ‘gender’ focus reveals an inordinate concern with numbers, that is, enrolment. When probed a little further, this focus on enrolment usually discloses a double move affected by the existing discourse. The first is to locate the reasons why girls are out of school strictly within a reading of cultural and familial practices, and the second is to therefore fail to recognise normative practices of schooling and state policies as already deeply ‘gendered’. The article—which focused on the Indian state’s recent efforts to set up residential elementary schools for girls, the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs), in each district of the country—was provoked by both the state’s lauding of this initiative as the most effective way of overcoming cultural barriers to girls’ schooling, as well as the startling absence of any critical feminist engagement with what was being actualised through this intervention. Had the state’s

Understanding Educational Innovation in India: The Case of Eklavya Interviews with Staff and Teachers

I n the middle of 2002, the countrys longest-running schoollevel educational innovation, the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP), was abruptly terminated by the Madhya Pradesh government. From its initial base of 16 schools in 1972, HSTP had expanded to cover 1,000 schools and over 2,000 teachers in 15 districts of the state. It served not only as a catalystfor Eklavya s other curricular initiatives in middle-school social science (the Social Science Teaching Programme ISSTP)) and primary education (Prathmik Shiksha Karyakram, Prashika), but was also instrumental in sparking off several innovative efforts in various other states. The unanimous opinion of scientists and science educators is that HSTP embodied all that good science teaching should entail, namely, an enquiry-based discovery approach in which children conduct experiments and arrive at their own hypotheses, which they then further verify. The governments unilateral decision resulted in the simultaneous closure ofSSTP as well. This programme has been lauded as a landmark effort to make social studies more interesting through its focus on causality rather than facts, as well as for its sensitivity in making abstract concepts intelligible by linking them to the childs local realities. Prashika developed an integrated curriculum with an emphasis on critical thinking, problem solving and creativity, and was one of the first programmes to be invited by the state government to contribute to its curricular reform efforts in 1995. However after just one phase the reform effort, the government opted for uniformity in its curricula and, in 2002, closed down Prashika as well as its own trial programme.

On Freire’s Critical Optimism

The magic of Paulo Freire is that he gives the impression that his ideas are easy to put into practice, and even at times aids this simplistic understanding of his work by providing a road map. However, what he is actually demanding is a radical rethinking of the ways in which we understand not only ‘learning’ and ‘knowledge’ but, more fundamentally, what it means to be human. His ideas, though widely employed to provide a dialectical reading of concepts like oppression, liberation and problem posing versus banking education, might more poignantly be acknowledged as attempting to put forward an understanding of what it means to be human in the world. To be human, for Freire, is to engage in relationships with others and with the world. Embedded in this otherwise disarming sentence is a critique of dehumanisation, a reassessment of common sense understandings of humanism and an analysis of the hierarchy and power structures that prevent us from being human, including our education system. His reformulation of the ‘human’ is less a sentimental and more a radical move, an inherently political rather than a poetic act. Though, if one reads Freire closely, the poetry is very much part of the politics (Freire, 1996). I refer less to poetry as a ruse through which language forever signals the ceaseless possibilities of engaging the word, but more of poetry as a state of being that is not mechanistic, that reveals to us our potential for the lyrical and often surprises by its unusual evocation of hope. This is Freire’s essential form, a revolutionary hope, a ‘critical optimism’ that is neither mechanistic in its imagination of the world nor naïve in its expectation of what the future can hold. Classics with Commentary

‘Afterschool and during vacations’: on labor and schooling in the postcolony

ABSTRACT The Indian states recent deregulation of child labor, several years after it passed a law making schooling free and compulsory, forces us to attend to the distinct dynamic between child labor and schooling that frame contemporary efforts around compulsory education. This paper opens-up this terrain through historicizing the child-figure – who combines school with wage labor – within the workings of colonial and postcolonial capitalism. It discusses how the strong and continuing traces of a longer history of exclusions is manifest in the widespread global construction of ‘school’ as inherently ‘fungible’ or the fragility of the school form, as central to this moment of compulsory schooling. Through a focus on this subaltern child-figure, this paper contends that both the ‘fungibility’ of schools for marginal children as well as the privatization of child labor foregrounds the antipolitics that undergirds the current fraught working out of compulsory education in the postcolony.

‘Global/local’ research on children and childhood in a ‘global society’

KARL HANSON: To start our conversation, I wonder if you would think of your own research as ‘global’ or as ‘local’ research? Also, how do you understand the terms ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘globalized’ childhood? Do you personally find these terms useful/ productive? STUART AITKEN: For some time now, I’ve been persuaded by the notion of flat ontologies. Sally Marston and her colleagues David Woodward and J.P. Jones published the now famous piece in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (Marston et al., 2005) that looked at the production of scale for what it was: precisely that, a production. They argued for an intense focus on flat networks and relationalities rather than hierarchical scales, and that is how I like to proceed with my own work with children and young people. I’ve published books on children and globalization, youth activists jumping scale (to use the term of the late, great Neil Smith, 1992) to affect national and international politics, the impact of neoliberal forms of governance on young people and so forth, and it always seems to come down to (if you will pardon the pun) engagement and aesthetics (the latter formed by the ideas of Jacques Rancière). My empirical work these days looks at young people as part of communities of care rather than scaled communities. Now, it is possible for some people (politicians, CEOs) to create scales and hierarchies to shut young people down so I do not want to diminish the politics behind the production of scale, but for me, at least at the moment, I am very much concerned with reproduction in the sense that Elizabeth Grosz and others use that term. I want to use the term reproduction here in perhaps a more expansive way than it is used by contemporary feminists like Grosz, Cindi Katz, Katharyne Mitchell and others, as the potential for young people to reproduce and remake themselves differently. The importance of the right to create and recreate themselves and their spaces is in the best interests of young people (and adults) and, as a consequence, the focus on spatial rights is not only about occupying spaces that are suitable for access to housing, livelihoods and education but also the right to stay put as well as right of movement and 779480 CHD0010.1177/0907568218779480ChildhoodHanson et al. research-article2018

Childhood in a Sri Lankan village: shaping hierarchy and desire

the academics in the Key Thinkers book are, with the exception of Roger Hart, Geographers. Similarly, none of the Handbook of Child Research chapters are written by Geographers. Although the ‘First Steps’ article (Aitken et al. 2003) showed how Geographers and Geographical thinking has helped to inspire and develop Children’s Geographies as a discipline, this rich heritage has not been drawn upon. Ironically, the lack of Geographers in this particular collection may reflect that Children’s Geographies has perhaps developed as a more collegiate endeavour than other disciplines’ engagement with Childhood Studies. Furthermore, both volumes focus mostly upon academics from the Global North – the books draw upon writers from the USA and Europe, with an occasional contribution from experts in the Middle East or South America. Similarly, both books largely explore Global North childhoods, with only patchy discussion around the diversity of Global Childhoods or international development. Interestingly, the Key Thinkers book refers to the decision to focus on the Global North as ‘largely a matter of space’ (11) in a narrowly technical sense – which, of course, for Children’s Geographers would be the starting point for a more critical and spatial analysis. Despite this, both collections are timely and relevant and would be interesting reads for Geographical researchers. Whilst the Handbook provides very useful summaries of key aspects of childhood and would be a useful reference resource for University libraries (a niche confirmed by the cover price), the Key Thinkers book is a fascinating, thought-provoking and considered resource which offers a unique contribution to the field of Children’s Geographies and beyond.

Sedimenting Labour through Schooling: Colonial State, Native Elite and Working Children in Early Twentieth-Century India

The contemporary deployment of formal schooling as the ‘natural’ antidote to ‘child labour’ evades the complex history of the relationship between the two. This historical terrain is marked by a vast unevenness of the modes in which an apparatus of formal schooling materialized in the lives of working children. The discursive and practical field of early twentieth-century schooling, wherein various pedagogic experiments with working children emerged, was situated on an imperial terrain where distinctions were already being shaped and justified through the colonial ‘civilizing mission’ (Fisher-Tine and Mann, 2004; Watt, 2005). The economic expediency that often underlined these ‘civilizational’ imperatives has been laid bare through archival research on how natives came to be produced as plantation, factory and other types of labour (Ghosh, 1999). But, the ways in which their children were reproduced as labour, using a parallel discourse on the kind of schooling ideally suited for working children and children of labouring populations, have been less researched.

Re-forming Lives: The Child on the Street and the ‘Street Child’

In the early nineties, Calcutta, a city that has long been identified with the charity of Mother Teresa, began to experience a radically different kind of philanthropic affect. Elaborating itself through newer NGOs and charity organizations, this new secular humanitarianism gathered around a figure who was previously noticed, but not spectralized or ‘recognized’, as a singular target of reform. This was the figure of the ‘street child’. In post-partition Calcutta, as the city dealt with unprecedented population shock waves of refugees and rural migrants,1 poor children on the street became a common sight. But they only helped produce the general picture of desperate poverty, a displaced postcolonial humanity struggling for survival in the modernist city. They were not unique or visible as a singular and special category of a problem that needed fixing. As an indistinct part of the mass of the poor, they gradually served as metonyms for the city’s decline and its inability to keep pace with the increased aestheticization and modernization in other Indian metropolises, thus effectively reinforcing Calcutta’s commonplace conflation with charity and decay (Hutnyk, 1996). However, within this generic conflation, in the nineties newer shifts in technologies of acting upon the poor had started emerging. These shifts, which had strong linkages with a transnational, ‘development’ form of governmentality, incipiently emerged against a waning backdrop of Marxist dreams of a revolutionary society and came to redefine the city’s relationship with its children on the street.

The Politics of Failure: Children’s Rights and the ‘Call of the Other’

In the early nineties voluntary organizations in Calcutta began to work closely with the police in relation to street children. Police brutality, in the lives of such children, has of course long been recognized as a key problem. Through regular training sessions, the organizations therefore tried to sensitize the police to existing laws and protocols in dealing with children, including informing them about the UNCRC and the need to involve the voluntary sector in police decision-making and rehabilitation efforts. With street children, the work involved having them recognize police violence as a blatant violation of their ‘rights’ and providing information on the steps they should take to formally register an incident.