Recent commentary on India’s educational system has focused on issues of “exclusion”. World Bank and UNDP reports focus on low enrolment data. Socio-economic reasons lead to early age school dropouts. The gender gap in education is widening with a bias against girls. Children with disabilities aren’t accommodated in public schools.

The inherent assumption in this is that exclusion from education has a “negative value” associated with it. Therefore, by default, education itself has a “straightforward positive value” associated with it. Educational Regimes in Contemporary India probes this assumption in detail.

The book is an anthology of pieces contributed by a variety of educational scholars and edited by Radhika Chopra of the University of Delhi and Patricia Jeffery of Edinburgh University. The first section, “Changing Contexts of Education and the State”, examines the contemporary educational scene in India and its evolution from the post-independence era.

The second, “Teaching and Learning Regimes”, contains rich ethnographic case studies of student-teacher relations in six contexts: The Doon School, military schools, a girls’ madarsah in Delhi, Government elementary education, the Ustad-Shagird relationship, and adolescent women in a Delhi slum.

The third, “Different Transitions, Different Adulthoods”, examines whether the value accruing to individuals who acquire an education differs by variation in socio-economic context. Cited cases include young dalit males and children of immigrants.

The book makes four important contributions to existing literature on education in India.

First, the authors do not employ a strict economic human capital “input-output” approach in their analyses. Through detailed ethnographic studies, the book takes a close look at the processes that occur during schooling. Inputs and outputs are easy to quantify and measure.

However, “processes”, the question of how inputs are transformed into outputs, are not. How does the process of education occur? The authors probe the “educational black box” with interesting results.

Second, present-day commentary looks at educational outcomes in a quantitative dimension: enrolment rates, graduation rates, test scores, and, in some cases, earnings after school. The popular perception of the purpose of schools is perhaps solely to “train” people for market use.

The studies in this book, however, look at educational outcomes in a qualitative dimension such as self-esteem, aspirations, values imbibed, citizenship roles, and so on; after which, the editors arrive at the conclusion: “In practice, education is profoundly ambiguous in its effects.” This assessment challenges the assumption that education has “a straightforward positive value”.

Third, the book evokes a series of critical questions. Are all schools equal? Does the education that children receive in different schools facilitate the desired goals enshrined in policy documents? What values are children being taught in school?

Who determines the values taught in schools anyway? Whose socio-political interests are served in perpetuating particular types of educational systems? What political contestations occur within the playing field of the school? Who determines which outcomes of schooling deserve the highest weighting?

Fourth, educational theories developed within a Western context are tested within the Indian milieu. This contribution is particularly important given that educational policy within India is framed in conjunction with many international aid agencies.

The outlook of development practitioners is often framed within a Western understanding of the purposes, processes, and outcomes of education. Case studies specific to India will illuminate the way education policy in India is both construed and constructed.

Yet, from a policy development perspective, the book would’ve had a stronger impact had it addressed the issue of generalisability of results from each case study. Would, for example, the findings from one urban slum be representative of all urban slums in India?

Would the experience of students in military schools in Maharashtra be the same as in military schools in Andhra Pradesh or Bihar? Or would situational, geographical, contextual factors translate into different results? Still, this one critique does not diminish the many contributions of this book.

Chopra and Jeffery make an important point. Schools are perceived to be the great levelling mechanism—our only defence against social inequality. Yet, far from being “social equalizers” (in the words of American philosopher Horace Mann), they are mechanisms which reproduce social inequality. That’s food for thought.

EDUCATIONAL REGIMES IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Edited by Radhika Chopra and Patricia Jeffery in collaboration with Helmut Reifeld
Sage Publications/Thousand Oaks
Price: Rs 380; Pages: 346