Abstract
In post-Jomtien phase, community participation in school education management has appeared as one of the most prominent features in all educational development programmes at global level. In line with this trend, India has also placed a significant focus on local communities in school management through various programmes such as LokJumbish, District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and SarvaShikshaAbhiyaan, etc. All these programmes have been implemented with active involvement and financial assistance from international agencies such as UNICEF and World Bank. Considering community as a viable grass root institution, these community participation programmes have assigned some crucial aspects of school management, such as school mapping, social accountability, curriculum design, resources mobilization, etc. to local stakeholders. However, these programmes have failed to customize the global notion of community participation to meet the local circumstances in India. These programmes grossly undermine the local character of community served by the public schools. Since public schools in India are largely catering to the poor and marginalized section of the society, the capacity of local community vis-à-vis education remained very limited. Further, caste, gender, and social distance between teacher and stakeholders remain other unresolved issues. This paper tries to interrogate these concerns with the help of qualitative data collected through primary field survey based on semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders in a village in Haryana, India. The study argues that the current idealization of community participation can be problematic if we fail to imbibe the social and local ethos of specific region. While the role of community participation as strong viable grass root structure in effective school management remains a desirable goal for the future, given the present limitations, this is unlikely to bring about the required changes.
Introduction
In post-Jometian phase, community participation in school education management has appeared as one of the most prominent features in all educational development programmes at global level. In line with this trend, India has also placed a significant focus on local communities in school management through various programmes such as District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and SarvaShikshaAbhiyaan (SSA) largely funded by the World Bank. These programmes, especially DPEP, marked the initiation of global impact and thrust on the concept of community participation in school education. The present study tries to analyse the concept of community participation in school education in the global and local scenario. How does the conceptualization of community participation at international level differ from the local-level functioning of community? These programmes have failed to customize the global notion of community participation to meet the local circumstances in India. The local character of community served by the public schools is grossly undermined. This paper analyses these contradictory equations from different perspectives such as caste, gender, social distance between teacher and local communities, etc.
The study is divided into four sections. After outlining the background of the study in the first section, the second section focuses on the initiation of global impact on Indian education. The third section discusses the concept of community participation in the Indian context. The fourth section tries to support the theoretical concern discussed in the third section with the help of findings from the field survey. The fifth section concludes the study.
Background of the study
District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) was implemented in Haryana in 1996 in the selected four districts: Hisar, Kaithal, Jind, and Sirsa on the basis of the highest gap in male/female literacy rate. Under different provisions of DPEP, VECs (Village Education Committee) were established for enhancing community participation in school education. These were districts that witnessed the functioning of the concept of community participation in school education for the first time in Haryana. Among these districts, Jind was the most backward district as per the selection criteria. Therefore Jind is selected for the study. The selection of the village Dhamtan Sahib was done on the basis of a government report and State School Board reports. This has been reported as the ideal village of this district from the perspective of quality of education by Board of School Education Haryana in 2005–2006 (Haryana School Result, 2005–2006). The village was declared ‘an ideal village’ in 2006 by the state government (Haryana Administrative Report, 2006–2007). Keeping the large parameters of the micro studies in mind, only government schools were observed.
Methodology
A mixed methodology was used for the case study. It was based on survey research, obtaining primary and secondary data through interviews, and document analysis. Open-ended questions and interviews were transcribed and inferences were drawn. Parents with different socio-economic backgrounds, Sarpanch 2 of the village, ex-presidents and ex-secretary of the Village Education Committee VECs, female and SC (Scheduled Castes) 3 members of the VECs, teachers of the school and members of newly constituted SMCs(School Management Committees) were interviewed. Information was also collected from documents and records available in schools and education offices. The data for the study was collected in two rounds. As the study was originally part of my MPhil dissertation, the first data was collected in 2007–2008 when only VECs were functioning. To capture the more updated scenario, data was again collected in 2011. This time VECs were replaced with school specific committees, i.e. School Management Committees (SMCs) 4 under the newly implemented Right to Education Act 2010.
Globalization and Indian school education
Ruperez states that ‘Globalization is the most general feature of the historical period education will experience in this century’ (Ruperez, 2003: 249). Globalization in the context of education can be defined as ‘the process in which particular ideas, images and practices of teaching, learning and schooling are brought about, mutually interact and influence national educational systems’ (Crossley and Watson (2003) as cited in Bak, 2006: 4). The education sector is affected by a wave of globalization as education policies in many countries of the world, including India, are engulfed in a series of educational reforms, involving drastic changes in the planning and management of education. Before locating the effects of globalization in Indian education, let's discuss the brief history of globalization in the education sector.
International efforts towards providing quality ‘Education for All’ became prominent with the Jometian conference. The Education for All (EFA) Conference, which was co-sponsored by three United Nations agencies (UNESCO, UNICEF and UNDP) and the World Bank, was held in Jomtien, Thailand in March 1990. In the declaration that emerged from the conference, both developing country governments and donor agencies committed themselves to the goal of ensuring basic education for all children by 2000 (Bennell and Furlong 1998: 45). This was also a time of economic crisis that lowered the total expenditure on educational areas. 5 These circumstances came with an opportunity in which the World Bank insisted that developing countries must borrow for primary education and health. Before the 1980s, India was persistently refusing to borrow money from the World Bank for primary education. DPEP was the first major instance of nexus of foreign aid and initiation of global impact in the Indian school education system. Kumar (2001: 562) maintains that, ‘while programme (DPEP) is certainly an outcome of the post-Jomtien era, official programme documents seldom make a mention of the link between DPEP and Jomtien’. Even before DPEP, there were small projects in different regions of India, as Kumar has mentioned: ‘In India, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Bihar Education Project, the Lok Jumbish Programme, Rajasthan, and the Andhra Pradesh Primary Education Programme, ushered in with the help of UNICEF, SIDA, and ODA, represented the “Education for All” ethos. India also began to develop its relationship with the World Bank in primary education through the Uttar Pradesh Basic Education Programme started as a pilot project in 10 districts with the lowest female enrolment in UP. DPEP represented an ascendance and entrenchment of this relationship’ (2001: 561).
After DPEP, SarvaShikshaAbhiyaan (SSA) (Education for All) was another major programme that made the presence of global educational trends felt in India. All these projects in general and DPEP and SSA in particular brought many new trends in Indian school education, for example:
the DPEP manifesto was the first national-level document where government concern shifted from elementary education to primary education; the concept of para teacher was inaugurated in Indian schools on a large scale; decentralization of educational administration was heavily emphasized as never before; a reliance on community participation in improving educational management at grass root level.
These are a few of the major trends that are accompanied or intensified with the emergence of global influence on the local front. These drifts have added new dimensions to the whole educational domain by underlining the need for reforms in educational systems with particular emphasis on decentralization and localization of administration of education (Tyagi, 2012). Globalization has implications for localization of educational reforms which maximize the educational relevance to local development and bring in community support and resources, local partnership and collaboration in learning, teaching and research (Cheng, 2003). Against this background, this paper is an attempt to study the functioning of the most remarkable global trend, i.e. ‘community participation in school education’ at the local level. The paper tries to highlight the contradiction between the expectations from community participation and its practical functioning at ground level.
Community participation in school education: ideological dimensions
In the DPEP, the first-time role of community participation was emphasized in providing quality school education. To share Kumar's (2001: 564) views, …the community has a central presence in the discourse of DPEP. The guidelines booklet says that the DPEP strategy consists of ‘stressing the participatory processes whereby the local community facilitates participation, achievement and school effectiveness…. [T]he usage of term community by DPEP technically implies ‘institutions’ like Village Education Committee (VEC), Parent Teacher Associations (PTA), Mothers Teacher Associations (MTA), Mahila Mandals, etc. Of these, The VEC has been envisaged as a key institution for community mobilisation, participation and empowerment under DPEP.
The concept of community in Indian context is more influenced by the Gandhian ideology. For Gandhi, the community in general and village community in particular is a more harmonious, integral structure, which has common needs and works together to achieve these common goals. After independence, the community development programmes and policies remained based on these ideas. However, different scholars have found problems with this notion. As Singh argues (2008: 4), ‘The village as “imagined community” (as harmonious and egalitarian) … never became a reality and in fact reinforces the division and hierarchy around which the village were traditionally organized.’ Vasavi (2008) finds that the concept of community on which the Indian policy and programmes of community development/decentralization are based, has overlooked the most realistic portrayal of village communities, as sites of caste-based conflict, tension and exclusion. When the term community is used in an Indian context, the heterogeneous nature of the population cannot be undermined. The problems of caste and gender have to be kept in consideration. These issues, if not dealt strategically, have the potential of making the whole concept of community participation dysfunctional. In the case of school education also, community is composed of people with different aspirations and needs that cannot be ignored.
The stimuli for the current phenomenon of community mobilization comes from outside. Independent local initiative, particularly in the field of primary education is extremely rare. Whether it is finance or ideology, there is an external input that provides the first seed for mobilization. In most cases, it is under a project that has been conceived and designed outside the community, possibly outside India. In most of the cases, there is an external funding involved. Under the external ideological input, there are chances that the felt needs of the community are obfuscated and more stress is on creating an ‘echo effect’ (Kantha and Narian, 2003). There is less stress on recognizing the region-specific characteristics of community and designing strategies as per requirement of that region. It becomes very relevant to quote Kumar (2001: 564) here: … we need to ask whether community is a discovery or an invention …. [H]ad it been a discovery, its own powers or life forces would have been recognised. Instead, we find that the DPEP presents the community itself as an instrument to be first devised and than sharpened for a given purpose. Thus invented community however, does not have the freedom of choice to either demand what it actually desires or not demand primary education as the invention is bound by a predestined purpose.
The community participation process is expected to create spaces for social interaction between teachers and stakeholders. The role of teacher in facilitating and enhancing community participation cannot be underestimated. The major determinants of effective school performance reflect collaborative, participatory relationship within schools and between schools and their communities (Wheeler et al., 1991: 2 as cited in Shaeffer, 1992: 171). To view the teacher–community relationship from the participatory perspective, generally community participation has been understood as a means to check the punctuality of teachers. Raina (2003: 185) contends that the issue everyone seems to agree upon is that community must pressurize the hapless and generally overburdened teachers to perform and check their absenteeism, as if that is the major issue in school education, which implies a supervisory role for the local committee. On the other hand teachers always question the competence of illiterate villagers to check their capacity. In Vasavi's (1997: 3182) words, ‘The teachers question not only the capacity of village leaders to perform functions related to educational matters but also the desirability of making teachers accountable to them.’ In this context, Bray (2001: 26) opines that ‘They (teachers) are especially resentful when they consider communities to lack the professional skills and insights necessary to make appropriate interventions.’ The class distance between the teacher and the pupils’ parents is certainly another factor that hampers the smooth sailing of teacher–community relation. The PROBE Team report (1999) mentioned that within the rural society, teachers remain relatively privileged in terms of class, caste and gender. To view from the class differences perspective, government teachers almost inevitably belong to the more affluent sections of the rural society, by virtue of their relatively high salaries and favourable terms of employment. The case study on community participation in school education, will explain these theoretical concerns in the next section.
Glimpses from the ground: a case study of community participation in school education
Before analysing the community participation scenario, it is necessary to have a look at the social composition of the village. The social profile of the village shows that the Scheduled Caste (SC) community comprises approximately 17 % of the total village population. The clear residential segregation reflects social and economic differentiation that exists in the villages. A walk through the different habitations gives the impression that there is a direct correlation between economics and social status in the village. Outward signs of prosperity such as cemented houses, TV antennas, cattle, neighbourhood store and a general air of well-being are most evident in the houses of the upper-caste community. Although all these facilities are now appearing in SC habitations, they are not as much in evidence as in the upper-community localities. Jaat community being the dominant upper caste, both sociologically and population-wise, the real power seems to rest with them. Most of the time, the post of the Sarpanch is held by the candidate from this community. The current Sarpanch is a woman from Jaat community. The representation of women is only on paper, the real power is being used by her husband, which was revealed by the interviews with Sarpanch and other villagers. If we look at the means of livelihood, it was found that communities in non-SC categories have the most government jobs and comprise the influential old land-owning community of the village.
Gender perspective
To look from the gender perspective, it is important to mention that Haryana is a patriarchal society. As per census 2011, Haryana has recorded its sex ratio as 879 which is less than the national sex ratio (943). ‘Female foeticide, domestic violence, dowry deaths and harassment, caste based oppressions and cultural restrictions on women's access to educational and health opportunities are some of the well documented and commented aspects of gender oppression prevalent in all the socio economic sections of Haryana’ (Vandana, 2004: 263).The government has taken many affirmative actions, such as women having 33% representation in panchyats. Even VEC and School Management Committees (SMC) have representation for females. But these representation policies have hardly any impact on improving the female condition in society. In a comparative study on Haryana and Himachal Pradesh's schooling by Marie Eve Bondroite (PROBE 1999:122), it was found that there is less equality in Haryana among male and female. It was observed that many mothers in Haryana have no idea of the cost of schooling and considered this to be their husbands’ business.
In terms of participation, community participation turns out to be only the participation of men. VEC meeting registers revealed that female members generally remain absent. Another issue that can be an important factor responsible for ‘no female participation’ and also shows the face of patriarchal society is the ‘Veil System’. The veil system is still prevalent in today's society. Females keep themselves under veil in front of their elders. This veil system ensures that females don't speak or participate in front of the elders of the village. These rigid social traditions don't let them gain confidence to participate in public spheres. This culture of grabbing social spaces by the male and lack of confidence among females is cultivated during their schooling. It was found that in the co-educational school, there were different sections for boys and girls in the same class. If there is a need to organize a combined class, teachers have to seek permission of the principals. This was done on the instructions of village panchyats. 6 In such gender-based segregation, females don't gain confidence to share public spaces with the male. The field evidences show that given proper opportunity, females can play an important role in solving educational problems of the village. In all the villages, it was found that when parents were invited to form a SMC, mostly mothers came to the school. 7 The principal of one surveyed school shared her experience, saying that whenever they call the parents of any child, generally mothers come to the school. 8 In spite of social barriers, they try to listen to the complaints from the teacher and understand the issues. Female participation generally was found visible in ensuring the regular attendance of their child in school. There is a need to focus on this potential role of the female. Given the social and cultural barriers, it was noticed that mothers have a comparatively high rate of participation in attending school meetings or visiting schools when they are supposed to deal with a female teacher or it is a girl's school. Male to female interaction still remains an uncommon occurrence.
Caste perspective
Besides gender, caste remains another social impediment obstructing community participation. As with female representation, scheduled caste (SC) representatives also have seats in VECs and SMCs. In a similar manner, their participation also remains rooted in social and cultural traditions of hierarchies. Incidences of social tension between upper and lower castes outside the school premises, are reflected within school functioning also. To cite one incident from the field, in one of the surveyed schools, a cook for the mid-day meal was appointed from lower castes. Although the social profile of the school maintains the majority of students to be lower caste, still parents of upper castes objected to the appointment. These small number of upper caste children did not eat food while the lower caste cook was there. Subsequently that cook was replaced with a new cook from upper caste. It shows the extent of influence of upper caste. 9 These incidents certainly negatively affect the participatory process, since the SMCs and VECs could not take action against such deeds in spite of the presence of SC representatives.
Another incident demonstrates the relationship between upper class teacher and lower class students, reflecting the social barriers. Generally teachers ask students to fetch water for the class teacher. When this school was visited for survey, the teacher herself brought water for me, when asked why she didn't ask any student to get the water, her reply carried caste notions. She replied that there were only two students from upper caste and both of them were absent that day, so she couldn't allow these untouchables to touch the water. These social division inside the classroom reflect the outside social conditions. Upper caste teachers generally don't consider the studies of these students necessary. Acharya (1985: 1787) also analyses this aspect …they feared that universal and compulsory enrolment would deprive them of the easy supply of child labour. In that case, they would be forced to hire in adult people instead of child labour at a higher wage which would cause an increase in their cost of agricultural production. Besides they feared that labour relations would deteriorate if laboring classes were educated. It was generally apprehended that the labouring classes would refuse to submit to the authority of higher strata and would try to assert their rights and privileges once they got a little education.
Teacher–community linkages
The association of the teaching community with the parents/stakeholders is a must criterion for invoking community participation in school development. Though different mechanisms and structures have been introduced to encourage community participation, until the teachers are involved for this purpose, it is impossible to obtain the desired results. However the perception of school authorities towards the stakeholders and their social background has remained a determining factor to enhance and/or impede the community participation process. These schools mostly serve the most marginalized sections of the community (both in terms of caste and class). Interviews with the government teachers reveal that they generally consider that these communities are not interested in education. The parents cannot provide any academic support to their children as they themselves are illiterate. The issue of first-generation learners remains a major challenge for these families.
10
The parents are criticized that they are not bothered whether their child has finished homework or not. These communities don't have traditions of schooling in their family. The incentives in the form of scholarships, free uniforms, books and no fees, are the only aspects, as mentioned by teachers, where the parents show interest.
11
It is said that the only occasions when the parents visit the school are when there is some delay in distribution of fellowship. Pointing to their occupational limitations, one teacher observed, ‘As the parents of these children are daily wage labourers, they treat government school as free crèches where their children are safe for the whole day with free mid day meal.’
12
Generally it was found that the teachers looked down on the parents as they don't consider them interested in education. It is to be noted that the statements of teachers were mostly caste specific. Regarding their perception about utility of community participation, the teachers opined that ‘what participation these people can provide? It would be more helpful if they don't interfere in school's functioning. The parents are mostly illiterate and cannot understand the technicalities of school functioning. Their participation and regular visit to school would create only undue interference in smooth school functioning.’
13
The school authorities generally could not see any value attached to community participation. The interpretations and stands taken by teachers regarding communities and their social backwardness only reveal the social prejudices of these communities shared in the society. As Sunny (2011) observed, how far can we encourage individual teachers, who are also part and parcel of existing social practices and perspectives, to act for change, when the school system itself is not geared for it? Teachers’ views and their reactions are part of the social processes. In this context, Lipman (1997 as cited in Anderson, 1998) found that participatory school restructuring cannot transform the educational experiences of marginalized students unless changes occur at both personal and societal levels. She argues that educators' beliefs and assumptions, as well as relations of power in schools and communities, must be challenged. The government schools are the places where the cultural capital possessed by the stakeholders are not respected or valued. Cultural capital
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informs relationships between schooling and family/social structure and this is also seen to shape the teacher's role in negotiating or not negotiating with students with different cultural capital (Sunny, 2011). The above discussed teachers’ perception of community and its relation with cultural capital is further very well noted by Sunny (2011: 29), … as the common practices of schooling do not accommodate people without cultural capital, their ‘deficiency’ is seen as the reason for not achieving schooling. This turns the problem on its head because the individual is blamed for her social deprivation. But the role of modern schooling should be to enable people who have been historically deprived of cultural capital. It would be expected to shape a space that is not simply physical, but social – that could be enabling, supportive and dialectical. And if such spaces are built, teachers as part of such a system would need to act differently through a different nature of textbook, perspective and practices of dialogue in the classrooms. But in the given socio-historic situations, the teacher herself as a part of the class-caste-gendered practices of society does not act for change.
Another dimension of hierarchy between teacher and community is visible in terms of class differences. The economic status of teacher and a common villager indicate that these sections belong to two different classes. Kingdon (2010), while citing the case of Uttar Pradesh (UP), argues that the ratio of teacher salary to per capita income tells us how affluent the teacher is, with respect to the average person in the country. Further, it also indicates the social distance between the teacher and the taught. PROBE Team report (1999) mentioned that within the rural society, teachers remain relatively privileged in terms of class, caste and gender. Taking class first, government teachers almost inevitably belong to the more affluent sections of the rural society, by virtue of their relatively high salaries and favourable terms of employment. The poor parents face greater difficulty in establishing rapport with the teacher. In this context, Kingdon (2010: 6) argued: When teachers are so much better-off than the students, they can look down on students with disdain since children in government schools typically come from poorer than average backgrounds in any case, and may come to school shabby, unclean and underfed. This gaping social distance may also partly explain the high teacher absence rate if well-paid teachers feel it ‘beneath them’ to teach such poor children or if it causes them to not take the education of these children seriously. Such social distance represents very unequal relations between teachers and the village citizenry and it may explain – at least in part – why community participation in monitoring education via Village Education Committees and School Education Committees has apparently not been effective in improving school and teacher accountability in India: ‘citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it. There is always psychological inferiority among the parents of children in government school. Generally, only socially and economically backward sections send their children to government schools. Even if teacher is from same community, he is being treated as a Bada Aadmi i.e. influential person who can cause harm to the future of their children if he is not being listened or obeyed. They always hesitate in speaking in front of teacher. Further, economic status of teachers obstructs this teacher and community partnership.
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Capacity-building scenario
The decentralization would necessarily mean transfer of responsibilities and powers to the lower level unit and functionaries. The decentralized units such as VEC and SMC have to be capable and efficient to shoulder the new responsibilities. Reflecting on the issue of decentralization, Lauglo (1990, as cited in Govinda, 1997) states that the distribution of authority will be conditioned by the confidence that politicians and officials have in their subordinates. If they are ill-trained and poorly motivated, their superiors will seek to simplify and standardize the tasks, using highly directive supervision. This is the case in many developing countries. This clearly highlights how fundamental is the need to build management capacities if community participation under decentralized management is to become a reality. A piecemeal approach of transferring powers to local leadership without strengthening internal management of institutions may lead to undue interference and subject the schools to undue political pressure from parochial elements in local community (Govinda, 2003b). The training needs to be viewed as purposive strategy with clearly set goals matching the overall objective and requirements of the department.
The ground reality reveals that capacity building is found to be the weakest aspect of the community participation agenda. The whole training process, as underlined by practising educationists, is reduced to one-time workshops and is mired in the lack of conceptualization of training as a pedagogic tool that can enhance learning. Modules produced at the State Council of Educational Research and Training and District Institute of Educational Training are simply applied on an arithmetic proportional basis, depending only on the numbers of schools and teachers to be covered (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2009). To quote Haryana Appraisal Report 2011–2012 (p.135), on the nature of training offered to Block Resource Persons (BRPs) 16 in 2010–2011, ‘One day long training programme was organized for all ABRCs to enable them about the implementation of SSA. One day training programme is being organized for all ABRCs. Besides, two days long training programme is also planned to organize for about 600 ABRCs on action research.’
An interview with SSA personnel at District Project Implementation Unit (DPIU) at Jind informed that the training programmes are kept as the last priority. It has been further informed that the training programmes are conducted at the end of the financial year to show the utilization of grants in files. These officials could not recall anything about training content except the number of person trained. 17 It would be very relevant to quote the VEC/VCC training plan from District Annual Work Plan and Budget (AWP&B), to indicate that the major focus is only on estimating the budget and counting the numbers of days for training. To quote the progress in the context of community/VEC training as mentioned in AWP&B for district Jind, ‘VEC members’ training for two days will be organized at cluster level in the month of Jan/Feb 2010. All ABRCs of the distance will be trained at DPIU Jind as Master Trainer for VEC training. 1569 male and 1047 female = 2616 VEC members will be trained. Sanctioned Budget during this year was Rs 1.89 lacs out of which Rs nil are utilized up to 31–12–2009.’ (AWP&B, 2010–2011: 57)
The basic emphasis is on producing numbers of person trained and the amount of resources utilized than focusing on real output. The content of training, the quality issues and collection of feedback of earlier training or the impact of earlier training programmes are not given any importance. Interviews with VEC and SMC members reveal that capacity building training has hardly been of any benefit to them. They were hardly able to recollect any aspect of training. To cite one participant's remarks on training camps, ‘the training camps are of no use in terms of enhancing teaching skills. These are like tea-snack party.’ Thus the capacity building scenario presents a very dismal picture and raises serious questions about the success of community participation programmes.
Conclusion
The analysis of the functioning of community participation raises some serious questions regarding the community and scope of community participation in school education. The first question is about treating community as a ‘homogenous group’. Vimala Ramachandran and Aarti Saihjee (2002: 1068) say: The undeniable fact is that people, be they parents, teachers, children or community members, do not have one homogeneous identity and hence cannot be subsumed in a generic category – the community. While there are distinct social and economic group like SCs, STs or OBC, these categories also need to be further broken down in each specific context. Similarly though gender is no doubt a source of stratification, it is also stratified along the lines of caste, classes and community. Community Participation is perhaps the most misused and misunderstood word in development jargon today. Community in itself has no meaning- it is like saying India or Rajasthan. Presumably, we are referring to those who are either left out or are participating from the margins … Community Participation implies the participation of the disempowered. Ideally it would involve people who have little or no access to basic education – as a community, geographical area or gender. However, this is easier said than done because it is these very people who are the most difficult to reach out to. Greater responsiveness demands a two-pronged approach. First, there needs to be a more consistent policy for community-based institutions and local governments, such that will enable them to become genuine forms for the articulation of community concerns … Second, teachers and head masters need to be trained to establish relationships and work with such organisations and engage in a dialogue about education with them … A genuine strengthening of community-school linkages would be possible when the internal dynamic of the system shifts towards professional and societal rather than ulterior goals.
Footnotes
Funding
I wish to thank Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) for providing me Junior research fellowship for my doctoral research. This paper was a part of my doctoral thesis.