Abstract
The aim of this article is to posit children as political beings and becomings in every aspect of their lives including schooling. This discussion explores the multiplicity of ways in which children actively make meaning about themselves in relation to the actors, institutions and discourses that constitute their lived worlds. It is empirically grounded in critical media analysis of two 2009 prime-time English language television news programmes about school reform. Both these programmes presented ‘what kids think’1 through interactions between a total of 22 private secondary school students and Human Resources Development Minister, Kapil Sibal. The analysis draws on a relational reading of the politics in childhood as constituted and enacted in the domain of schooling. In this context, it focuses on how children perceive and negotiate the subject positions and subjectivities presented to them by their families, the state and media. More specifically, this article argues that children are aware of and competent to engage with extent power relations and structures as represented in discourses of schooling.
Introduction
In 2009, education briefly made headline news in India around the passage of the Right to Education (RTE) Act (hereafter referred to as the Act). The historical significance of the legislation lies in the adoption of ‘rights-based’ legislation, the guarantee of free and compulsory education to all children aged 7–14 years. Other historical milestones include minimum norms and standards for the recognition and regulation of all schools (government and private), the abolition of examinations until Class 12 and the banning of corporal punishment. One of the most controversial aspects of the Act related to the requirement of 25% reservations in Class 1 of all private schools for children from economically weaker and socially disadvantaged (EWSD) groups 2 (see also Thapliyal, 2012).
Leading English-language news television channels gave prime-time, if short-lived, coverage to the Act and to the politician responsible for its contents – Kapil Sibal, Minister of Human Resources Development (HRD). CNN-IBN hosted a discussion with Sibal on the RTE Bill on Face the Nation (FTN). NDTV hosted a discussion with Sibal after the passage of the Act on We The People (WTP). The FTN programme also included four invited expert panelists from elite Delhi private schools and non-governmental organisations. Both anchors invited children to question and engage with the Minister.
My critical media analysis of these two television programmes revealed the ways in which childhood operates as a symbolic space that mirrors the fears and anxieties of a society and a nation (Thapliyal, 2015). It also underlined how the discourse of child rights has been diluted by the Indian state in association with global neoliberal development institutions such as the World Bank to promote interconnected agendas of nationalism and the commodification and privatisation of education. Within this agenda, children are reduced to human capital – objects of deferred economic value to the nation and, conversely, costly burdens. At the end of writing that paper, I have found myself frustrated with an analysis, which was devoid of any reading of agency or subject-hood on the part of the child participants. Therefore, in this article I foreground the voices of the children who participated in these television programmes.
My analysis starts with the premise that children are active agents and participants in their socialisation. Critical and interpretivist scholars have established that the processes by which children are socialised are multi-directional, fluid and diverse (Kallio, 2014; Kallio and Häkli, 2011). Children co-constitute themselves and their worlds in relation to multiple meaning-making systems including gender, caste/ethnicity, class and so forth. Relatedly, critical scholars have explored schools and, to a lesser extent, media as spaces in which children enact diverse political agencies through both formal and officially sanctioned forms of participation as well as banal or everyday agencies.
The field of childhood studies in India has highlighted some of these diverse agencies by critiquing universalising and essentialising tendencies in transnational discourses of child rights (Raman, 2000), colonial and nationalist discourses of childhood (Bénéï, 2008; Weiner, 1990) and policy-driven research constructed by the international development industry (Balagopalan, 2011; Nieuwenhuys, 2009). Along with foregrounding a multiplicity of Indian childhoods, this literature has also underlined the influence of intergenerational values and relationships around family, kinship, tribe, community and class on the ways in which children make meaning about themselves and their relationship with the world (Banaji, 2012; Morrow, 2013).
However, much less is known about how Indian children engage with and make sense of their schooling and, relatedly, the media. In a ground-breaking study on rural children’s perceptions and engagements with schooling, Padma Sarangapani (2003) concluded that children are actively engaged in ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ children: ‘they are responsive to social change, evolving new orientations and simultaneously providing the channels through which older orientations and processes continue to act’ (p. 241). Subsequent contributions by critical qualitative researchers provide complex and situated insights into how children and their families perceive and experience schooling (see, for example, chapters by Bénéï, Balagopalan, Hameed and MacDougall in Chopra and Jeffery, 2005). However, the multiplicity of schooling experiences of Indian children still remains largely invisible from the academic gaze although both childhood and schooling are familiar tropes in entertainment and, to a lesser extent, news media. Joseph (2007) finds, while Indian children are a regular subject on entertainment television and film media, these discursive sites offer few opportunities for children to speak for themselves. However, the few studies that have asked children about how they see themselves and what matters most to them conclude that children are receptive and discerning consumers and participants in and of media (Joseph, 2007). On a related note, Sarangapani and Vidya (2011) report that education news tends to be grossly underreported. When education is reported in the news, it tends to sensationalise the ‘failures’ of the public education system and focus on the educational concerns of urban, middle-class, English-speaking parents whose children are in private schools.
What has been amply documented in the literature is the fact that Indian education is organised as a multi-tier system of schooling which functions to reproduce complex social hierarchies around caste, class, religion and gender (Kumar, 2006; PROBE Team, 1999, 2006). Since the introduction of colonial education, access to high-status education has been restricted primarily to upper caste and class Hindus – initially able-bodied males and now females as well. Six decades after Independence, education scholar Krishna Kumar (1992) found that elite schools continue to protect and regulate ‘avenues of sponsored mobility’ to elite higher education institutions and employment for the children of the ruling classes (p. 52). Public education has always been a low priority for the state and ceased to be important all together with the advent of structural adjustment in the 1990s. Since then, education policy (national and local) has worked to weaken and privatise public education under the aegis of the World Bank and other neoliberal development institutions (Kumar, 2006; Thapliyal, 2012). In neoliberal India, schooling constitutes one of the key ‘privatised’ strategies by which the traditional and new/emerging middle-class negotiate the socio-economic changes associated with the expanding freedoms of a market economy (Fernandes, 2006). Today, India has a trillion dollar economy along with the highest rates of primary school dropouts and adult illiteracy in the world. Children from historically marginalised groups including Dalits, Adivasis, girls and the disabled are disproportionately represented in statistics on educational exclusion (Kumar, 2006). However, dominant educational discourse has resisted any interrogation of the notion that schooling is always and only beneficial to subaltern and marginalised communities (Raman, 2000).
In this context, television news media’s sudden and short-lived interest in ‘how students feel’ (in the words of WTP Anchor Barkha Dutt) offers a rare opportunity to explore how relatively privileged children co-construct their childhoods and make meaning about themselves and their schooling. The aim of this article is to posit children as political beings and becomings in every aspect of their lives including schooling. This discussion explores the multiplicity of ways in which children actively make meaning about themselves in relation to the actors, institutions and discourses that constitute their lived worlds. My analysis is empirically grounded in critical media analysis of two 2009 prime-time English language television news programmes about school reform. Both these programmes presented ‘what kids think’ (a phrase used by both anchors to talk about the children) through interactions between a total of 22 private secondary school students and Human Resources Development Minister, Kapil Sibal. The analysis draws on a relational reading of the politics in childhood as constituted and enacted in the domain of schooling. In this context, it focuses on how children perceive and negotiate the subject positions and subjectivities presented to them by their families, the state and media. More specifically, this article argues that children are aware of and competent to engage with extent power relations and structures as manifest in discourses of schooling including those that seek to reproduce the imperatives of the nation-state.
Methodology
Exploring the various ways in which children make meaning of and negotiate ‘unavoidable subject positions’ (such as student, future of the nation and so forth) involves asking questions about (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 28) ‘how subject positions are presented to children, how the proposed subjectivities are perceived, which tactics are used to enact them, and how children’s responses are acted upon by their authorities and communities’. These questions are explored through children’s participation in WTP and FTN. WTP had 7 ‘student’ perspectives on the programme, two of whom were female. Three of the males were introduced as ‘integration’ students because they were from poor families but had received merit scholarships to elite private schools. FTN had 15 children (two female) on the programme along with four education experts from the private sector. With the exception of Naveen and Yogesh, all the students were in the Class 8 to Class 12 range and approximately 13–18 years of age. All the students on both programmes spoke fluent English and addressed themselves exclusively to the Minister and Anchors.
After transcription of the programmes, critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to explore how multiple modes of discourse as well as the particular properties of text, verbal interactions and communicative events influence modes of reproduction and resistance (Van Dijk, 1993). So, for example, I paid particular attention to how and when children were introduced and the ways in which Sibal and other adults engaged with their questions. Thus, with the exception of the ‘integration’ students, all the children were allowed to pose only one question directly to the Minister on cue from the Anchor. Also, on both programmes, the Anchors repeatedly evaluated, redirected and sometimes reframed questions and comments by children.
More broadly, I also looked at the particular ways in which the Act was framed and represented by the Anchors. For example, participant Dutt (WTP) emphasised the themes of equity and social integration, while Ghose (FTN) emphasised the themes of the abolition of examinations and the substitution of marks with grades. Relatedly, I also noted when certain ideological perspectives were references, namely, human capital theory and pro-private sector perspectives. Other stakeholders, such as poor and disadvantaged children and their families, were spoken ‘for’, while still other groups and ideologies were excluded all together, such as teachers, anti-privatisation movements or Left perspectives.
Given the paucity of information on the background of the children, I make no claims to representativeness here. However, I do posit some cautious inferences about these children as located in relatively privileged (economic and social) locations based on recognised symbols and enactments of class status gleaned from television programmes. The first indicator is educational attainment. These children have reached secondary school and see themselves in college/university in a country where a complex caste–class–gender hierarchy continues to predict access and completion of basic education (PROBE Team, 1999, 2006). Second, the generally high level of fluency and confidence in English is a marker of class privilege in a post-colonial society where English continues to be the language of power. Third, some of the children themselves provided classed ‘cues’ when they talked about access to the particular kinds of economic and cultural capital required to succeed in school, for example, high-cost International Baccalaureate curriculum and extra-curricular hobbies. Fourth, some of the children explicitly positioned themselves as privileged relative to other children. Last but not the least, the Anchor and the Minister, at particular times, positioned the audience as upper-class and elitist. The reader should also note that given space constraints, the quotations provided in this article usually only include the words of the children except where additional context is required to clarify and support my analysis.
Discussion
For the purpose of organisational clarity, the analysis in this section is grouped by the themes evoked in each programme.
FTN
Sagarika Ghose opened her programme by introducing video-recorded questions by two students from the prestigious Campion School in Mumbai. These first two questions to the Minister focused on one of the features of the Act highlighted by Ghose in her introduction, namely, the abolition of all examinations except the school-leaving examination and the substitution of letter grades for numerical marks. The concerns voiced by these two students focused on the impact of these reforms on high-achieving students and would become a recurrent theme in student questions. Student 1 emphasised the time and effort that children devote to school – a recurrent theme in subsequent comments: Hi, I am Devanshu Gulati and I would like to ask the honorable Minister that if Board exams are replaced then what will be an alternative method of testing the knowledge and the skill that students have accumulated over ten years of studying? (Student 1, male)
Student 2 highlighted the high-stakes nature of school-leaving examinations by drawing connections between achievement and subsequent choices for further study and employment. Science subjects have historically always required the highest marks and enjoyed the most prestige in popular constructions of academic ability: I would like to ask Mr. Sibal a question. If the honorable minister plans on removing the board exams and the percentage system, how will we know where do we lie? Won’t the under achievers and over achievers come under the same category? How will we know which subject to take whether arts, commerce or science? And which career option to choose? (Student 2, male)
Of the 15 students on FTN (including the first four questioners), 10 spoke to these concerns. Student 3 asked the Minister whether students could be expected to do well in Class 12 exams without the ‘pressure of exams’ throughout their schooling. Sibal and three other panelists, including ironically both private school principals, immediately signalled their disapproval of this question by criticising high-stakes standardised testing. However, this concerted avoidance of student concerns did not deter four other students from trying to explain to the Minister how the substitution of grades for marks would disadvantage high-achieving students. Student 5 was introduced by the Anchor as Aditya Vignesh from DAV Boys Secondary School, another prestigious private school from the southern Indian city of Chennai. This boy reminded the adults about the reality of parental pressure on children to become and remain ‘the first ranker’. This theme was echoed by another male student 9 who also talked about parental pressure for academic achievement.
Student 8 (also male
3
) proposed an alternative scale for the grading system, which would illuminate the differences in student achievement. While these differences are numerically miniscule, 1 mark or 0.5 of a mark can stand in the way of admission to high-status colleges and universities. Student 6 was the most succinct on this theme: What do we do with the real, real, real toppers seriously because … the grading will generalize the students … there will be no difference? (Student 6, male
4
)
A female student reminded the audience about the fundamental disconnects between secondary and higher education. Her comment exposed the limits of the rhetoric of creativity and choice that feature prominently in the comments of the Minister. She pointed out that without reforms in college admission procedures, secondary students were unlikely to be able to take advantage of the purportedly child-friendly curricular reforms in the Act: You were talking about hobbies and harboring creativity and everything but I am a class XII student with applied art as one of my electives and I am not allowed to include it in my best of four. So isn’t that discouraging people from taking up subjects like applied arts? (Student 13, female
5
)
These comments provide insights into some of the subjectivities and lived realities that constitute Indian childhoods. These students have internalised adult and broader societal messages about ideal and less-than-ideal children that centre on academic achievement or the lack thereof. Students 5 and 9 represented parents as the source of unrelenting pressure to secure the highest marks and, relatedly, highly remunerative employment. This orientation towards intense competition and high achievement can be traced back to colonial rationalities of schooling, which were dominated by concerns for employability and relatedly social mobility for a lucky few. As Sarangapani (2003) reminds us, the history of schooling in post-colonial developing countries does not include ‘myths or ideals (such as the Victorian faith in the liberating role of education)’ (p. 252).
It is in this discursive context that children are viewed as and view themselves as ‘becomings’ where their value will be determined by their future achievements. Thus, the children who argue against the reforms of the examination system are exercising political agency based on a sophisticated and situated understanding of their positioning and interests as high academic achievers. These children’s understanding of how schooling mediates one’s positioning in the power structure is far more complex than the depoliticised and individualised ways in which the Minister and the media present their ideal of a ‘bright student’ and ‘well-educated person’. In particular, the format of the FTN programme creates a binary between traditional understandings of high achievement (based on marks and ranks) and the supposedly new ways the state requires Indian children and their families to view themselves, as exemplified in the quote below: I’ll give you another example, all of Europe you have what is called the International Baccalaureate. Now the International Baccalaureate is also in India, in Kerala and some other schools … You think the people who pass out of
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International Baccalaureate are any less endowed than students who do class X? So I think that’s a myth. Issue is not how well you do in exams, issue is how well educated you are. What kind of sensitive citizen are you going to be as you move into society? You see, this is not about exams, this is about India. (Sibal in response to Student 3)
The remaining three students on FTN earned the Minister’s emphatic approval because they explicitly positioned themselves as supportive of his initiatives to reduce the stress engineered by continuous testing and examination. They used a variety of communication strategies to state their position. The first student drew on personal experience: Mr. Sibal, I completely agree with you and I feel that, I also took the International Baccalaureate exams and I feel that although the course was really rigorous I felt that I was on par with everyone else and it gave equal opportunity to fellow students you know to excel, and so I completely agree. (Student 5)
The second student used humour to which the Minister and the audience responded with laughter and applause: Sir if you don’t mind taking a look at this wonderful video that’s playing, do you see any child who is happy after solving a sum, does he say that ‘Yippy! I solved a sum!’ [Audience laughter and applause]. So I think that we should decrease the course. (Student 9)
The third student framed an appeal to the Minister in response to which the Minister castigated parents who supported the traditional system of continuous examination as impediments to the future well-being of the nation:
Good evening, honorable Minister. I would like to say that when we take any exam our goal should not be 96% to 98%, it should be to retain something in life and we use it in our profession or anything which we do. And as growing children with so much pressure and studies and so many things to mug up, we don’t get time to ourselves. We barely get an hour or two in the evening to ourselves so children should get time to pursue their hobbies … 7
But I want to say something today and I am very happy. The mindset of our children has changed but our mindset has not changed. It’s the parents that need to be addressed.
In summary, this analysis has identified how children can construct ‘power relations on their own grounds, using specific tactics to maintain political dynamics that underpin their own positions and interests’ (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 26). One of the ways in which they do this is by talking about how they view themselves – as ‘beings’, in the here and now – and the issues that are of most significant to them. Student 9 claims the right to be happy – now – while other children similarly claim time for themselves, the opportunity to be creative and so forth. Minister Sibal represents children as symbols of the future well-being of the nation to the almost complete exclusion of the lived realities of the children in front of him. However, the children are also aware and able to engage in the politics of symbols where Sibal represents not only the authority but also the responsibilities of the state. The multiple ways in which children purposefully and competently ‘shape and rehearse certain kinds of subjectivities and agencies’ (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 27) in order to take their place as full members of their societies are also apparent in the other programme WTP.
WTP
On WTP, the children’s participation provide further insights into the relational ways in which children make meaning about themselves, their schooling and society as a whole. As previously mentioned, the Anchor was primarily concerned with the question of ‘integration’ or the entry of disadvantaged students into elite private schools through the 25% reservation policy. 8 Four out of the six students on this programme spoke to this theme. The first student to be invited to question Mr. Sibal named the problems of peer bullying and harassment that are likely to occur with the implementation of the reservation policy:
Do you have any specific plan, Sir, for the holistic development of the students and their psychological well-being? (Because) problems such as peer pressure, maladjustment, bullying are still present in the existing set up and they are bound to rise once this thing [the reservations] is initiated.
Well again I don’t think we should start having legislation on these things. If you are in a school and the school is a sensitive management, they should take care of this.
Sibal responded to Student 1 by stating that he was unwilling to ‘legislate on these things’ which could be addressed by a ‘sensitive’ school management. Later, the Anchor reminded the adult audience members who voiced similar concerns that it was not possible to ‘legislate attitudes’. However, the problem of harassment reappeared in the testimonials of all three ‘integration’ students who talked about the different kinds of discrimination they encountered because of their poverty. While Dutt and Sibal endeavoured to reduce their stories to testimonials of academic merit and successful social integration, each of these students challenged these simplistic representations of their lived experience of class difference in elite schools.
The first student, Sagar, described the material deficits that he had to overcome in order to be successful in the academic and social domains of his school. He acquired fluency in English as well as a cell phone; however, these acquisitions were not sufficient to protect him from bullying because of his background of poverty. However, after listening to Sagar, Sibal continued to insist that closing the class divide was as simple as a friendship between a man who owned a Mercedes and another who owned a scooter:
At starting I had a lot of problem with computers and sometimes in English but when I went to higher classes I started learning English and I am doing well right now.
You are doing perfectly fine actually.
Yes.
And my friends are very caring to me. They don’t discriminate me. They call me to their birthday parties and all and my parents are very caring to me. Also, they give their mobile phone when I go to my friends’ parties …
So no problem, you think integration can work.
Yeah, but some people in our school are like, they bully other people like, very weaker sections.
Did you get any questions asked about, you know, what does your father do?
Yeah.
And if you had to say taxi driver, was that difficult for you?
Yes. At starting it was very difficult to me to say that my father was a taxi driver.
9 But you know Barkha supposing, you know, I had a friend and he had a kid and his father owned a scooter and I owned say a Mercedes. Right? Now this happens in life no? …
The next ‘integration’ student, Naveen Yadav, also talked about the ways in which his background of relative poverty shaped his experiences at school. He chose not to talk about his relationship with peers but he did make it clear that he and his parents could not participate in the social activities of the school. Naveen also emphasised that access to elite schooling (through the merit-based scholarship) would have made little difference in his life without access to high-quality higher education. In his case, he was only able to go to a reputable university because his school (Springdale) paid the fees. However, while Naveen’s integration story focused on the insurmountable barriers of poverty, Dutt and Sibal focused on his perseverance and resilience:
There is also Naveen Yadav here … And you are now a software engineer at HCL. Now this thing, everyone is talking about integration. Was that ever an issue for you?
It was. I can recall, when my parents were called for a parent teacher meeting, I never informed them. (I) mean that was an issue for me …
But you didn’t want to take your parents to PTA meetings because you thought it was embarrassing for them.
I never did that, plus we have fetes right, those fete booklets, we have to sell them. Now I didn’t know how to sell that right. So what would I do? I used to skip school for that one week when we got those booklets I used to skip school, I mean how I am going to sell that?
It’s very real but looking back, all in all, was it still worth the psychological trauma at times?
It was, I mean everything’s fallen into place, but the reason why it fell into place, because I got funded from the school after fourteen as well, right … I joined IP Institution first, I wasn’t able to pay fees, so I dropped out of IP then luckily I got into DC and then Springdales pitched in to …
I think you’re being very honest and real about that embarrassment that people feel …
Point is, it’s the sensitivity of the child, I mean what he is going through and what he went through at that point in time. If there was a counselor there, you know, she would have given him a lot of confidence but he dealt with it on his own.
The third and last ‘integration’ student, Yogesh (who received the least minutes of speaking time of the three), also chose not to address the preferred topic of integration. Instead, he emphasised that poverty did not equate with lack of academic ability and that given the opportunity poor children were every bit as capable of making a significant contribution to their country. Using his own success as an example, he argued that education is a ‘need’ for poor children and that private schools should reserve seats for them at all class levels, not just Class 1. Yogesh is the only student to explicitly reproduce the dominant discourse of children as the future of the nation. At the same time, he challenges the dominant formulation that places the responsibility for being contributing citizens on individuals. His comment highlighted the role of the state in removing barriers to education for poor children to which Sibal responded with a familiar refrain of not ‘forcing’/legislating admissions policies for private schools:
All right, one last story of integration, Yogesh Kumar. Yogeshji, aap Heritage Schools se hai (you are from Heritage schools). Again a story of integration. Now in Delhi School of Economics, but Yogesh your father was a laborer shayad (perhaps)?
10 Ya, he passed away in 1999 and I was in a government school and changed into Heritage school in 11th class and I did very well, I was the topper there, and I got admission in Sriram College of Commerce. And we are missing one big point here, for poor people education is a need, it is not a want and it can do wonder for the people, I mean if they are given a good opportunity they can do wonder for this country, and nobody talked about this need … 11 One more thing I would like to add over here that you said you are implementing 25% reservation in 1st standard, why don’t you implement for other classes? As I can show you the way, I got admission in 11th class and I was a Hindi-medium student, despite that I got very good marks and topped that school and the poor too can show the way to other people as well.
Okay, why just Class I? [Applause]
No, no, absolutely, nothing prevents the school administration to admit persons beyond Class I, we only said it must start from Class I. But schools can admit children in Class II, III, IV, we don’t say no, the law doesn’t prevent it, but once we force administrations to do that then of course there is a problem.
Other than Yogesh, few of the students explicitly aligned themselves with dominant nationalist discourses of childhood which produce children as objects and possessions of the Indian nation. While this study does not have the scope to explain this pattern in any depth, it is useful to note that emergent literature on the new middle-classes notes a strong disinclination to engage the state except when necessary to protect class interests (Baviskar and Ray, 2011; Fernandes, 2006). This is a key point of distinction between the traditional and emerging middle-classes along with an unapologetic preference for conspicuous consumption on the part of the latter. However, the egalitarian impulses of even the former group have rarely objected to the stratified education system and the underlying hierarchical logic that sorts and ranks social difference in punitive ways. Instead, the gains in egalitarianism have come from persistent struggle by marginalised groups. It is a discourse of difference that works to legitimise and reproduce the privileges of the extent ruling classes (in schools and beyond) by constructing the poor and marginalised as inherently lacking or deficient. Thus, the lack of academic success among the poor and socially disadvantaged is attributed to deficits in the individual, the family and interestingly, public education. In short, schools play a key role in the ways in which elites ‘define themselves against an imagined other, whom they deem less worthy and capable, and without whom they could not declare their own distinctions’ (Howard and Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2010: 4).
The remainder of my discussion provides situated insights about how children constructed the imagined Other, specifically poor children and government school teachers. A relational discourse based on binary and hierarchical thinking and notions of less-than and better-than permeates these constructions of the Other. Student 2 explicitly acknowledged his privileged positionality as a child who has been ‘spoon-fed’. In other words, a child who can take access to quality education for granted. This boy also framed social inequality as a cultural problem by naming a political culture in which basic social entitlements are not guaranteed by the state but subject to purchasing capacity. In other words, it is access to formalised political power and not inherent ability that determines individual success or failure: One of my questions was, how do we know that the money is actually going to get there? Now I hate to say it, but there is a lot of corruption in this country, right. [Laughs from audience]. And money does go into the pockets … Because I agree these kids need the education you know more than most of us do. We are born with it, spoon-fed. But they aren’t. (Student 2, male)
The other two students echoed the more common us-them binary which maintains the social stratification and fragmentation that characterises India today. Student 3 echoed these broader socio-cultural discourses which reaffirm formal Western-style schooling as necessary for the socialisation and for the integration of disadvantaged children:
Sir, education is not just about numbers or may be about alphabets …
Why you are singing my tune. [laughs]
Yes, however what I feel is that it is more about how you sit, how you stand, how you dress may be that is also part of education.
How you carry yourself …
That is also a part of education.
Sure, sure.
And that starts at home, or may be that starts at ground level, may be at zero to three years or zero to six years,
So why have you left out that group?
Yes!
Student 5 rehearsed the same discourse of deficit which is applied not just to individuals and groups but the public sector as a whole by many Indians located in aspiring and traditional middle-class. The decline in status of the occupation of teaching has intensified with the privatisation of education and is intrinsically linked to the global assault on public education by neoliberal financial institutions (Kumar, 2006; PROBE Team, 1999). Student 5 repeated the popular refrain about teachers in government schools as incompetent and indeed unemployable anywhere except in the public education system: Sir, you talked about taking teachers who are actually unemployed right now, who are BA’s and MA’s, who have passed out (graduated) of colleges but are right now unemployed, Sir, why does the government have to take the worst of the lot? [Laughs from the audience]. I mean those people are unemployed … (Student 5, male)
On both television programmes, we see and hear children acknowledge and engage with adult- and state-constructed discourses about childhood, schooling and society. However, the normative dimension to the ways in which children make relational meaning about themselves and communicate with authority figures does not mean an absence of political struggle (Kallio and Häkli, 2011). On WTP, the testimonials of the ‘integration’ students capture how children co-construct their selfhoods and affirm their lived realities to speak back to imposed positions of ‘student’ and ‘national subject’ in complex ways. The comments of the other three students also represent the ways in which these relatively privileged children construct and position themselves in relation to their lived and imagined worlds. All three name power differences in their society (having to do with political power, cultural capital and occupational status) which have embodied and material impact on their own lives as well as those of disadvantaged children. Thus, a relational reading of politics and political identities, such as the one in this article, supports more expansive and complex understandings of politics in childhood.
Conclusion
Albeit mediatised, the news television programmes analysed here offer a rare opportunity to watch and listen to Indian children comment on and intervene in discourses and decisions that shape their own lives. Although the children are positioned primarily as students, they rehearse a range of subjectivities around what it means to be a student and a child-citizen today that reflect local and global idealised discourses of childhood as well as their social locations of relative privilege. They exercise their political agency in diverse ways to situate themselves and their interests in relation to dominant ideologies, political projects, and conceptions and norms about childhood. Their self-representations and engagements with others reveal day-to-day lived experiences of the dominant discourses active in their particular social milieu (Millei, 2014). They also make strategic choices about how to situate and present their particular claims and demands to adult authority figures that reflect their awareness of relational power dynamics and power structures in society. Taken as a whole, this analysis underlines the relational, fluid and deeply political ways in which children co-constitute their subject-hoods within the domain of schooling and perform those in these news programmes. It contributes to arguments that politics is pervasive and that the political socialisation and actions of children are not limited to formal and official political spheres (Kallio and Häkli, 2011).
It is not my intention to over-analyse the agencies and subjectivities of the children on television. However, I do argue that a contextualised and relational reading of children’s political agency effectively problematises monolithic and passive representations of children in the media and beyond. It also underlines the need for more research about the lived experiences of children who enjoy relative educational privilege. I anticipate some natural synergies between this line of scholarship and the emerging literature on the relationship between class and media in globalising India (Banaji, 2012; Khorana, 2014).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and supportive feedback.
Funding
This work was financially supported by the University of Newcastle.
1.
Both Anchors used this phrase.