Education and Inequality in India: A classroom view by Manabi Majumdar & Jos Mooij

Author:Manabi Majumdar & Jos Mooij
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

The classroom as relational space

Schools in India are hierarchical places. It is partly through the experiences within the school that children learn their place in the social hierarchy at large. While we have not noticed any overt discrimination by teachers against any particular caste or religious group of students, it is clear that hierarchy and inequality are reproduced.2 Based on constructed notions of good or bad, teachers ask some students to ‘go and sit at the back’. These so-called ‘slow learners’ – usually slightly older students – often remain neglected and marginalised in the classroom. Typically the teacher keeps interacting with a group of his or her ‘favourite’ students, of whom (s)he expects a reasonable performance. In contrast, not much is expected from the ‘slow learners’. These children also know this; and the teacher’s lack of confidence in them erodes their own confidence. They are physically present in the classroom, but are excluded from the classroom processes. Apart from this, children in government schools also know that they do not belong to the group of children that leaves the village every morning, dressed in uniform to go to a private school elsewhere. They are also acutely aware of the discrepancies between what they consider as an ‘ideal school’ and the school they are enrolled in.

Gender is another division in the schools. Children in the child consultations in Kurnool mentioned to us that already by grade 1 boys and girls occupy different places in the classroom. When we probed, they said that this was not imposed by the teachers (but not challenged either, and thereby institutionalised). In one consultation, after some more probing and giggling, the children said that if they would sit next to someone from the other sex, their two names would appear on the walls (school, toilet, blackboard) in the form of graffiti. On the whole, our sample schools had slightly higher enrolment figures of boys than of girls. Boys also go more to private schools; girls are over-represented in minority language schools (such as Urdu- and Kannada-language schools in Andhra Pradesh). Within the classroom more girls than boys are distracted by younger siblings that they have to look after simultaneously. Boys and girls get different extra-curricular work from the teachers, reinforcing a gender division of labour. Both have front rows with children eager to learn and receiving attention from the teacher and rows in the back of the classroom with children who are participating much less.

Another dimension of the hierarchy has to do with the relationship with the teacher. Despite DPEP and SSA rhetoric to the contrary, fear is instilled in children’s minds. They are hardly encouraged to question or challenge the teacher. In almost all schools, children are to respect authority, as ‘the teacher is never wrong’.

Some teachers, however, let themselves be challenged. In an NGO-run school in Kolkata, we met a firebrand young teacher who refused to accept that ‘his task is to supply English-speaking young hands to shops like Pizza Hut’; rather he saw it as being one to transform the existing social order.

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