An article which truly is an eye-opener Unfortunately, We have a dearth of Such seminal ethnographic account in the disability studies.
http://www.epw.in/insight/indelible-class-identity.html How regular schooling unfolds for children should be an important concern in the light of the Right to Education Act, 2009 that makes schooling not just free, but also compulsory. While getting children to school is a central pillar of the state's mandate of promoting social justice and enabling improved opportunities and life-chances for all, the empirical data presented in this article shows how children, identified by their social milieu and even humiliated on that count, can be constrained within the processes and the ethos of learning. Jyoti Dalal ([email protected]) teaches at the Institute of Home Economics, University of Delhi. The central premise of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 rightfully asserts that the school should give primary importance to the individual or learner identity of children. However, as this article demonstrates, in the everyday life of a school it is the class identity of the children that determines how schooling shapes up for them.1 After providing the larger backdrop of the study, the article reflects on the everyday interactions that I observed in the school concerned. I found these interactions demeaning in nature as teachers, non-governmental organisation (NGO) volunteers and the headmaster openly identify and stereotype children on the basis of their home lives and the larger milieu in which they live. Methodology and Setting This article emerges from an ethnographic study of a state-run primary school, situated in a lower-class socio-economic neighbourhood named Mandolla,2 in Delhi. In the course of the research, I used a number of methods but the main staple of my findings emerged from the ethnographic techniques of observation and interviews. The examined school has one headmaster, seven women teachers, three male teachers and six volunteers from two recognised NGOs. I call them official adults as they are responsible for the pedagogic, disciplinary and bureaucratic functions of the school. They have official permission to be present in the school and can be distinguished from the informal adults who at times are seen in the schooling space without any formal permission or official purpose. These informal adults are parents, the students' relatives, other adults from the neighbourhood and the vendors at the school gate. The official adults belong to a higher socio-economic strata as compared to the students of the school. They come from nearby colonies that are considered to be better off than Mandolla where a majority of the schoolchildren stay. As per the school records, the students' families earn between Rs 3,000 and Rs 5,000. A majority of them are engaged in unorganised labour in the nearby mandi (market) and employed in semi-skilled and unskilled occupations like selling fruits and vegetables, loading and unloading of goods, pulling rickshaws, driving trucks, or vending goods. Children help their families with the work or in the running of the household. This article demonstrates how the perception and interaction of the official adults in the school regarding the children is primarily based on the class difference that prevails between them. Identifying by Class Bourdieu's (1984, 1996) economic, cultural and social capital incorporates both the material and the non-material aspects of class. The economic capital which is about material wealth can be converted into the cultural and social a-spects of capital. The cultural capital alludes to linguistic skills, education, possession of artefacts such as books; the social capital refers to the social relationships and networks. The present section demonstrates how the class divide between the official adults and the children's families -- translated in economic, social and cultural capital -- determines how the official adults look at children and their background. In the school, instead of addressing them by their names they are often identified by a range of personal and social categories that evoke their class identity. The children are addressed by the occupations in which they or their families are involved. For instance, Rahul is called kelewala (banana seller), Abhishek is andewala (egg seller) while Deepmala is referred to by her lahsan (garlic)-related work. With such individual markers, all the class children are also identified by their proximity to, and their parents' o-ccupational association with the space of the mandi, as they are collectively called mandiwalon (those who belong to the mandi). Children are also labelled according to the spaces they inhabit, as the ones who stay in jhuggis ((hutments) are often called jhuggiwalon while all the children are collectively addressed as Mandollawalon. Such collective markers demonstrate that the places outside the school get personified in the bodies of the children in the school and they are treated as if they collectively represent this "stigmatised" identity. The children are also ridiculed as their names are accompanied by their father's first name, which departs from the usual north Indian urban practice of attaching the surname. The fathers' names are evoked, in a comical way in the class while speaking with the children. For instance, Abhishek is called Pappu Yadav, while Raman is referred to as Raman Chaman, or just Chaman, which is his father's name. The children also ridicule each other by calling out the father's name. For instance, Raman is not only called Chaman but is also ridiculed as Chumman ke. The children are also negatively labelled and ridiculed as being mota, kala, kaali, lambu (fat, dark, tall). Some children in class are referred to as ganda (dirty), bhadda (ugly), which again shows how a physical body is not neutral but is always signified through social categories. There are times when such bodily markers and identity are used for the entire class, which also becomes a way of denigrating the spaces from where the children come as parallels are made between the dirty bodies and filthy spaces. The socially marked bodies signify the weight of the social world that the children carry with them into the school, as perceived by the official adults. Hence, the collective and individual identity markers invoked in the school represent the neighbourhood, occupational, personal and familial aspects of the children's lives. The process of identification is such that the children are negatively stereotyped in everyday interactions. The children's milieu is usually referred to in a disapproving fashion, as teachers often make snide remarks about their background. The episode r-elated below demonstrates how the teacher passes gratuitously nasty remarks about the children's homes and their social milieu while teaching a lesson on environmental studies. This is also significant as she teaches from a book that is part of the innovative NCF 2005 that tries to bring the home lives of the children inside the formal space of a classroom. A Negative Space Nirmala taught the chapter Duniya Mere Ghar Main (The World in My Home) from the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) environmental studies' text Aas Paas (Nearby) for Class IV. The chapter, divided into different sections, encourages children to collectively examine their cultural practices on issues of gender, honesty, caste divide, sexual abuse and so on in a thoughtful manner through discussion. The first part titled Nok-Jhonk (Altercation) deals with a common scenario where a fight breaks out over the remote control of the television set. The teacher read out the entire chunk in a flat voice and then came to the questions. She read the first one: Are there fights in your home related to a particular thing? The children gave mixed responses yelling yes or no. Nirmala ignored all the responses and announced "There are fights in your houses on each and every thing. Besides fights what else happens in your homes?" She came to the second question "Who resolves those fights at your home?" The children excitedly mentioned various members of their families with most of them naming their fathers. She then told them to keep quiet and asked "Can anyone ever resolve the fights in your home?" and immediately added "Narrate an interesting anecdote about a fight that happened in your home." However, without waiting for a response she said, "Leave it. We don't want to know what you people fight about. Keep your stories to yourself." She then read the second part Alag Kyon? (Why Different?) which is about a girl who is required to return home by a certain time while her brothers have no such restrictions. The teacher read the entire section and asked the class if this occurred in their homes. Again, the children gave mixed responses. She ignored their responses and loudly asserted "At our home this does not happen. If a girl comes late, she is scolded but if a boy comes late or goes out without telling, he is also scolded. But this does not happen in your homes." When some of the children said that the same thing did happen in their homes the teacher yelled back "Why do you say so? I don't think the boys are scolded. That's why they are getting spoilt. If your parents scolded them, then wouldn't they have been on the right path?" She continued to read other questions remarking that the children and their families are gender insensitive. The third part Pilloo Mami (Pilloo Aunty) is about a woman who pays the correct amount of money for an ice cream even when the shopkeeper asks for a lesser amount. Nirmala asked the students "Do you do this?" and immediately answered herself, "No, you don't. In Mandolla there is no one who will do this." She then proceeded to ask the questions and give the answers herself about how such things would not happen in their homes and that the children would naturally think that Pilloo Mami should not have given the correct amount if the shopkeeper had asked for a lesser one. This episode demonstrates how negative remarks are openly made in the formal pedagogic space of the classroom. The children and their families are characterised as uncouth, belligerent and dishonest people who quarrel, lie and cheat. The children are also portrayed as coming from homes where boys are not subjected to any discipline and are incorrigible. The pedagogic style of the teacher goes completely against the intent with which the chapter was designed. Her indifferent and biased view towards the children and their world makes the chapter counterproductive as the content appears to provide ammunition for the teacher to pass hurtful remarks about the children's milieu. A similar discouraging tone and snide attitude can be seen when NGO volunteers teach from their prescribed texts. For instance, one of the NGO volunteer Nitu once told the children to draw things that are in their homes. The children got excited, naming out various objects noisily in the class. Upon this she yelled, "We don't want to know what things you have at your home. Write it quietly in your books. I should not hear any murmuring." And added in a sarcastic tone "We know how beautiful your houses are." Such remarks exhibit ridicule for the children's modest or impoverished homes. The official adults maintain a physical distance from the spaces and lives of the neighbourhood people. They avoid visiting the neighbourhood and interacting with the residents and mention how, when they are required to visit the neighbourhood for official purposes, such as census duty, they try to get the assigned area changed to avoid going into the neighbourhood. The official adults openly pass remarks that criticise the personal lives and culture of these residents and their presumed marital and reproductive practices are targeted for censure. They often exclaim at the number of children that the families have. They are seen as thoughtless and immoral in having so many children to whom they cannot provide care and attention. The imagery of fauj (an army) of children is often evoked while referring to them which reflect upper-class anxieties about hordes of the underclass overrunning the city. The Teachers' Sense of Superiority The official adults consider their own cultural practices to be superior and normative, deriding any deviations as marks of being uncivilised, uncouth and immoral. The school certifies the social and cultural capital of the official adults, thus becoming an arena for reproducing and legitimising class inequality by sociali-sing young children into the discourse and world view. The silent, organised classroom appears to be a fantasy and this exemplary state is not achieved for more than a couple of minutes. Official adults resort to hitting and scolding when the class is engulfed in total noise and chaos. Rebuke takes the form of addressing children by identifying them on the basis of their social and spatial origins, as the official adults pass remarks like, "Arre...Mandollawalon, be silent;" "You have clearly shown that you belong to Mandolla. You have shown your true colours;" "This is not your Mandolla. This is a school." They are also reprimanded on making the school look like their mandi or their neighbourhood with comments like, "Why are you making noise? You have turned the class into a mandi. Have some shame." The children's association with these spaces is looked down upon and is blamed for the indiscipline that prevails in the school. The uncouth, filthy nature of these spaces emerges from another episode. On one occasion the children found a lizard in the classroom leading to much confusion and noise. There was no teacher in the classroom. When Nirmala spotted this from the corridor, she barged into the classroom and went on a hitting spree. She yelled at the children "Hey...you got scared of a lizard! You eat such fat pigs and goats. You don't get scared of the fat pigs that are found in your homes. Here you are getting scared of a lizard!" This suggests that, in the negative "place image" (Reay 2007) of Mandolla, the spatial and the social are merged with each other. The fact that the children live in a neighbourhood marked by the presence of unclean animals, and the teacher's perception that they are themselves socially inferior, is used to suggest that the children have no right to be squeamish about the presence of a lizard in the classroom. Such comments are also passed whenever the cleanliness of the school is discussed. The official adults often tell children how the school should not look like their homes, streets and neighbourhood. The latter are seen as places where civic discipline does not exist and are marked as places of physical disorder that has filth, congestion, noise and chaos -- qualities that the children are blamed for bringing into the classroom. For instance, most boys in the school did not use the toilets and could be seen urinating in the open within the school premises. The headmaster once made an announcement in the assembly exhorting the boys to use the toilet, ''I don't want to see any child urinating outside. This is a school, not your locality. Don't turn this into your mandi". Being the connecting link between the neighbourhood-mandi and the school, the children are reprimanded for corrupting the sanctified space of the school, making it resemble the neighbourhood. The distancing from the neighbourhood is considered important for the sake of the larger order in the school. Such verbal humiliation goes hand in hand with physical beating. The official adults defy the ban on corporal punishment and regularly resort to slapping, punching and kicking the children. They blatantly resent the ban claiming that it is essential for teaching and disciplining "these children," who are seen as chronically unable to respond to any other technique of compliance. The school's inability to maintain discipline and ensure learning is not attri-buted to the failure of the school, but is blamed on the spillover, overwhelming effects of the neighbourhood. Any transgression is immediately blamed on the regressive influence of the social milieu outside the school and its tenacious hold on the children's ability to rise above their circumstances. Blamed for Learning Failure Children are frequently told to work in the mandi as manual labour is all they are capable of. Their familial and socio-cultural background is invoked to label them as failures. For instance, Deepmala sells garlic in the local vegetable market and finds it difficult to even copy from the blackboard. Teachers and the NGO volunteers often told her to quit school and stop being a burden on them as they remark, "You might as well go and sell garlic, why do you come to school?" Similarly, Rahul was also told time and again, "You should go and sit in the banana godown, why have you come here?" The fact that some children help their parents in their work to make ends meet is seen negatively. Their poverty is seen not as a challenge that schooling can help them overcome but as a guarantee that they are bound to fail. The family compulsion to involve children in earning a living is interpreted as proof of parents' disinterest in their children's schooling. The official adults categorically blame the children's background whenever the question of the children's poor performance is raised.3 They find almost everything wrong with the children's environment, neighbourhood and homes. The fact that the children belong to disadvantaged backgrounds and need material support and educational supplements in the form of school uniforms, books, and meals is also unacknowledged by these adults. They see it as the largesse provided by a welfare state to an undeserving and recalcitrant underclass. Far from viewing these resources as a right or entitlement of the schoolchild, they regard it as a waste of funds and a pernicious practice that encourages the poor to become freeloaders, enjoying state charity and becoming even less inclined to work. This conservative and contemptuous view is communicated to the students constantly, reinforcing the negative image associated with their class position. The official adults point out that the parents and relatives of the students do not come to the school to inquire about their wards' progress while making innumerable visits to get the money they are entitled to. According to the official adults, all those children who had stopped coming to the school or had allegedly gone back to their villages suddenly reappear during the time of distribution of the "largesse". Comments like, "Since it is the time to get money, you can see them running to school. Otherwise they don't worry about their kids' studies at all. They just care about money" are liberally passed when talking to the children. Such remarks indicate their belief about the futility of offering benefits to "these" children and their families. Teachers and other official adults often declare that the parents are not concerned about the larger well-being of their children and convey disgust and disdain for their lower socio-economic status. Their alleged greed, seen as a product of their background, combined with their perceived indifference to studies, is associated with their failure in the school. Instead of recognising the inadequacy of the school, the curriculum and the teachers, it is their milieu and the children themselves that are held responsible for their failure in participating and completing their schooling. Concluding Observations The cultural difference between neighbourhood families and official adults in the school is marked by class inequality with the children being constantly exposed to a barrage of insults designed to reinforce the superiority of the official adults and the inferiority of the social groups to which the children belong. The class divide is also reflected in the antagonistic relationship that the school shares with the children's milieu which is seen as an obstacle in the everyday life of the school. The official adults attribute the disruptions within the school, its lack of discipline and the children's failure to learn, to "deficiencies" in the children's social milieu outside the school. Their milieu is not seen as something that can be overcome, but as a permanent and debilitating condition that condemns the children to failure. School emerges as a site that identifies and contains children within their working class background. Hence, children's experience of schooling is shaped by their specific class identity. School emerges as a site that identifies and contains children within the same identity that it claims to transcend. This runs contrary to the normative idea that claims to provide equal schooling to all children regardless of their ascriptive status; demanding that educators examine the ordinary, everyday life of the school -- a real testing ground for policies, acts and curriculum frameworks. Notes 1 This article emerges from my larger doctoral research that examined how childrens' caste, class, religious and gender identities get manifested and constructed in a school. 2 To retain anonymity, the names of the area and the school being studied have been changed. 3 Studies of Ogbu (1974); Talib (1998); Nambissan (2010); Sayed et al (2007) have also shown how the poor performance of children in school is attributed to the disinterest that the parents of these children show in schooling. References Bourdieu, Pierre (1984): Distinction: A Social C-ritique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. -- (1996): The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nambissan, Geetha (2010): "Exclusion and Discrimination in Schools: Experiences of Dalit Children" in S Thorat and K S Newman (ed.), Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Reay, Diane (2007): "'Unruly Places': Inner-city Compre-hensives, Middle-class Imaginaries and Working-class Children," Urban Studies, 44(7), 1191-1201. Sayed, Y, R Subrahmanian, C Soudien and N Carrim (2007): Education Exclusion and Inclusion: P-olicy and Implementation in South Africa and India, London: DFID. Ogbu, John (1974): The Next Generation: An Ethno-graphy of Education in an Urban Neighborhood, New York: Academic Press. Talib, Mohammed (1998): "Educating the Oppressed: Observations from a School in a Working Class Settlement in Delhi: Ideology, Education, and the Political Struggle for Liberation" in S Shukla and R Kaul (ed.), Education, Development, and Underdevelopment, New Delhi: Sage Publications. . -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. 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