Socialisation

Violence is not always physical and bloody. Certain kinds of violence are more subtle, more cruel, aimed at debilitating or killing the spirit - the self-image, self respect, the identity of a person, community or group... These discriminations are human-made and not God-given as we are "given" to believe. Its ultimate aim is power or control over others. Socialisation (family and the educational institutions) is a powerful medium of communicating these beliefs and perpetuating the existing inequalities/injustices...

Any discrimination is based on the assumed superiority (along with privileges) of the one against the inferiority of the other. On this is built the edifice of inequality, injustice, oppression. This is of course rationalised on the basis of a natural given (sex, birth, colour, race etc.) and further authenticated, approved, affirmed and asserted through religion and institutional assent.

It is pointless to dwell on the need to change these discriminatory sets of relationships; it has been asserted ad nauseum onwards of 1947. The present educational system, in view of the above, does not respond to the above discriminations. To that extent it appears to us as subtly reservationist (the reservation which society does not wish to acknowledge) and secondly, as largely irrelevant - examination oriented and ill equipped to understand and cope with the world around (Heredia, 1996).

Educational institutions are acclaimed instrument of socialisation, based on the following table Haq (1991:245) argues that "it is through the educational structure and educational process that the values pertaining to caste like untouchability, caste feeling, casteism, parochialism, caste superiority, caste hatred, discrimination etc. are transmitted and, thus, education becomes a mechanism of 'traditionalisation' of modernity".
The teachers of the village school maintain separate pots of water (for the teachers and students) for the avarnas (outcaste) and the savarnas (caste). The attitude of questioning such practices is absent in the teachers themselves. How will it be transmitted to the students?

The educational process that a child passes through is devoid of an active values inculcation and integration component in the regular curriculum. This, coupled with the plethora of wrong patterns of behaviour, life styles and role models (also sec Desrochers, 1987) which are available to the young mind today, makes them aspire or simply follow (in the absence of any other) to those life styles and patterns of behaviour. The cycle goes on reproducing itself in society. S/he looks at tile utility of a bit of information / knowledge from the perspective of Board / University performance only.

The output of this kind of an educational process is a product which is utilitarian and status quoist. Utilitarian, because s/he would only value the degree in terms of a job and the salary-perks-position package which it brings. The creativity which s/he can bring to the job and the contribution to the organisation and society at large are of secondary importance. This kind of education produces disparities, and tragically for the country, we must admit, the system thrives on these disparities. Thc citizens that such a system produces are numbed to the gruelling realities of the times and in that sense, status quoist, because it would never occur to such a product that the reality needs questioning.

- Education: An Option for Social Change, Persis Ginwalla and Jimmy Dabhi, Vikalp, 01/12/2003 N00, /eldoc/n00_/01dec03vkp7.html

The Tamil Nadu legislature has adopted the Compulsory Education Act . Complaints have been aired in this context about the nature of the instruction imparted by the state's Tamil medium schools: complaints of excessive reliance on textbooks, of the use of a version of Tamil that alienates lower caste pupils...educational structure is pyramid-shaped, the higher the grade the steeper the incline a student from a marginalised community has to traverse.

The instructional method most prevalent in schools - that of chalk and talk - also reduces the sense of affinity students need to develop in order to make use of their education. Another dimension that is lost due to the rigid conception of 'good' Tamil is the cultural capital accumulated in dialects. By correcting the speech of the children belonging different com-munities, we dispossess them of their cultural capital. A poignant example of the sort of loss was observed by me in a Chennai school where there were a number of children from fishing communities. When their teacher introduced the word 'champanki', these first standard children insisted it was a variety of fish. The teacher, who was an upper caste vegetarian, did not agree. The powers vested in her by the state and society ensured that her contention - that it was a flower - prevailed.

- 'Learn Thoroughly': Primary Schooling in Tamil Nadu, Aruna R, Economic & Political Weekly, 01/05/1999, /eldoc/n00_/01may99EPW.pdf

As social institutions, schools are therefore vulnerable to instability within the environment in which they function. They also face diverse student learning needs, abilities and home environments, and internalised views on the part of teachers, learners and parents, about social inequalities and differences. Learners also bring social ‘baggage’ with them into the school. In Jamaica, as Sewell argues, processes of gender identity that are built into the socialisation process at home and in wider society, have led to a culture of under-achievement for boys. Girls are socialised to be more domesticated and docile, while boys are encouraged to play and have more independence. This ironically has led to a reversal in relation to performance within the schools. Girls work harder and perform better, while boys are seen to be ill-disciplined and unmotivated. These attitudes, which lead to boys and girls being treated differently, are reproduced, rather than challenged, by teachers in the classroom.
Schools themselves are not immune from these wider social structures of inequality. They do not operate as neutral actors in an environment which they can easily change, but reflect the dominant cultures in which they operate. Soudien writes about the ways in which inequalities of race and class are reproduced within school management structures in post-apartheid South Africa, where black parents’ voices often continue to be drowned out by prevailing hierarchies of authority and knowledge within the school. These hierarchies of authority are based on generations of knowledge accumulation being concentrated in the hands of ethnic and class elites, with the result that newer generations of school populations are deemed to lack the knowledge to manage educational processes.

The way in which these hierarchies of knowledge play out within the school is also captured by Sarangapani’s ethnographic research in a village school in India, where the teaching process proceeds with the implicit objective of erasing the knowledge learners bring to the classroom and imposing the teachers’ ‘authoritative knowledge’ on the learning process. Sarangapani observes that children’s ‘talk’ in classrooms is crucial, particularly for rural children and children from underprivileged backgrounds, as the worlds they inhabit and their realities are under-represented in official curricula. The teacher therefore plays an important role in mediating the official world of the textbook and the ‘real worlds’ of learners.

- Class struggles: the challenges of achieving schooling for all, Ramya Subrahmanian, N00 /eldoc/n00_/class-struggle.htm

Civics textbooks project our present as one in which the state exists as a given and the task of the future citizen is to facilitate its smooth functioning. This is true not only of books that were introduced during Joshi’s tenure but also of those that were in circulation for the last two decades. As the introductory section of the new social science textbook ‘India and the World’ reiterates, “It is essential for us to know the organisation and the functions of the government of our country, then only we can serve our country best by active and judicious participation in the government at various levels”.

The focus is invariably on detailing the architectural aspect of the institution not on what goes on within that space. Panchayat, parliament, courts, district administration — everything appears fully formed with no history, struggle or debate surrounding it. For example, in the chapter on the Panchayati Raj structure, the ‘new’ fact of reservations for SCs/STs and women is mentioned but no attempt is made to clarify why this provision had to be made or whether it has had any impact.

Agreement, or compliance, is sought through the notion of participation. Participation, in some contexts, is synonymous with discipline. While introducing forms of social organisation to sixth standard children, the justification for enforcing “discipline” in school is: “It is necessary for each student to reach school in time or he or she is punished. Even in the society some people sometimes break the rules and to punish them an organisation is needed. Your school is also an organisation.’’ (‘Our Civic Life’; 1989: reprint 1999).

Another ground for participation is the rather limiting instrumentalist logic of nation building. The removal of inequality and caste has little to do with justice or human dignity. ‘Our Civic Life’ puts forth the need for land redistribution because, “the landless workers do not have the same interest in working on other people’s land as they would have if they had their own land. This feeling adversely affects the quality and the quantity of produce”. The caste system is seen as a hindrance to the nation’s progress. ‘‘As long as these people are considered inferior, we cannot get their full cooperation in the programmes for the progress of our country’’.

Civic text-books construct a dualistic world for the child — urban vs rural, literate vs illiterate, developed vs backward. Rural India is represented as the repository of all ills. This stereotyping is evident in statements like ‘‘Indian villages are surrounded by fields with very narrow lanes. The houses in villages are made of mud and have thatched roofs... People in villages lead a somewhat leisurely life.’’ Such statements would rank with the finest orientalist caricatures of the 19th century.

Then there is Unity in Diversity. But the textbooks look at diversity only in terms of dance, food, custom. The plurality of core cultural values, gender roles, economic systems and how these affect the people is passed over in silence. It should be obvious to any serious student of civics that this is one area that needs careful attention of those who seek to move future generations away from essentialising communities, religions, regions. Without rethinking civics, we might be moving towards a future where our diversity would be a historical phenomenon.

This essay seeks to examine the construction of nation by our educational system as reflected in the intentions and visions of policy-makers and in the nature and structure of ideas embedded in textbooks. By analysing the various contradictory and complementary discourses that inhabit the curriculum, the essay notes the process of essentialisation, mythification and
romanticisation of Indian history, society and economy which denies interrogation by alternative paradigms of development and social justice.
IT is a truism today, that the structuring of knowledge is an exercise which is intimately linked to the structuring of power. In a colonised nation, this is played out on the political and economic terrrain of the coloniser, but post-colonial nations seek to redefine and reinvent themselves via alternative definitions of what is worth knowing. In India the project of nation building has lain at the heart of educational policy since 1947. It has been however an uneasy and contestatory process. To explore the articulations of state policy on education as well as its implementation in textbooks is to uncover a variety of dis-courses. On the one hand, there is the in-evitable emphasis on defining and celebra-ting the nation; on the other, the silences and assertions reveal a profound unease with potential challenges to this over-arching definition, an attempt to negotiate the conflicts. This is evident in nearly every education report commissioned since 1947. Over-whelmingly, education is seen as the holy grail, the crucial element in shaping national culture. As early as 1952, this is spelt out in the Mudaliar commission report on secondary education: The aim of secondary education is to train the youth of the country to be good citizens who will be competent to play their part effectively in the social reconstruction and economic development of their country.

It is interesting to note that the notion of the nation in this report as well as elsewhere within the system is that of a single and undifferentiated entity. The Mudaliar com-mission report sets the tone for the next four decades: it sees the nation as a monolithic and unitary whole and is reluctant to conceive of an entity which is made up of fragmentary and diverse elements. In fact, the conflicting and contesting identities which inevitably exist are generally seen as divisive and dangerous: The anxiety for a strongly centralised identity is comprehensible in a newly fledged nation, five years after the partition. It is, however, echoed with equal vehemence, over three decades later in the 1986 National Policy for Education (the New Education Policy, as it is popularly termed), suggesting that years later, the anxiety to define a coherent and unified nation remains equally compelling. While stressing the need for education to teach the values of secularism and tolerance...
If we argue that the construction of the nation in these textbooks is a deliberate exercise in ideological structuring, we need to address ourselves to the question of whose and which ideology is reflected. It seems superfluous to say that these textbooks function as reflections of the dominant ideology of state policy: the more interesting questions are of how this is established and whose state is ultimately reflected in the process.

- Educating the National Imagination, Shalini Advani, Economic & Political Weekly, 03/08/1996 /eldoc/n00_/03aug96EPW.pdf

There could not be a better example of schooling being a system of power and ideology than that of Francophone Africa. For over three decades after independence, French has remained the language of instruction in the earliest grades of primary school (and for higher grades) even in the remotest parts of rural Sahel – despite the overwhelming evidence from pedagogical theory that children learn best in the earliest years in their mother tongue. The alien school system was one factor underlying French west Africa’s very low primary enrolment rates, which remain till date the lowest for any region of the world.

- Human Capital or Human Development? Search for a Knowledge Paradigm for Education and Development, Santosh Mehrotra, Economic & Political Weekly, 22/01/2005 N00, /eldoc/n00_/22jan05EPW300.html

The attitudes being promoted through the educational system can be dramatically illustrated by English Course Reader. English is seen as important for two reasons. First, it is seen as a language of the rulers, past and present. Therefore those who learn English want to imbibe the cultural values of the ruling classes. Second, it opens up job opportunities. Comprehension levels are low, which makes it necessary to use simplistic language and statements. The language is consequently more indicative of genuine attitudes.
R.P. Bhatnagar who has compiled the textbook in English (Course Reader) for the 11th and 12th classes, Rajasthan Board, has thought it a matter of pride to mention that it will foster both linguistic and cultural values of the students. He states:
Section A is intended to instil confidence in the students and therefore contains relatively easier textual material, well
within the reach of an average student, both linguistically and culturally.
The first lesson is called "Picnic Cancelled". surely 'picnic' is a concept which is both urban and Aiiated with a class which enjoys leisure and sharply divides work from enjoyment. The lesson begins with a description of the Sharmas and the
Bhatias. Mrs. Sharma is watering the garden yet another urban symbol of feudal or modern wealth. There are no gardens in rural areas. Even the rural rich do not have gardens. While teaching this lesson to some students who lived in the neighbourhood, it became clear that the concept of a garden was totally alien to them. For those who have not travelled far it is difficult even to visualise it.
When Mrs Sharma informs her husband about the intended picnic, he promptly says, "In that case I'll get the gardener to water the trees. It is alien enough to have a garden, but the concept of the gardener is totally urban and upperclass. Land in rural areas is used for productive purposes.
As if the lesson were not enough to mould attitudes, the exercises at the end of the lesson are used to comprehensively drive home the point. In his short note to the students at the beginning of the book Mr Bhatnagar says: The manner of equipping the student for the various demands life will make on them is revealed in exercises at the end of lesson one on structures and usage. It is worth reproducing the whole section.

Structures and Usage
1. To get someone to do something
a. I shall get the gardener to water the trees.
b. I shall get the servant to help us remove the table.
c. I got some villagers to push the car.
d. Did you get a dhobi to wash the linen?
e. She does not like to get anyone to help her finish her
homework.
f. Will you get the tailor to make me a dress?

While 'a' and 'b' only re-emphasise ideas in thelesson, 'c' shows us exactly what our educators think villagers should be doing. Obviously something constructive like pushing other peoples' cars!
...It is not surprising therefore that there is a low value for rural life in general and manual labour in particular, and aspirations for the life of a 'Babu'. Andreas Fuglesang has rightly said in About Understanding—ideas and Observations on Crosscultural Communication: The formal education system is primarily concerned with instructing the next generation in the techniques and values of the dominant social system, thereby preserving and perpetuating a power structure.

- Class and caste in the Classroom , ARUNA ROY and NIKHIL DEY, Mainstream, 23/01/1995, /eldoc/n00_/23jan95mai1.pdf

- Deconstructing Literacy Primers, Anita Dighe, Economic & Political Weekly, 01/07/1995, /eldoc/n00_/01jul95EPW.pdf

- Another course in CBSE syllabus: defence studies, SUNETRA CHOUDHURY, Indian Express, 24/01/2001, /eldoc/n22_/24jan01ie1.pdf

- Colonising the Child: Education as an Instrument of Prejudice, Chitra Padmanabhan, Times of India, 11/03/2005, /eldoc/n20_/11mar05toi1.pdf

- History, Ideology and Curriculum, MUBARAK ALI, Economic & Political Weekly, 02/11/2002, /eldoc/n00_/02nov02EPW.pdf

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1. Evaluation of School Textbooks from the Standpoint of National Integration - A Report on Evaluation of Textbooks in Delhi Schools, NCERT, 01/01/1984, R.N00.1

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1. Learning from Conflict, Kumar, Krishna, Orient Longman, 01/01/1996, B.N00.K8

2. Image, Ideology and Inequality: Cultural Domination, Hegemony and Schooling in India, Scrase, Timothy J., Sage Publications, 01/01/1993, B.N00.S16

3. Cheap Poison - American Infiltration in India's Educational Life, Prof. Bagchi Nirmalya, 01/07/1974, Chalti Duniya, B.N00.B7

6. Constructing School Knowledge - An Ethnography of Learning in an Indian Village, Sarangapani, Padma M, Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 01/01/2003, B.N20.S5

7. Power & Ideology in Education, Karabel, Jerome & Halsey, A.H. (Ed), Oxford University Press, 1977, B.N00.K9

8. What is Worth Teaching?, Kumar, Krishna, Orient Longman, 1992, R.N21.56

9. Prejudice and Pride - School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan, Kumar, Krishna, Penguin Books India (P) Ltd., 2002, B.M10.K19

10. The Underground and Education- A Guide to the Alternative Press, Mike Smith, Methuen, 1977, B.N00.S12