Children’s Participation in Their Right to Education: Learning from the Delhi High Court Cases, 1998–2001

Abstract

With several states in the majority world having passed legislation around free and compulsory education and millions of marginal children now enrolled in schools, the question of how we frame children’s participation in their right to education assumes considerable significance. By drawing together discussions around children’s representations, participation and educational equity, this chapter critically opens up the particular dynamic that has helped produce educational equity as a continually deferrable goal. It argues that the dominant representation of first-generation learners as economically marginal children is variously, and continually, leveraged to justify their presence within unequal and deeply segregated school spaces. To help problematize this narrative of assumed victimhood, the chapter discusses a set of court cases adjudicated in the Delhi High Court between 1997 and 2001. These cases not only highlight the state’s role in perpetuating existing inequalities but also draw attention to how these dominant representations had a deleterious effect on marginal children’s school experiences. By countering a simplistic narrative around school attendance as an adequate measure of children’s learning and participation in education, these Delhi High Court cases foreground marginal children’s primary identity as learners. They thus help expose how the current fuzziness around children’s participation in schooling has helped produce schooling as a critical compensatory technology that is no longer about guaranteeing educational equity.