Childhood in the neoliberal age

Childhood in the Neo-liberal Age: Some Thoughts for Adults V. Geetha There is something not quite right about the state of childhood in our society today. On the one hand, all indicators to do with the well-being of children appear certainly better than in previous years: child mortality rates have come down; more children are in balwadis and in schools than ever before, and this includes girl children; children from deprived communities, particularly from dalit and Adivasi communities are able to progress beyond secondary school in some parts of the country at least, and access higher education; child labour is on the decline, at least officially and child health is on the whole getting better. On the other hand, there are inevitable dark spots in this somewhat positive picture: to do with the sex ratio, concerns to do with children with disabilities and the worrying slowness as far as access to, and completion of higher education by children from dalit and Adivasi communities are concerned. Further there are discrepancies between states, with some states actually showing a worsening trend with respect to the sex ratio, child labour and health. Further malnutrition is rife amongst children, with some figures claiming that one in every two children in rural India is malnourished. Moving away from statistical information, we see that there are other things which are equally, if not more worrying. For one, crimes against children, particularly sexual abuse and kidnapping children for begging or trafficking, are more visible today, and appear to happen more often and with regularity. Familial violence, even if underreported is quite shocking – both routine physical hurt delivered at children as also child sexual abuse. Corporal punishment continues to be legion as well, in many of our schools. Secondly, children today are subject to unmediated multiple messages and cultural and social practices, thanks to the proliferation of media, which is accessible with just a touch of the finger. Smart phones target the child in the privacy of her self, and the messages she or he receives are therefore larger than life and overwhelming in their power to persuade and mesmerize the child – whether this has to do with buying a product, following the fortunes of a favourite film star or sports star, watching sexually explicit images, or staying in touch with strangers who appear interesting to the child, but who could in fact harm children. We need to recognize here that smart phones are not only sought by the middle and richer classes, but even young people from working classes and castes. A dalit social worker in southern Tamil Nadu pointed out that pre-teen and early teen boys in villages around Sivakasi use the money that they earn in the fireworks and match industry to outfit themselves with these phones, and in the process become impervious to other things that come their way – including child labour rehabilitation programmes, offers of education, scholarships in schools that are willing to accept children from marginal backgrounds. Thirdly, and here is a paradox, even as children are targeted by the media, the market and adults who seek them out for sex, childhood and children are discussed more avidly than ever before in countless forums including those that have emerged on the internet, and also in our various urban contexts. These discussions have to do with evolving suitable learning and extra curricular material for children; challenges faced by parents, when confronted by querulous and argumentative children; the effects of television on children; the worrying fact of violence in children’s interactions... The individual child is the focus of much of these discussions and a plethora of ‘experts’ is invoked or drawn into them – education counselors, child psychologists, teachers who have experimented with creative approaches to learning… Fourthly, and this is equally paradoxical, and is a trend that threatens to affect children across caste and class lines: learning to survive and adapt to an increasingly competitive world are valued as important and considered necessary to secure ‘success’ and display ‘achievement’. Predictably enough both success and achievement are defined through quantitative means: marks, being top of the list of winners in competitions, finding jobs that are the best paid and so on. Children who do not fit into this scheme are consigned to the bottom of the social heap. Schools routinely deny admission to such children, or detain them for the year they have to give their public exams, so that the school’s reputation as a ‘100%’ pass school is not tainted. Lastly, children, and children’s rights, for all the claims made on their behalf are routinely denied them, by both civil society, as we have seen, but also by the State – whether this has to do with how the State implements laws meant to protect the child, or whether this has to do with State supported institutional care. The record is one of indifference, neglect and in some instances active abuse and ill-treatment of children. This is the broad picture and I think it begs us to address the question of the child in the world, and the child’s future not merely in social and economic terms, but also in philosophical and ethical ways. This is because we, adults, invest meanings in childhood, define its content and character, and plan for children in ways that reflect our views on education, growth, progress and so on. In this sense, we think and work from within a conceptual paradigm that we have either evolved or inherited. Children and what we want for them, as well as our understanding of childhood are anchored in world views that have to do with our – adult – disposition towards questions of knowledge, ethics, human needs and emotions. If, today, we have a fairly dismal situation as far as the child in our times is concerned, then clearly adult world views in this regard need to be appraised, critically examined and rethought. This is what I intend to do in this talk. *** I start with a brief description and analysis of how adult perceptions and needs shape and in fact construct childhood and what we assume to be children’s needs. To be sure, we base our arguments and observations on the basis of what we have noticed about children, and some of us have worked for decades with them and so can claim to have a profound knowledge of children’s ways, of learning, relating, and their capabilities. Besides, as parents and care-givers, we all engage with children on a day-to-day basis that it would seem counter-intuitive to claim that our understanding of childhood and children reflects our imaginative needs rather than the ‘truth’ about children and childhood. Yet, historically it has been so, at least from the early modern period, that is, from the 18th century, when in parts of Europe and Russia, childhood appeared a state of existence that was autonomous and definable on its own terms – that is, childhood was understood not simply as a state of incomplete adulthood, but a state of existence where the human person is at her most spontaneous and where he or she is the embodiment of innocence. We only have to think of the writings of Rousseau, and the poetry of William Blake in this context. Historians have pointed out that earlier centuries in Europe did not yield such an understanding of the child and that this construction of childhood had to do with transformations in the social and economic worlds of the European continent over a long historical period. Nearer home in colonial India, the child was marked out as a tender and innocent being in the context of social reform debates – to do with child marriage, for instance – in ways that were new and startling. As education became a desirable social goal for all people, irrespective of caste and gender, another sense of childhood emerged: the child as an empty vessel, whose mind was a veritable tabula rasa, and who needed to be educated to become a proper moral person. When India attained Independence, the child was marked out as important for other reasons: she or he was the face of the future, and had to be educated into responsible citizenship. Here I must pause to point to a series of studies that a group of us did on school textbooks – social science and language textbooks – from five states: Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and West Bengal (2005-2009). For all our regional differences, in this, all textbooks were united: constituting the child reader, the young student who reads these textbooks, as a citizen-in-the-making, who had to learn to value the nation above all else, and position herself in a worthwhile relationship to it. This normative citizen that the child was expected to become was not defined by caste, class, ethnicity or region, or even language, and in a default sense, was constructed as ‘male’ and ‘Indian’. By the same token, the India that this child had to learn to inhabit became an idealized space with its manifold contradictions of caste, class, gender, ethnicity, language, religion, region all ironed out and rendered either non-existent or considered obstacles to the grand goal of citizens building their nation. The point is, as must be evident from this brief historical note, we literally ‘imagine’ and ‘invent’ childhoods – whatever the child’s actual experiences of her world and her self and others, these are accommodated and can be made sense of only through the paradigms that adults create. Adult paradigms in turn are shaped by historical circumstances, by actually prevailing social and economic realities, of hunger, poverty, wealth, power and so on. Even with respect to alternative and dissenting visions of childhood this is the case: whether it was Tagore, Gandhi, or J Krishnamurthy on the one hand, and Dr Ambedkar, Periyar and Phule on the other, adult concerns and experiences fashioned childhood and children. Let me illustrate this proposition by considering two different views of education, as expressed by Rabindranath Tagore and Dr Ambedkar. For Tagore, education had to do with freedom of the mind, freedom of love and freedom of the will. The first referred to unrestricted play and enquiry, which education ought to encourage and supplement. The second had to do with what teachers ought to strive towards – creating an atmosphere of care and love for all children and thereby refine the emotional and inner life of the child. The third freedom was something children ought to cultivate, and deploy to build the school as a community. In the experiments that he carried out, Tagore outlined education models for rural children, for children from tribal worlds and artisanal cultures – all of which kept these ideals in mind, though the curriculum was varied. Tagore’s writings on education present to us a vision of childhood and an image of the child that may be described as empathetic and even romantic: clearly influenced by Rousseau and the English romantics, particularly Wordsworth, the child symbolizes the free spirit, which ought to be allowed to develop in keeping with its own ‘natural’ rhythms at least for the first 10-12 years of its life. In this sense, childhood was a magical time, which, if properly nurtured could school a person into becoming a full personality, and not merely one who knows this or that skill, but whose learning and cultivation of mind and spirit are complete. It must be kept in mind that Tagore’s sense of what children are like and of childhood experiences owed a great deal to his memory of his own childhood, and what he liked and hated about school during that period. His views were also shaped by his interest in local cultures, and the richness of their art and carft traditions. Deeply sympathetic to anti-colonial swadeshi practice, he was committed to building what he considered ‘national’ as well as modern institutions of learning. I come now to Dr Ambedkar’s views. He understood education to be the means to emancipation – freedom of the mind to think beyond what was given, and to comprehend the world using one’s mind. In caste society this was important since it equipped the learner with the requisite knowledge to free herself from imposed stigma and ignorance. Education was also a way of lifting oneself out of caste-bound labour and existence, and take in the world in all its richness for oneself. Most important, education was central to Dr Amebdkar’s vision of democracy – following his mentor John Dewey, who defined schooling to be practice that enabled one participate in a democratic life, Dr Ambedkar held education to be fundamentally necessary to build cultures of fraternity and fellowship. Further, educational systems had to be reformed, to accommodate representatives from the subordinated castes; and also rationalized, so that students across the university and college systems could learn in whatever context they desired, and not be bound by specific institutions. Lastly, education was to go beyond securing marks in an exam and be a fitful mixture of practice and theory. Tellingly the motto that adorned Dr Ambedkar’s Siddhartha College was ‘Knowledge and Compassion’. Dr Ambedkar’s experience of discrimination in his school days, and more generally, his experience of caste-life and his passionate attachment to the intertwined causes of equality and fraternity, both of which, he held were antidotes to the caste order, made him understand education the way he did. Oriented as they were towards a public cause, argument, research and reflection on history, society or culture, Dr Ambedkar’s writings do not present us with palpable images of either childhood or children, but he was keenly sensitive to the affective as well as sensory aspects of education, as is evident from the manner in which he imagined his educational spaces. Take the boys’ hostel space as designed under his supervision afor students of Milind College, Aurangabad – it recalls the form of a Buddhist monastery, but assimilates within that vision a sense of space that could potentially make for equality as well as fellowship between students. Or consider the fact that the timings of Siddhartha College were such that poor, working youth could both study as well as work – a fact that points to his keen and acute sense of a poor student’s realities. Even from this brief and rather cursory description of two distinctive views of education, it is evident that at least in the modern historical period in India, education was viewed as central to the resolution of various social and political projects; in turn the child as the subject of these projects was viewed as an exemplary being in whom the future of the world rested. *** Are the visions of the last century, whether they were defined by the post-colonial State, or by dissenting imaginations, or emancipatory politics relevant today? The idea of the child as a future citizen persists – at least within educational planning, with the State, however indifferent or hypocritical, owning up to its duty to ‘educate’ the child; with the Right to Education Act, being the most recent expression of State interest in children. But this view of the child, as a citizen-in-the-making is shaded by other considerations: to be a citizen today does not only have to do with taking pride in India, or assist in ‘nation-building’. Articulate opinion, as voiced in the media, or in educational forums, is obsessed with competitive success – as we all know from the hysteria that breaks out at the time that exam results are announced, and when it comes to admissions to professional or even degree colleges. Behind this hysteria is an entire system at work: from humble tuition centres to coaching academies; from school management systems that advertise their ‘expertise’ and what they have on offer (from horse-riding to state of the art computer technology) to co-curricular activities’ planners who want to fill a child’s every free minute with either a sport, or a skill that everyone imagines the child should know… All of them have an investment, commercially, and as representatives of this country’s aspirational middle and upper middle classes in ensuring that no child forgets that to be successful is a virtue, and if one were to fail, there is nothing worse that can happen to a child. In Tamil Nadu, there exists a set of schools which ensure that children that come to them clear their Class XII exams with very high scores. These schools are run like study camps, with children literally forced to repeat exercises and model question papers over and over again – for nearly 12 hours a day. Coroporal punishment is not unknown, and children’s emotional concerns are routinely overlooked. Suicdes have taken place in these institutions. Children who pass out from these schools make it to professional courses, but the psychological costs involved for some of them, or even most of them are immense. Significantly, it is not only the urban middle classes, and the dominant or upper castes who are invested in competitive success: parents from communities that were barely literate two generations ago, parents who are from peasant, artisanal and trading backgrounds and those who are themselves modest professionals, being school teachers, or government employees are all eager for their child to succeed. Since success is measured by what the child gets to do as an adult – doctor, engineer, IAS officer, and so on – parents from all these classes do not mind investing heavily in their children’s education, even if this means they take loans or mortgage family property. An entire information network exists today, which connects aspirant children and their parents to educational opportunities, literally, across the world. Thus, it is not at all uncommon to have children who have grown up in rural or moffusil Tamil Nadu actually studying medicine or dental sciences in places some of us have not even heard of – in China, Uzbekistan and the Caribbean! Since government medical and dental colleges are few and far between, with limited seats, and private colleges are prohibitively expensives, parents do not mind literally ‘shopping’ for medical seats elsewhere, even if these are places they otherwise have no relationship to! Alongside this obsession with success, is also present lingering doubt: parents constantly wonder if they are doing right by their children. While some insist on success at any cost, others worry whether they are not over-burdening their children and if they should not be more imaginative in their parenting. This brings into focus the child counselor, and many schools in urban India today employ such a person. Parents also seek out counselors and rather than relate their children’s excitable, nervous and stressed state of mind to the expectations they are burdened with, they are anxious to have ‘professional’ advice: on whether their child suffers from ‘attention-deficit disorder’; or whether their child is indeed ‘hyperactive’. It is not that these are not real or actual psychiatric conditions, but these terms have become veritable shorthand to describe what may actually be symptoms related to specific and enumerable causes. There is another variant of the ‘success’ model: this is not as aggressively oriented towards results and achievement. Rather it is interested in exploring alternatives, experimenting with schools that are not as focused on exams or on marks. For example, across the country, there exist schools which are gentler with children, which allow a degree of creative latitude when it comes to learning and which do nurture individual talent, without trying to insist that ‘one size fits all’. But it is not clear if all such schools nurture different educational goals, and it is not clear too if they are also not equally committed, like more mainstream schools to persuade children to fall in line with existing notions of success and failure. In any case, for parents who are not convinced entirely of the success model, but who are reluctant to experiment beyond a point such schools prove attractive. This interest in guarded experimentation is on account of not wanting to take risks with one’s status and lifestyle – which are crucially dependent on being integrated into the economic and social order, as it exists. This brings me to a related point: the relationship between success and the class and caste backgrounds of children who are pushed to ‘achieve’ whatever their parents want them to achieve, or what they imagine are goals they cannot overlook. As I have noted earlier, to aspire to success is a disposition that cuts across several social divides. But the fact also remains that not everyone succeeds in exactly the same way. Clearly children from castes and classes which have what sociologists call ‘cultural capital’, or resources which they can rely on – from cultures of reading to networks of social and economic support – are likely to benefit from their success more than children from aspirational families, where parents, at least some of them, are probably first generation graduates themselves. Thus there exist caste and class clusters even amongst the successful, and these are further linked to professional and knowledge networks which help build careers. Those who do not have the benefit of being part of such networks succeed less, so to speak. Or they must rely on other factors – in the last few decades, we see the evolution of a new form of cultural capital: which has to do with having access to State resources, by virtue of being part of the political class. For aspirant castes and classes, then, linking to members of the political class, through local caste or kin networks, and regional affiliations becomes crucial to achieving their ends. Here I must point to a paradox: the obsession with success pushes parents and educators to separate the child from his or her context, and focus on her individual development in an obsessive sort of way. But once the child is brought into the adult world, she or he is immediately absorbed by her class and caste context! Clearly, our sense of the child is defined by our own social location, whereas what we want and desire for her or him is dictated by the dynamism of the neo-liberal economy, where growth for its own sake, and a push towards higer and higer consumer spending are eoncuraged. Thus, we nurture highly individualized aspirations but also at the same time, stay within the charmed circle of class and caste. Sadly, this is the case, even with schools and parents who strive to be ‘alternative’ and envision children as active, creative beings – for one, these are schools that cater to the middle and upper middle classes and the upper classes, for the most part. Their pursuit of alternatives is defined by their class status – for the alternative and the experimental to work, children would have to find their own own way through learning, and often this might require them to go against the grain of the everyday, that is against the logic of competititve success. In other words, they may not want a regular career, or make a living. Here, class status comes in handy, since it provides financial anchoring to an extent. Further, in today’s India, there are enough careers to be made, which look to alternative skills, in the media or in one or the other service sectors: in other words, the risks involved in being alternative are socially covered. Secondly, the alternatives that set great premium by learner-centred approaches, assume that the learner is an unmarked social category – the child is seen as an entity in herself, and not from a particular social and economic context. This is what actually renders the alternative attractive in our neo-liberal context, this erasure of the social contexts of childhood, and the intense focusing on the child-learner. As long as it is children that must change, or our approaches to children that must change, and not our social contexts and choices, the middle and upper classes are not averse to the alternative. Not all alternative experiments are of this kind, it may be argued, and some have been in place for several decades, deriving as they do, from particular educational traditions – the Krishnamurthy Foundation schools, or the schools associated with Aurobindo and the Mother’s teachings, for instance; yet, we need to ask if the creative work undertaken in these contexts are replicable across caste and class locations. While the KFI has assisted in the setting up of rural schools, and do outreach work with state schools, their own constituency continues to be dominated by children from the upper middle and upper classes. The question therefore is whether the learner-centred, non-competitive and active approach to learning, relying as much on processes, as it does on the end result, can be made to work in different social settings; or if we need to rethink the nature of creativity itself. I would like to place before you an example of the issues at stake for those who experiment with the ‘alternative’, in contexts where children are from marginal social backgrounds. A school that was set up in Trichy in Tamil Nadu in the late 1990s, with a determination to provide an open learning atmosphere, had to engage with the anxious demands of parents who wanted their children to be like other children – score marks, dress as other children do, with shoes and belts, speak English. The school was reprimanded for not giving enough homework, for being ‘lenient’ towards children, that is, for not using corporal punishment – in short, it was argued that the school was not competitive enough or efficient enough. For a school committed to a learner-centred education, but whose constituency is the aspirational class – many of the children that came to this school were from small peasant and petty trading families, or were children of Class 3 and Class 4 employees of the government – this poses a dilemma. How does one engage with these aspirations, even while retaining an open, creative learning atmosphere? How does one function without donor support or financial back-up, relying on a modest free structure? How does one also retain good teachers, who share the school’s vision, but who cannot be paid what are viable professional salaries? The problem is compounded when the vision that animates such projects is an individual one – the onus is on that individual to persuade others to her point of view; or to anchor it in a more generalized yet different understanding of childhood, children and society. The point is our contemporary engagement with alternatives in education, in whatever fashion, is not anchored in worldviews which help us connect education with the larger social good. As far as the first sort of alternative is concerned, where learning is open, creative, and where students are encouraged to be experimental, the larger social good remains an abstract possibility; where the second sort of alternative is concerned, the larger social good, in this case, the education of children from aspirant but subordinated classes and castes is kept in focus, and creative learning meanwhile has to accommodate itself to the realities of what aspirational parents want for their children. In either instance, educational practice is limited by what is considered given and normative: the model of competitive success that must either be refined or aspired for, but always rendered achieveable. It is not that there are no alternatives to these models. In the Indian context, public good and creative learning were central to the educational visions of both Gandhi and Tagore and in a very different way to the educational thought of Dr Ambedkar. Tagore was particularly sensitive to the claims of local cultures and communities: 'My path, as you know, lies in the domain of quiet, integral action and thought, my units must be few and small and I can but face human problems in relation to some basic village or cultural area. So in the midst of worldwide anguish, and with the problems of over three hundred millions staring us in the face, I stick to my work in Santiniketan and Sriniketan, hoping that our efforts will touch the hearts of our village neighbors, and help them in reasserting themselves in a new social order. If we are to give a start to a few villages, they would perhaps be an inspiration to some others--and my life work will have been done.' This crossing over to another social context, and building an educational culture which followed the rhythms of rural working life, but refused to accept the caste divides that went with it, was unique, and besides, learning was creative precisely because it flowed from what one could learn from one’s immediate context: ‘Their studies, though strenuous, are not a task, being permeated by a holiday spirit, which takes shape in activities in their kitchen, their vegetable garden, their weaving, and their work of small repairs. It is because their class-work has not been wrenched away and walled-in from their normal vocation, because it has been made a part of their daily current of life, that it easily carries itself by its own onward flow.’ Such an approach to schooling appears a misnomer in our contemporary context, given the fact that the larger world of growth and development impinges on local contexts, and besides local contexts themselves, as in Tagore’s time remaine caste-bound. Tagore imagined that schooling would rid students of caste baises, particularly with respect to manual labour; but it is also the case that for children who are born in laboring communities, it is this labour, unvalued, stigmatized and ill-paid that they wish to exit from. How may we reinstate the pedagogical worth and value of what the laboring classes and castes know? Is it possible to imagine an education and learner which looks at laboring cultures and the knowledge that labourers have of material, environment and processes and so on and build a case for an enhanced and creative universal education model on this basis? In all this what do we do with the politics of caste, and of property, labour and State power that go with it? There have of course been experiments that address the realities of class and caste in their curricula and in how they address students from marginal backgrounds. Ekalvya’s work comes to mind, as also the work that groups continue to do with children from Adivasi communities. But this is still different from anchoring the learning experience in the life worlds of laboring castes and cultures and evolving a critical educational model that builds on experiences and knowledge from these contexts: but for this we need to have a sense of lower caste, dalit and Adivasi life; and we need to also ask questions of these life-worlds that is not limited to an understanding of deprivation and suffering. In a sense, we need to ‘universalise’ these life-worlds, so that they are lifted out of their being embedded in the pettiness of caste and become categories that are relevant for human life, labour, thought and interactions as such. *** In our context, education, critical knowledge and emancipation come together in the educational thought and practice of anti-caste radicals and in the work done by left activists in the literacy movement, particularly science literacy. Left activism produced brilliant approaches to democratize learning – focusing on learning by doing, drawing from real life – as is evident from the work of groups such as Kerala Shastriya Sahitya Parishad, to name one. Such activism also helped shaped the attitudes of countless teachers in the State system who went on to experiment in their own classrooms. On the other hand, the question remains: what was the left activist’s sense of the child and childhood? This is an important question, because within the left tradition, particularly in the Bolshevik world view, children were granted an important place. For the Bolsheviks, education was central to the social change they wished to bring about – especially the education of children from families which, for generations, had not been to school. They also had to address a related problem: their revolution, and the civil war that followed in its wake had created thousands of homeless and abandoned children. These children were to be looked after, and kept away from dissolute crime. In all, children were viewed as the symbol of the future, as incipient socialists, or ‘small comrades’: they had to be educated into and for socialism. School, for instance, was not simply a place to learn, or be instructed; schools had to raise socialists. In a practical sense too, this was necessary – for children without home or families, state-run care homes were the only places to be, and in this sense, the state was indeed raising them. In the early years of the revolution, this raising of children was understood in highly imaginative ways – and led to the mushrooming of unusual teaching methods, and exciting publications for children. Art and design were pressed into the service of literacy, and libraries were set up across the Soviet Union to cater to the child – while these were notional rather than real libraries, given the perennial shortange of books, the linking of education to creative publishing and a public library system was unique. In the Indian context, this sort of linking has happened to an extent, but it is not clear if we have evolved our own conception of the child – apposite to our social and cultural contexts. We need, I think, to know what our working classes and castes have to say about childhood, children and what they want for their children. While their world views are shaped by what is around them, and by mainstream expectations, they are also linked to their experiences, of poverty, labour, love, care, violence… In this context, I would like to share the results of a rather impromptu study that some of us carried out in Tamil Nadu two years ago, and which taught us a great deal about how we may imagine a viable future for our children. We examined parents’ hopes and expectations for their children – and concentrated attention on families from marginal social groups. We defined the term marginal broadly, including within that category, dalit and Adivasi families, households comprising parents who worked for nearly 14 hours a day, being engaged in either construction work or sanitary labour; those from nomadic and semi-nomadic communities, who do not speak the local language, and who do not have a permanent dwelling place; and parents who undertake work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme (we realized this has become a visible social category). We spoke to teachers from state-run schools, including Adi-dravida welfare schools, government aided schools, run by Chrisitan missions or trusts, and non-formal education centres. In all, we spoke to 17 teachers and over 50 parents, from diverse backgrounds, including a group of fathers. Our exercise, limited as it was proved fruitful in unexpected ways: we realized that for this set of parents their own role in shaping their children’s future with respect to education, was contingent on their relationship to school – and this, we thought, was an important factor, for it pushed us to rethink fundamental questions to do with child-rearing, so that we do not imagine these practices as anchored in the household and family merely, but also in the school and its environs. To the parents we spoke to, school was not merely a place for children to learn, but one where they are literally ‘raised’ – that is, they would be happy for a school to be such a place, which took itno account their own situation, as working class adults whose lives are difficult, unstable and precarious. While schools are not organized to do this we found out that individual teachers do accommodate children’s needs, however, startling these might be. The head mistress of a state run primary school in Pudukkottai district of Tamil Nadu, famous for the work undertaken in the 1990s during the heyday of the National Literacy Mission, gave us two examples of what she did: an eight year old girl would come to school with her four month old brother and stand outside the classroom. Since their parents went away to work leaving her in charge, she had not know what to do. She wanted to be in school, but was not sure if she could take the child along. Eventually the school arranged for her to keep her brother in school, and for her to feed him from time to time. This happened throughout the period the girl was in primary school. The second story had to do with an even younger child, a seven year old who would ask permission to go home every afternoon at 2 pm to fetch water from the pipes on the street, since there was no one else at home to do so; with her mother being away on work for the better part of the day. She too was allowed to do this, and then come back to school. Another teacher we spoke to, from Thanjavur district spoke of girls in her school whose parents worked on construction sites and would leave home very early, and return late at night. The oldest girl child was entrusted with cooking rice, feeding herself and her siblings, and putting food away for the night – and then ensuring that every one of them got to school. Teachers in turn accommodated the needs of these children, did not penalize them, if they were late, or stayed on longer than others, and made sure they ate their free afternoon meal. Where there are no sensitive teacher or teachers, children simply do not go to school regularly. An entire neighbourhood of children, we found out, remains at home in a dalit hamlet in western Tamil Nadu, because there are no adults around during the day. Being sanitary workers, adults in this community go away before the onset of dawn, and return later in the evening, and it is the oldest child in each family or street that literally takes charge – and it is entirely up to her, whether she can get children to go to school. These are neither new nor startling facts. However we wish to draw attention to how teachers who recognize the social conditions in which their wards come to school can and do make a difference, and how parents, who literally are not present to supervise their children’s learning or growing up, rely tacitly on such teachers and the school as a space to not only teach their children, but also nurture them in a quotidian sense – make sure they eat, and that their younger siblings are taken care of. Teachers who do this also know that unless the school assumes this role and becomes that space, children will not remain in school. But, as I have have noted earlier, whatever individual teachers do or do not do, the State school is yet to emerge as a community space which serves multiple purposes. Subject to a strict administrative regimen, teachers’ tasks are defined by what the state expects from them, not only by way of teaching, but record-keeping as well. This makes the school day a fairly inflexible one, and while teachers do adapt to it in any number of ways in keeping with their sense of vocation, that is still not enough to allow teachers to pay attention to home conditions and ensure that learning allows a negotiation of these as well. There is another problem as well. Parents we spoke to brought up questions to do with how schools engage with them: A dalit parent, we found out, could be put to work inside the school premises, made to shift furniture, sweep, clean up etc – and all this, while waiting to meet with the head mistress or a teacher. In such a context, dalit parents pointed out, they do not feel confident of going to school and confronting teachers: the latter’s education, the fact that they are salaried employees of the state make it difficult for dalit parents to question them, or even if they do, secure a dignified hearing. And so unless their children are particularly troubled, or hurt, parents rarely go to school to speak with teachers. But, it was also evident that notwithstanding this expression of helplessness, dalit parents particularly dalit mothers invested a great deal in education: they were insistent that their children should complete school, and put up with whatever inconveniences there were, for that was the only guarantee that they would get beyond a wage labourer’s job or employment mandated by their caste status, such as sanitary labour, leather work and graveyard labour. We found out too that where there is a receptive teacher, that teacher can actually create precedents for dalit parents to visit school regularly and remain involved with their children’s education. A dalit teacher noted in this context that it is not always easy to remain in touch with parents – for in many families the men drink and squander away their earnings, and women bear the burden of worrying about their children. They therefore do not find time to come to school. For children, the teacher added, the home atmosphere becomes stifiling, with an anxious mother and a violent father and we often have to keep this in mind, when we see children remain listless even after we have given them a lot of attention. The role of the teacher becomes even more crucial, he added in such conditions and one that he cannot take lightly. Our study brought home to us other facts, besides what parents wanted from schools, or for their children: we learned too of their understanding of childhood and children. For many of them childhood was a vulnerable stage of existence, but that did not mean that children could not do what adults did. Children were meant to, and did, assist in household and other labour. Children were not kept away, from familial discussions, violence or quarrels. Neither were they shielded from poverty, or uncertainty. Yet children needed care, protection and parents felt duty-bound to set them on course, and if possible steer them towards a viable future. Interestingly, for these parents, parenting is not so much a familial activity, as it is a social one. Schooling is also seen in this light, as a place where children are ‘raised’. What do these parents want their children to learn and become? I provide two contrasting examples: one, of a group of peasant fathers who sadly and wistfully noted that their children did not want to practice agriculture, felt demeaned by their parents working on the farm, and clearly wanted a home which was not debt-ridden and which had enough money to spend on things that mattered to young people – clothes, movies, and a ‘modern’ future. One parent recounted how his son had run away from home, because he did not want to be made to work in the fields during the holidays. Most of the men who were part of our group discussion were resigned to agriculture being a commercial ‘failure’ but they could not yet let go of it. They worked very hard but for uncertain results, and while they were saddened by their children’s reluctance to take to farming, they also could understand their point of view. The second group of parents that we spoke to are from nomadic communities (the adiyan, narikuravar and boom-boom maattu karar communities) in Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu. Associated with small game hunting, itinerant trading, and soothsaying, these communities are needless to say poor, and worse, have been pushed into begging for a living. Children accompany parents on such occasions and are put up to beg – this is a profession that is widely practiced around pilgrimage sites in the region, for here are three major sacred sites, to do with Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. The tsunami destroyed the fragile seaside homes of these communities, who also could not avail of relief, since they did not have proof of long-term or permananet residence. In this context, some volunteers working on relief came together to set up the school. Today it is a residential campus with its own farm, where rice is grown to cater to the school’s food needs. Initially, children ran away from school often and back to their parents and the streets, and school volunteers would have to literally bring them back. Parents too were not particularly convinced of their wards going to school, or of what good this would actually achieve. This was not difficult to understand, considering these children’s experience of state schooling had been uniformally unpleasant and disempowering – other children teased them, teachers did not quite take to their rather free ways of speaking and behaving, and some openly discriminated against them. Over a period of time, the school population stabilized, and this was in no small measure due to how the school functioned. Since it comes under the SSA, it is assured of some resource support from that body. There has also been support from other donors, which has enabled the school feed the children nutritious and healthy food all year around, and to maintain rather large and imaginatively designed school premises. Further, apart from the regular curriculum children get to draw, do sculpture, theatre, and play music. The teachers, particularly the warden, have been receptive to the community and its concerns. Regular meetings are held with the community and community elders are brought into the foreground, when it comes to school-related celebrations. For instance, on the occasion of March 8, International Working Women’s Day (in 2015) women within the community were upheld as models of labour, enthusiasm and strength. On the other hand, it has not always been easy, to work with the state system. Since Vanavil is a residential school for dropouts, officially, children cannot treat it as a permanent educational space. After a point, particularly once they finish the primary stage, they have to be enrolled in a local state school, though they are permitted to stay in Vanavil. This has not always worked to the children’s advantage, since regular schools continue to be spaces of disquiet and torment. Yet, some of the children have succeeded in completing class x and xii and today two of them are in college. As far as parents are concerned, they would like their children, at least one of them to find a place in the local administration, in addition to wanting them to be artists, engineers … Some of them had started planning for the day their children go to college, or to other schools, and are into saving money for that day. Many find it curious and interesting that children talk to them animatedly about school, things they have learned, invoking worlds and contexts that are removed from the imaginative worlds they have known. There are concerns about behavior, watching television, for one, and chewing betel nut (paan). In both cases discussed above, we see that in this age of dynamic economic growth, those who are marginal, and sadly small peasants are a marginal community in our context, cannot hope too much and beyond what the present system of education offers their children; even if children might themselves have vast dreams. Yet both communities have much to offer that can nurture our vision of education and steer it away from the current obsession with success. The question is: How does one evolve an understanding of childhood and children and educational futures based on these expectations and experiences? Historically, our vision of schooling for the poor or the marginal, to quote Tagore again, is paltry. In his words, schooling for the poor ought not to be ‘doled out as a famine ration, carefully calculated to be just good enough for an emaciated life and a dwarfed mentality… I have generally noticed that when the charitably- minded, dry-bred politicians talk of education for the village folk; they mean a little leftover in the bottom of their cup, after diluting it copiously. They are callously unmindful of the fact, that the kind and the amount of the food that is needful for mental nourishment, must not be apportioned differently according to the social status of those that receive it.’ While schools that work with marginal groups – such as the school I described above – make up their vision of schooling for the poor, as they go along, the fact remains that we act on the assumption that we need to take schooling to them; it is never the other way around, that we have to learn something from them, by way of schooling. Further, our sense of schooling for the poor, especially in a broad sense, is fairly simplistic – that it must be public schooling. But what does that mean? The State’s vision of schooling needs to be reexamined and renewed every so often, and while the State does this in a formalistic sense, we need to ask it to do more: field debates on its sense of children and childhood. Today, the only register in which we appear to be able to speak of children is through the prism of rights – but surely there are other equally valid ways of debating the future of children, which take their worlds seriously, and pay attention to how children in diverse social and cultural contexts think, work, and learn from their environment. *** In this last section, I would like to consider briefly, the vision that Dr Ambedkar had for education: his exhortation to Dalits to educate themselves and his active work towards that end – the setting up of hostels, and a slew of educational institutions deserve to be studied in their own right, for what they have achieved. For now, I would like to call attention to his fundamental premise: that education is the path to emancipation. He thus endowed education with a utopian flavor and possibility. The manner in which he took to learning and books in his own life was proof of his commitment to a life of the mind, a concession to its importance. The example he set has been tremendously important for Dalits, who had been denied learning and deemed unworthy of it, and on that account, deemed and kept tied to a lowly and despised status. This circle of ignorance had to be and could be broken in the age of print and democracy, and to this day it has created cultures of learning within dalit communities across India. As Sharmila Rege has pointed out, and as those who have participated in the Dhikshabhumi events every October, affirm, the grounds at Nagpur, for that period, become a literal treasure trove of publications to do with caste, Dr Ambedkar’s life and work, Buddhism, rationalism and much else – all produced and circulated by modest economies of culture. It is this sense of learning and education that perhaps has resulted in the emergence of spontaneous networks of educational support – from very modest single-person efforts to get dalit children to go to school to more organized efforts that enable dalit children access State resources meant for their welfare, including higher education, and avail of affirmative action policies. This utopic vision of education assumes the child learner to be an aspirant of a very different kind – not one who is merely competitive, or set on achievement. Rather, the learner is one to whom education makes all the difference between a life of bondage and discrimination and a life of possible hope and freedom. We need to tease out the implications of this model of the child: if children and childhood are central to this emancipation project, how are to to rethink emancipation from this point of view? For the adult, the relationship between education and emancipation might be self-evident; and in any case adult practice makes that connection clear. But where children are concerned, to create a life world, at home, in school, and in society at large that takes emancipation seriously would require us to rethink schooling itself, both its content, structure and process – and not only in terms of ideology. We also would need to go beyond some attractive alternatives, including theses on ‘deschooling society’ and ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’. Keeping these histories in mind, we may want to press ahead with other questions that are particularly relevant in our conext. So some of the questions we may have to ask are: How may we rework child-centred approaches in this context? What sort of balance would we want to strike between creative, spontaneous exploratory play and guided critical learning? Would labour so crucial to dalit and other working class lives, be a source of knowledge? Would workers – artisans, performers, artists, from within marginal contexts - be teachers? How could their skills be made relevant to contemporary needs? Should some things be left behind, transcended? *** I would like to conclude by going back to where I started: if all is not right with children in India, how do we understand the worrying descriptions I started out with, in view of what I have discussed so far? On the one hand, we have the middle and upper classes’ obsessive relationship to childhood animated by a vision of the child as a future consumer, who is driven by notions of competitive success to achieve goals already set in place. On the other hand, is the child who is malnourished, subject to systematic as well random violence, and who has to make do with an indifferent and loveless school system. Both are victims of an economy and polity where children matter, only as future successes or future victims. The one elicits admiration, shaded by anxiety; the other incites pity, haunted by fear. For every successful child there are many who fail, and who are wrecked or made to feel wrecked on that account, while the successful ones are conditioned to not let the pressure show. As for the other sort of child, she is at best a rights-bearing person and at worst an object of sentimental charity. Both stand testimony to the poverty of the adult imagination, our imagination: and both pay the price in different ways. The urgent need therefore is to begin thinking aloud and together on what our children mean to us, not in a familial, sentimental way, but as integral beings who share our lives, and whose capabilities need to be cared for and nourished; we also need to place different kinds of children in focus, when we debate this question, calling attention to their various situations, of class, caste, faith and region. The challenge before us is to evolve a sense of childhood that answers to the experiences of the vast majority of our children, and simultaneously transcends the limits which shape those experiences. We need a new poetics of childhood, a philosophy of the child, which takes the dalit and Adivasi child, the peasant and artisanal child and their worldviews and experiences seriously. We have some precedents in this regard, some experiments, and what we lack is political will on the one hand, and imagination on the other. To yoke the one to the other is our challenge, because as I have demonstrated, public good has become impoverished because it is understood through a prism of justice and needs alone; whereas individual achievement remains captive to a model of competitive success. Creative, imaginative visions, gleaned from how a majority of our population live, labour, love and experience the world can and ought to provide us with a nourishing vision of childhood. Page 12 of 12