India

For the most part, the sociology of education in India approaches its objects of inquiry against the backdrop of a complex society, with divisions attached to religion, caste, language, geography and material relations at both the global and local levels. The divisions in Indian society are myriad and run along multiple fault lines. One commanding approach has been to study the educational strategies of the Indian middle classes. As Geetha M. Nambissan (2010), one of the country’s most prominent sociologists of education, brings to bear, the most surefire option for securing “elite upper middle class status” in India is either through English-medium public (in the British sense) schools or education abroad. This forms a pronounced strategy at the middle to top of the social structure. The strategy of sending

40 Educational conservatism serves here and below as a euphemism for the initial cultural arbitrary formed by the dominant interests embedded in the Indian and German approaches to secondary education.

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children to private schools, however, is not just the purview of the elite; rather, it has spread to varying degrees throughout the broad middle classes, aided by the “Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization” (LPG) reforms, ultimately leading to “the downsizing of the public sector” (286-287). The privatization of secondary education is no doubt an interesting trend and furthermore greatly complicates the discussion of education as a public good. In this sense, although Germany has seen a slight yet still minimal uptick in private secondary schools, the situation in India is different in terms of scale and quality and can be interpreted as an expression of frustration on the part of the middle classes with public education.

Nambissan (2010) explains the issue: “…strategies and practices of middle-class fractions have led to the rapid growth of the unregulated private sector in education, which is exploiting the aspirations, anxieties and often helplessness of families belonging to the lower tiers of these classes” (293).

It seems that private schools are becoming entrenched in India, both in rural and in urban settings. According to estimates in India’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2014), for example, thirty-one percent of rural children attend private schools, with an aggregated estimate for all of India at thirty-nine percent (2). This, combined with the power of the provinces to steer their respective education policies, decreases the control and influence of the federal government, with the notable exception of the skeletal structure of the education system, which most private schools must adhere to in any event. The privatization of education has been understandably greeted with scrutiny by academics. Nambissan (2010), for example, airs this reservation: “What is of concern is that sections of the poorer/working classes are today seeking ‘quality education’ for their children in English-medium schools, and that the unregulated private sector sees this as a business opportunity” (293). The situation is compounded by the fact that very little is known about the Indian middle classes in terms of their educational aspirations (294). Perhaps frustration with public schools has facilitated the explosion of private schools, but there is little reason to hope that private schools will be more effective in allowing, for example, capabilities to become functionings (Sen 2003) if the logic behind the schools is profit and not service of the public good.

This public-private divide in education has far-reaching implications. Far from the classical liberal idea of the market acting as an invisible hand, justly distributing resources, the spread of private schools in India has done little to decouple school structure from social structure. According to K.L. Sharma (2013), the education gap in India still persists 60 years

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after independence and, what is more: “Access to education is differentiated as there is a hierarchy of educational institutions, more or less parallel to social hierarchy in India”

(Sharma 555). This hierarchy has not disappeared in spite of the promises of market-based solutions. That being said, Sharma asserts that the overall trend is a net positive: “Based on various reports, it can be said that due to several factors, including social awakening, economic development, and political freedom, there has been a decline in inequality of educational opportunity in the post-liberalization period” (557). The author, however, goes on to contradict this very statement later on by suggesting that the correlation between educational stratification and social stratification has not decreased.

From his point of view, the problem is not that education has been privatized; rather, the problem is that this privatization has neither directly nor indirectly increased the quality of public education. As will be seen, however, it has in fact had some important indirect effects. Sharma (2013) arrives at a major sticking point in the sociology of education in India:

despite reforms, “India continues with the colonial legacy, at least in two ways: (1) English-educated manpower to administer India; and (2) structures, institutions, and norms and procedures, which were created by the British” (557). This is precisely what is meant by educational conservatism, a feature of the public sphere which should be rooted out.

One could even go so far as to say, echoing Polanyi, that the meteoric rise of private schools in India represents a transition from the market being imperfectly embedded in institutions (schools) to institutions being perfectly embedded in the market. On the one hand, then, Indian education has undergone a neo-liberal shift, with the idea being that private institutions can offer a viable alternative to public ones, and this shift has arguably had some positive implications in terms of access to and quality of education; on the other hand, these private institutions, while being embedded in the market, are duly embedded in the colonial structures introduced by the British. If it is in fact the case that the privatization of education is unable to deliver on its utopian promises and is actually a pathological process which inhibits egalitarianism and social mobility and is embedded in a colonial and even neo-colonial structure, it would appear that education in India, broadly speaking, offers very little hope for being able to deliver social mobility and equality. This double embeddedness makes meaningful reform extremely difficult but does not entirely preclude it. The first step, however arduous, necessarily involves disembedding education from its erstwhile colonial

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structures and reanchoring education’s goals in an egalitarianism which postpones meritocratic measures instead of in oppression.

Other studies focus on specific caste,⁴¹ class and gender groups, and explore the relationship between performance, social mobility and somewhat narrowly defined groups.

Divya Vaid (2004), for example, analyzes the gender divide obtaining during what she calls

“educational transitions”, first from primary to secondary school, from lower secondary to upper secondary and then from upper secondary to university. Her conclusions, that those from “socially deprived origins” face significant transitional obstacles and that females face more challenges at every transitional stage, regardless of social background (3935-3936), are certainly enlightening in that they speak to significant divisions regarding class/caste, gender and, more importantly, at their intersections. Perhaps even more enlightening, however, is Vaid’s depiction of “educational transitions” which can be seen in what she rightly refers to as a simplified model:

(from Vaid 2004: 3930)

41 While it is optimistically argued that the emergence of the middle classes problematizes the “inheritance of occupations” dictated by the static caste system, this is not necessarily the case (Vaid 2014: 392). Caste identity is, in fact, important, but suggesting it is either static or under imminent threat is highly problematic.

In fact, much recent literature challenges the orientalist presumptions that castes are static and unique to India (Vaid 2014; Jodhka 2012). The four Varnas in the traditional reading of caste hierarchy are as follows:

Brahmins (doctors and priests), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (laborers), with so-called “untouchables” being extraneous to the system and thus not representing any caste at all (Vaid 2014: 393). Along these simplistic lines of the religious division of occupations, India’s social structure has been viewed as unchanging. While caste and sub-caste identity is very much important for some social practices, namely marriage, the idea that the caste system is absolute and static is problematized by group mobility and intergenerational, individual social mobility (395).

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The “educational transitions” happen in between each of the blocks, representing a logical winnowing of school participants the higher up the pyramid one goes.

Educational transitions make for compelling analyses. Anirudh Krishna (2014), for example, focuses on the transition from upper secondary to tertiary education, with a particular emphasis on a growing field, namely engineering. His conclusions, that equality of opportunity does not really exist in the field of education and access to engineering training and jobs (a socially valued activity) is predicated on the social origins of the individual, and that this can only be overcome by increasing the quality of education throughout India, are far-reaching and compelling (25) and certainly help to answer his broad question, “who becomes an engineer?” What is more, those who possess enough cultural capital find an easier path to participating in a socially valued activity. Those whose reserves of cultural capital do not line up with the cultural arbitrary or who do not speak the language of the cultural arbitrary are sorted out of the system in the name of meritocracy

A significant amount of the literature on the sociology of education in India focuses on infrastructure in describing the challenges pupils face.⁴² With such a large population and a large land mass, the actual construction and provision of schools in India becomes a daunting task. Singh, Singh and Lata (2008), for example, point out that many states in India do not have enough classrooms for all of the children (223), providing a significant infrastructural barrier to quality, universal education. Uneven geographic development then becomes a complicating factor. What is more, they go on to enumerate another structural problem, one related to economy:

Poor families are also more likely to keep girls at home to care for younger siblings or to work in family enterprises. If a family has to choose between educating a son or daughter because of financial restrictions, typically the son will be chosen (Singh, Singh and Lata 2008: 223).

42 This is a problem which Germany had not had to face since the end of World War II, but it is becoming a more significant issue as infrastructure from the turn of the last century begins to crumble.

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Sending a child to school represents an opportunity cost, given that the child could otherwise contribute in some way to household or livelihood work.

Linking these ideas about the sociology of education back to a rough notion of Indian social structure, the following statements can be made: first, inequalities related to caste, class, gender, ethnicity and geography interact and are imperfectly reproduced via education.

While this was the case, too, prior to the “Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization”

(LPG) program, what differentiates Indian education at large now from the era preceding liberalization is that with the proliferation of private schools, education has become exposed to a double embeddedness: on the one hand, the logic of domination via colonialism is embedded in the larger educational structure; on the other hand, as private education has grown exponentially since the early 1990s, education has become embedded in neo-liberalism. Second, and relatedly, education remains the best avenue for social mobility, and the challenge consists of recognizing this and changing the structures in such a way so as to remove the correlation between social origin and educational achievement. A system increasingly embedded in the market disallows such an action, as do the remnants of an anachronistic, morally tainted system of dominating people, i.e. colonialism. For a critical theoretical approach to education, one that allows people to lead a good life, disembedding colonialism from the education system is an important first step; disembedding the education system from the market is the second step.