Introduction: Modernity, Schooling and Childhood in India: Trajectories of Exclusion

Balagopalan, Sarada

doi:10.1080/14733285.2022.2073196

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 64 publications

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“…Qvortrup, 2001). Its effect is evident in not only how schooling reifies educational discrimination and trajectories of exclusion linked to ability, caste, indigeneity, gender, class, geography and religion (Balagopalan, 2022) but also generates aspirations and desirable futures that are difficult to attain (Mains, 2011; Ansell et al, 2020). Schooling futures are contingent on the expectation that young people continually retrain themselves to remain “in the game” in an otherwise competitive and precarious labor market, in part created by the excessive reliance on credentials of formal educational institutions – what Donald Dore (1976) long ago referred to as the “diploma disease”.…”

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confidence: 99%

Refusals for liberating childhood from the trap of schooling?

Abebe

2023

Childhood

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confidence: 99%

Refusals for liberating childhood from the trap of schooling?

Abebe

2023

Childhood

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

Balagopalan

2023

Studies in Childhood and Youth

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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.

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