Empowering the Subaltern: Resources of Hope for those left behind by the Indian education system

Following the first special issue on ‘Indian Education at the Crossroads of Postcoloniality, Globalization and 21stC Knowledge Economy’, the authors in this second special issue have written on diverse issues affecting efforts to reform and improve the Indian system of education. In many ways these articles bring to the public sphere subaltern issues of Indian education. Spivak (2002: 24) wrote:

I presented ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ as a paper twenty years ago. In that paper I suggested that the subaltern could not ‘speak’ because, in the absence of institutionally validated agency, there was no listening subject. My listening, separated by space and time, was perhaps an ethical impulse. But I am with Kant in thinking that such impulses do not lead to the political. There must be a presumed collectivity of listening and countersigning subjects and agents in the public sphere for the subaltern to ‘speak’.

The authors have been committed in their research and writing to examine critical issues affecting the education and empowerment of the subalterns of the Indian society. From women’s education and empowerment to issues of establishing international research collaboration by native Indian scholars, the aim of these papers is to open up critical dialogue and research inquiry for the future. These papers are expected to be springboards for generating future research questions to expand the knowledge base on critical issues affecting Indian education.

There are huge gaps in research-based knowledge on the history, philosophy, sociology and economics of Indian education compared to that of other countries. The internal ethnic and cultural diversity of India as a Nation State and its hybridized postcolonial subjectivity defies any standardized approach to investigate educational problems within the country. Even the British colonialists adopted different approaches to education in, for example, the province of Punjab compared to the province of Bengal (Allender, 2006). Moreover, as Seth (2007: 12) wrote,

… few nationalists doubted that what India needed was modern, western education, and hardly any advocated a return to ‘indigenous’ knowledge practices, even as they urged that modern knowledge be disseminated through Indian languages rather than through the medium of English. That modern Western knowledge has come to be normalized, such that it is identified with knowledge as such, is as much the ‘gift’ of nationalism as it is of colonialism.

 The enormity and complexity of the problems are therefore both daunting, taking into consideration the internal diversity of 780 indigenous languages ¹ from which 220 were lost in the past 50 years; and only 22 languages are now recognized as official languages by the Indian constitution. While English was supposed to be phased out as the official language after independence, it became one of the official languages for communication, in accordance with the Official Languages Act 1963. Globally this is a contentious issue because organizations such as UNESCO are still debating how we can be more responsive to local languages and cultures to successfully promote education for all as basic human right. ² Within India there are large numbers of out-of-school children (1.4 million) despite the progress made in recent years. Although India constitutes 17% of the world population, the country accounts for 37% of the world’s illiterate adults (i.e., 287 million illiterate adults) according to the UNESCO 11th Education for All (EFA) global monitoring report. The study also found that in spite of recent increases in access to education, one-third of primary school age children reached fourth grade in school without learning the very basics they needed to know. This fact has been also testified by the annual ASER reports published by Pratham, an independent NGO, since 2005.

However, despite this abysmal state of education, Sen and Dreze (2013) cite the 1999 PROBE (Public Report on Basic Education) study and studies run by the Pratichi Trust ³ to emphasize the fact that, contrary to popular notions, even the poorest of the poor Indian parents consider education with high regard and think that education can help their children to progress in life. Girls in particular are held back from pursuing education due to safety concerns since the schools are often located far away from where parents work and often public schools do not have basic amenities such as separate toilets for girls, and teacher absenteeism has become almost like a cultural norm in most public schools.

Though cultural Marxists generally emphasize the role of the state in the delivery of public services, Sen and Dreze (2013: 110) emphasized the role of state in providing public funding for education by quoting from classical liberal economist, Adam Smith (1776), to emphasize state responsibility for providing basic public education:

For a very small expense the publick [sic] can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

However, the effectiveness of public provision by the state compared to private provision is a critical issue in the Indian context, much like some other developing postcolonial countries in Africa. Even the poorest of the poor parents prefer private schools because of the ineffectiveness of the state in delivering quality education within the public system. An increasing body of literature on low-cost-private schools has therefore emerged in recent years. Based on the existing body of literature and her own research on low-cost private schools, Srivastava (2013) has raised serious questions about the quality of these low-cost private schools, just as Dreze and Sen (1995). In the absence of a good system of public education, these low-cost-private schools may provide children from lower socio-economic groups access to education, but they also contribute to the segregation of the Indian schooling system already segmented by social class, which Spivak (2002: 26) critiques as ‘class apartheid’.

Moreover, Chudgar and Quin (2012) have argued that the reason why private schools appear to be performing better within the Indian system is because majority of students in private schools come from comparatively better socioeconomic backgrounds. Nambissan (2010), has argued that because of the predominance of ‘family sponsorship’ by upper-class educated parents, who strategically choose to educate their children in segregated better resourced private English medium-elite schools, performance and accountability is very poor in the public system of education, where majority of the children are first-generation learners from poor families with illiterate parents belonging to minority excluded groups. While ‘school input’ from the state has increased in terms of improvement in basic infrastructure and teacher salary in public schools, very little attention has been given to pedagogy and school governance. School-drop-out rates have thus been high, although access has increased over the years. Moreover, in presenting an analysis of data from various government sources and independent research institutions, the first internationally collaborative India Exclusion Report (2014), ⁴ recently released by the independent Centre for Equity Studies (based in New Delhi), argues that in the Indian context exclusion is systemic for women, children with disabilities, Dalits, ⁵ Adivasis ⁶ and Muslims.

The Indian system of education has thus been characterized by ‘exclusion’ and ‘inequity’ for various historic and socioeconomic reasons. In the context of the segregated hierarchical social class-based Indian schooling, Heeral Chhabra’s paper sheds light on the irony of the British colonial legacy and subjectivities of Indian elites, especially with regard to some of the hill schools in India. Her paper analyses how these schools became symbols of modernity, high status and elite culture in postcolonial India, although they were first established for the poor subaltern European and Eurasian population during the colonial period. Ghosh, Chakravarty and Mansi's explore educational issues of women as excluded subalterns within the Indian system by comparing women’s education and empowerment in two states of North Eastern India.

Because of its internal ethnic diversity, national identity formation through education has been a major challenge for postcolonial India since independence. However, analysing textbook narratives, Ghosh (2012) notes how educational practices in the recent postcolonial nation states in South Asia, including India, activated a ‘militarist’ concept of citizenship as ‘us’ versus ‘them’ rather than a critical understanding of ‘active’ citizenship as being responsible democratic citizens based on rights and duties. In these globalizing circumstances, when formerly disconnected territorial places are becoming interconnected in the digital, non-territorial global space, citizenship education is becoming a key area of research in most countries around the world. In this context, Namrata Sharma’s article on learning active citizenship by engaging with Gandhi and Makiguchi suggests new possibilities for thinking about citizenship education.

Teacher education and teacher professionalism is considered a major problem within the strict curriculum-based, test-driven performance oriented Indian system and there is little research on teacher’s beliefs and professionalism. Forming an evidence-based critical understanding of these issues is critically important for the Indian context in order to address the learning needs of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Evidence on student learning outcomes and school drop-out-rates suggests that the existing system is not meeting the learning needs of the marginalized children. Based on evidence from her research, Suzana Brinkmann’s paper therefore analyze issues of child-centred pedagogy and teacher’s beliefs within the Indian system. Her paper also highlights some of the ethical dilemmas in changing teachers’ beliefs and offers an important opportunity for generating dialogue about teachers’ pedagogic practices. As noted above, lack of teacher professionalism is a major problem of the Indian public system of education. With some honourable exceptions, the public system has been characterized by teacher absenteeism and corruption, since teachers hold private tuition classes rather than teaching in schools. Teacher professionalism has been studied and much critiqued by scholars (see, for example, Sen, 2002; Sujatha, 2006). In this special issue, Meera Nath Sarin offers useful insights in her paper on teacher professionalism based on research evidence from a government school in New Delhi.

The Indian system of education, because of its rapid expansion in recent years, is also facing major shortages of quality teachers and researchers. However, based on a sample survey in two major Indian cities, the paper by Ananya G Dastidar and Soumyen Sikdar analyses occupational choices of high performing students within the Indian system and conclude that the majority of these students would not choose teaching and research as their preferred profession unless working conditions improved. The insights from their research is very significant, especially since the system needs high performing qualified teachers and researchers.

There are no specific articles dealing with issues of the subaltern Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim and children with disability population in this special issue. This gap actually highlights the need for generating quality research, particularly with regards to the education of historically excluded and minority communities. However, the final paper on research collaboration, by Mousumi Mukherjee, which presents an analysis of data from the case study of a global conclave of young scholars of Indian education, raises questions about the problem of these historically marginalized subaltern populations within the Indian education system. More systematic research needs to be done in this area to understand the problems of educating children from subaltern, less-privileged backgrounds in India, as Amartya Sen (2002) wrote in his introductory remarks to the Pratichi Education Report: ‘Extensive inefficiencies in operation in general are reinforced by particular inequities in the failure to provide fair opportunity to children from less privileged background’.

The idea of the two special issues on Indian education emerged after my participation as a researcher in the first ever global conclave of young scholars of Indian education, mentioned above, which was funded by the Indian government in 2011 and organized by a major public university engaged in educational research, planning and administration in India. Hence, I would first like to thank the Global Conclave organizers. I would also like to express my gratitude and thanks to the principle editor of Policy Futures in Education, Michael A Peters, for providing me this opportunity to compile the special issues; and to all the contributors from within India and abroad for their enthusiasm and patience through the review process. As Fazal Rizvi stated, citing Raymond Williams in the preface to the first special issue (Volume 13, Number 2), the articles in the special issues have been compiled to provide resources of hope for future researchers to examine further the critical problems of Indian education, to guide future policies for making Indian education more inclusive, while meeting the challenges of the fast changing technologically mediated 21st century.