- 1 AR Vasavi’s other books on rural India and agrarian problems include Shadow Space: Suicides and the (...)
- 2 “Shadow education” refers to institutions (mainly private) that operate outside the spectrum of for (...)
1A.R Vasavi’s works1 always serve as a reminder of the significant role played by public anthropologists’ accounts in understanding the origins and persistence of inequalities in Indian society. By outlining a few distinctive features of public anthropology, Carole McGranhan (2006) has argued that it should be practiced as an engaged endeavor rather than as an extractive enterprise (p. 255), and Vasavi’s works are true to that spirit. In Differentiation and Disjunction: Interrogating India’s Education System (2022), Vasavi examines an Indian educational system riddled with multiple challenges at every level (primary, secondary, and higher) and attempts to contextualize the crisis in education through the lens of differentiation and disjunction. In the field of education, differentiation should ideally aim to address the diverse educational/learning needs of heterogeneous groups from the outset, but it instead serves different consumer groups and ultimately reproduces social inequalities and privileges. As for disjunction, it inherently vitiates educational policies, ideals, and goals. For example, after obtaining a professional/general degree, a significant number of graduates in India must attend coaching clinics in order to secure paid jobs. This is due not only to a discrepancy between their skills and the dynamic requirements in each industry, but also to the sheer presence and inevitability of shadow education.2 By commenting on the discourse surrounding human capital development in developing countries, which promotes mass higher education regardless of the quality, Vasavi argues that it has ultimately turned educational institutions into mere “extractive institutions” (p. 9), which Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2012) have defined as those “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset” (p. 76).
- 3 The caste system in India represents and reproduces a uniquely stratified society, in which no grou (...)
2Interrogating the educational system in India’s uniquely stratified society (meaning that it is marked by “graded inequality”3) demands an intricate analysis of policies, institutions, and sociocultural norms. In a policy-level analysis on higher education in India, situated at the crossroads of liberalization during late 1980s, N. Jayaram (1991) noted that education in general and higher education in particular drifts along the “currents and cross-currents of socio-economic forces” (p. 40). The recent work of Shivali Tukdeo (2019) on educational policies in India has broadly outlined the historical accounts of cultural politics and argued how they have shaped policies and their implementation. Vasavi’s book complements this and presents a comprehensive picture of the Indian educational system. She draws on over two decades of fieldwork conducted since the 1990s and involving multisited ethnographic projects as well as action research projects, which provide a comprehensive look at education in liberalized India. The book is comprised of eight chapters. Vasavi’s arguments in the first four chapters revolve around how the primary education system in India is facing a quandary involving a peculiar iron caging of educational bureaucracy and the school differentiation that leads to an iron ceiling for disadvantaged children’s futures as well as democracy. The four chapters that follow look at higher education, with a special focus on how disjunction in educational policies and practice in higher education discriminates against people from marginal castes.
3The author begins her analysis with the government elementary school (GES), an institution at the grassroots level of the public education system, which offers primary education to more than 200 million children in India (p. 15). This chapter is the result of fieldwork conducted intermittently across seven different states—including her own state Karnataka, where she carried out an action research project. Here, Vasavi briefly outlines the shortcomings in sociological/anthropological studies on elementary education, which are confined to analysis of the “delivery failures of the system” (p. 16) and ways of improving it. This presupposes that the school is either a malleable entity that can be easily modified or a mysterious site. She explains the everyday functioning in the government school, the role and agency of teachers, and how the local dominant castes and politicians influence school administration, broadly offering the sociocultural lens to understand the bureaucracy of school education in India. Educational bureaucracies across the world are strangely inert when it comes to enacting reform to address certain challenges, or perhaps it is that they are structurally positioned to maintain the status quo, irrespective of how efficient they are in disseminating or producing knowledge. Commenting on Scotland’s education bureaucracy, Walter Humes (2021) has called it an iron cage of educational bureaucracy. Though Vasavi does not explicitly mention Humes’s (2021) work in this chapter, she advances the understanding of educational bureaucracies with the necessary nuances of school education and the functioning of the GES in India. She uses the concept “critical bifocality” proposed by Lois Weis and Michelle Fine (2012) to investigate the interlinkage between the broader political economy of the GES and the sociocultural specificities of the society in which these schools are situated (p. 17). In outlining how the GES serves as a site that reproduces social inequalities and hierarchies, Vasavi notes that the disjunction that originates here also persists. This disjunction manifests largely in terms of knowledge dissemination through the curriculum or pedagogical methods, leads to learning difficulties for children, and has a considerable impact on their educational futures. This eventually contributes to antischool sentiments and cultures, especially when the transition to formal employment is unachievable.
4In the third chapter, Vasavi highlights the emergence of school differentiation and poses the key question of whether it is a cultural choice made by families or by the state in utilizing so-called scarce resources. As schools in modern meritocratic societies are increasingly becoming pivotal institutions in “structuring and assigning opportunities” (p. 57), this differentiation is considered inevitable and essential. Vasavi classifies schools broadly into three distinct categories based on the premise that they largely function as “processual sites” (p. 68), operating with different objectives/agendas and serving different social groups. The first is government schools, which largely serve to manifest “welfare governmentality” (Sanyal 2007, as cited in the book) and appeal to the electoral base. The second is nonelite private schools, which cater to the aspirations of middle-class India. The final one is elite schools, which reproduce privilege and focus on social and cultural capital. In assessing the problems of school differentiation, Vasavi warns that it proliferates democratic deficiencies and reproduces existing social inequities. As school differentiation discourages the sustenance of “common schools,” which are originally meant to foster a democratic spirit and impart democratic culture among the country’s future citizens, this undeniably creates a democratic deficit in society.
5In the fourth chapter, Vasavi addresses the sociocultural aspects of the communities that influence how government schools function. She outlines the historical trajectory of community-school linkages from colonial times to post 1990s India. During the colonial period, the British educational administration disrupted the exclusionary schooling mechanism practiced by upper-caste communities and brought the state in as a pivot. After 1993, however, India, like many developing countries, also introduced the role of “communities” in all development programs, including education. With the constitutional provisions, the state delegated administrative responsibilities to the local self-government, and, thus, the community. For example, in Karnataka (a southern Indian state), the parents and a few elected representatives from the village take part in the government school’s School Development and Management Committees (SDMC). As Indian communities remain caught up in the caste system, which hardly helps it evolve into an organic community, this is reflected in the SDMC formation and thereby the functioning of the school. This defeats the real purpose of the community’s role in managing the government school, making it another site for the political contestation of dominant caste groups. Vasavi concludes that the “community-school relationship is shaped by larger political and economic structures, of which community and school are only a part” (p. 88).
6In the fifth chapter, Vasavi discusses the dominant education and employment regimes across India through a micronarrative of the life history of a Dalit man in rural Karnataka. In promoting mass higher education, the state makes education accessible to disadvantaged generations and marginalized communities. While the architecture of inclusion is laudable (essentially being constitutionally mandated), it has failed to provide a safe space with equal opportunities to the marginalized youth, who face challenges and humiliation. Vasavi specifies the disadvantages and discrimination encountered by the Dalit man, who was labeled a “Government Brahmin,” a casteist remark and a conspicuous misnomer. A study conducted by Surinder S. Jodhka and Katherine Newman (2007) on caste discrimination in the Indian labor market, particularly in selection processes, has revealed the lives of lower-caste graduates after completing their education. Amidst this dysfunctional education and employment regime, Vasavi discusses how government job/public-sector employment has emerged as a “hegemonic economic model” (p. 103), further reproducing inequalities. This chapter critically engages with Jeffrey’s (2010) study of the educated upper-caste unemployed in northern India, who hopefully await and simultaneously exploit the crisis-ridden higher-education system. In contrast, lower-caste youth precariously wait for government jobs within recruitment systems that are rigged and delayed.
7By addressing the crippling disjunctions in Indian higher education with respect to learning and aspirations, Vasavi calls for Social Transformative Learning (STL) in higher education. The STL approach advocates for critical thinking and the enhancement of students’ social capabilities (p. 130). Discussing STL in the seventh chapter, Vasavi argues that higher education in India is gradually disassociating from providing comprehensive education, instead creating new specialized programs and producing laborers instead of learners. She provides a critical analysis of the Centre for Research and Education in Social Transformation (CREST) program of Kerala, of which she is a founding member. While she praises the program’s efforts to impart STL to youth from marginal backgrounds, she also points out the shortcomings of its approach. Their training succeeds in instilling confidence among disadvantaged youth, but the program still ends up defining success as finding employment in corporate markets as opposed to other socially impactful careers. In her contextualization of STL in India, Vasavi argues that STL should also be imparted to young people from privileged backgrounds, which would aid in addressing the lingering dilemma of why social change always has to be shouldered by the disadvantaged/marginalized youth populations.
8In the book’s penultimate chapter, Vasavi analyzes the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020), closely examining how it contributes to more differentiation and disjunction in the Indian education system. She highlights that the policy’s proposal for greater structural change would further centralize the education system, and ultimately leave the fate of education and institutions in the hands of the ruling political party/regimes. She argues that it advocates for a narrow perspective of education that further reinforces the dominant communities’ cultural supremacy. It excludes critical pedagogic practices in the design of the curriculum and classroom space, severely impacting the meaning of education and its contribution to the democratic culture in society. A comprehensive evaluation of the policy cancels out the proposed progressive measures in several of its other parts. For example, NEP 2020 advocates for primary education in the vernacular medium and professionalizing the education of teachers in order to address the learning gaps among children studying in state-funded public schools. But it also calls for vocationalizing early secondary education, which could place disadvantaged children on nonprofessional career paths without allowing them to realize their full capabilities and aspirations (p. 155).
9In the epilogue, Vasavi argues that, apart from engaging with the plethora of solutions and diagnoses offered in (educational) policy studies to ameliorate the existing education system’s ills, there is an immediate need to “reimagine what direction and orientation our education system must take” (p. 172). While she uses the introductory chapters to flag the dirth of educational studies after reviewing diverse academic literature on education in India, here she rallies for the independent community of scholars and educators who cannot be co-opted by either the state or any global agencies that might have their own interests or objectives.
10Once education becomes like any other commodity, the existing interlinkages between state, market, and society in the educational landscape experiences significant shifts that critically (re)shape the relationship between market and society. For example, in her recent work on aspirations for English-medium education in Kerala, Leya Mathew (2022) has highlighted that proliferation of neoliberal rationalities and the emerging moralities of aspiration in (civil) society contribute to the emergence of (English) language imperialism from below. Vasavi’s book tries to address these dilemmas emerging in the era of globalization and approaches the arguments in the volume edited by Marie Lall and Geetha Nambissan (2011) from a fresh perspective. This book asks readers to view the hegemonization of educational aspirations in increasingly alienated labor markets through a lens of disembeddedness. Vasavi argues that the emergence of private edu-enterprises and the recent NEP 2020, which strongly advocates for designing new courses/programs, would invariably widen disembeddedness in terms of disassociating local skills and the knowledge system from pedagogy. She concludes that since the objective of this education regime is to produce a “globally adaptable worker” (p. 178), it inevitably dismisses any dependence on local economic systems, like participation and rejuvenation of artisanal skills in local crafts. During an employment crisis, the blame is placed on either the individual or the global system over which the local state has no control, subsequently perpetuating the crisis without giving rise to any social resentment against the local state. Although Vasavi does not explicitly conceptualize disembeddedness, this book shows how useful it might prove in examining it alongside the commodification of education in order to critically engage with education studies in emerging consumer societies like that of India. The absence of discussion on education financing is one noticeable shortcoming in this book, particularly in the chapters on higher education. As it focuses more on general degree education than professional education, the book overlooks the significant growth of education loan defaults.4 Nevertheless, this book could be immensely helpful for researchers and policymakers/practitioners working on education and school studies in India. As Satish Deshpande opines in the preface, it can truly be endorsed as both a manifesto and a testament on education in India.