Education as gatekeeping

Chintan Girish Modi

Vishal Vasanthakumar, who has worked with the Tamil Nadu government’s Department of School Education, launched an education start-up to teach public speaking and debating to children, got a Master’s Degree in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, been a political consultant to a political party, and is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Cambridge University, has poured these experiences into a book called The Smart and the Dumb: The Politics of Education in India.

The book is based on the premise that globalization has “contributed to new dimensions of inequality and stratification” instead of being a social leveller that has spelt success for everyone. The author argues that education has failed to fulfil its promise of being “a one-stop solution to address all of society’s problems”; in fact, education has taken on the role of gatekeeping. Caste, class, and gender influence one’s access to education as well as employment opportunities.

Although the author mentions that he is bothered by increasing privatization, he also clarifies that offering solutions “to solve the quagmire of India’s problems in education” is not his intention behind writing this book. Each chapter in the book is only meant to be a record of stories and conversations from the field, collected on his travels and peppered with some data and commentary. It is likely to be of interest to researchers, school administrators, policymakers, educators, activists, entrepreneurs working in education, and people who consume non-fiction to know more about the state of their country than they can glean from primetime television shows that tend to blur the boundary between news and entertainment.

In this book, we meet children who grow up amidst violent conflict and want guns as Christmas presents. We visit communities that are reluctant to educate girls because they fear that education would empower them and make it difficult to control them. We get to learn about the insecurities of palmyra tree climbers whose children do not want to pursue their hereditary occupation because it is viewed as undignified work in the labour market. We get a glimpse of the cut-throat competition encouraged in coaching centres that train students to ace the entrance exams that would enable them to join an Indian Institute of Technology.

The author also acquaints us with school leaders who want to use history textbooks to instil patriotism but not foster critical thinking, mothers who have to be primary caregivers for children with developmental disorders with little or no support from the fathers, and students who are initiated into “networks of caste solidarity” through seemingly innocuous extracurricular festivals and competitions that restrict participation to elite schools.

When the author set out to write, he was looking for answers to two questions: What does education mean to different people? Whose needs are being met by education? The entire book stays loyal to this enquiry. In the process, it also throws light on the author’s discovery of his own caste privilege and his realization that the word “middle class” is a slippery and dubious construct widely used by Indians to peddle narratives that deny their social capital.

As a child, when his academic performance did not measure up to his grandmother’s expectations, she used to tell him, “Don’t you want to score good marks, get a good job and earn lots of money?” She wanted him to believe that “if one scored well, it was a reflection of one’s intellect and skills, and that would lead to a high-paying job”. In this book, the author questions those assumptions and urges us to give up the notion that people who are not doing well financially are either lazy, or lacking in skills. While education does lead to social and economic mobility for many, there is no guarantee of such success for everyone. He cautions us against sorting people into two categories – the smart and the dumb – based on their success, which is a result of multiple factors and is not simply an indication of their talent.

He remarks, “By continuously peddling the myth of meritocracy in a neoliberalized world where opportunities are getting farther and farther out of reach, the politics of education becomes a politics of humiliation, where regret and comparison are constantly provoked.”

This point is well-taken. However, one wonders why each chapter in the book opens with quotes from scholars like Eric Fromm, Urvashi Butalia, Nancy Fraser, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire when the author does not intend to engage in a deeper way with their work. They remind one of blackboards in schools around the country, where a “Thought for the Day” is prominently displayed but never discussed.

One hopes that, in future editions of this book, the author – given his background as an educator and his training as an academic – will find a more creative and engaging way to share the material gathered in the course of his research and benefit his target audience.

The reviewer has an M.Phil. in English Language Education. He has worked with the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, the Kabir Project, Shishuvan, Muktangan, and the Prajnya Trust’s Education for Peace Initiative. He can be reached at chintan.writing@gmail.com.