Yunus R (2023) ‘Labour class’ children’s schooling in urban India: a sociological account. London: Routledge. (Available from Routledge, Amazon).
Why is it important to study poor children’s schooling?
Development and policy discourses have long argued that schooling is the antidote to child labour and key to reducing poverty and driving economic growth in regions of the global South. Such discourses tend to blame unequal educational participation on lack of provision and/or the ‘backwardness’ of parents and communities especially in the case of girls’ schooling, rather than acknowledging the myriad interconnected ways in which poverty shapes both the need for poor children to work and their experience of education. While poverty is recognised as a barrier to accessing education it is not appreciated as a reality significantly shaping everyday processes and social relations in the classroom.
Such understandings of the problem of educational inequality have meant that while there is focus on expanding provision and making education compulsory, policy discourse and provisions tend to ignore classroom processes and the way poor children’s experiences are shaped by poverty. Scholars of education and childhood have pointed out that in countries like India, schooling continues alongside children’s engagement in paid and unpaid work essential to their own and their families’ survival. Therefore, it is important to study how wider forces, like parents’ work and incomes, lack of social security, or caste and gender relations shape families’ decisions around children’s schooling and work rather than assuming that socio-economically marginalised communities do not value education.
Policy discourses also fail to meaningfully consider the processes of educational marginalisation in conjunction with marginalisation based on gender, caste and social class in other sectors such as employment, healthcare or housing. This failure becomes more significant in the case of girls’ education as triumphant narratives of ‘girl effect’ ignore the complex ways in which education can be both an empowering and marginalising experience for girls. Therefore, this book foregrounds poor children’s experiences of, and views on their schooling and work, alongside their parents’ struggles to find paid work and survive in urban India in the hope that these accounts would help rethink education policy and practice in closer conjunction with children’s experiences of wider socio-economic injustice.
What does ‘labour class’ in the title mean?
The term, ‘labour class’ comes from teachers’ usage. It captures the material and cultural dimensions of the low status assigned to poor children in urban state schools by their teachers. As the book argues the term also represents the caste and class dimensions of the poverty that is central to pupils’ experience of combining (un)paid work with schooling. As such, this term also refers to the key contribution of the book: moving beyond descriptions of poverty in sociological analyses of Indian education to its interrogation as a ‘structural condition’ emerging from class and caste relations and insecure, informal work. To do so, the book develops a conceptual framework based on feminist critiques of caste patriarchy, capitalism and economic informality which enables it to link everyday experiences and practices around survival and schooling to historically specific structural relations.
Methodologically speaking, the book is based on an eight-month long classroom ethnography in a co-educational state school in central India. This ethnographic account from Class VIII (ages 13-16 years) is supplemented by interviews with parents and pupils which allows a richer picture of children’s life at home to emerge. In its discussion of family circumstances and social background the book combines qualitative data with state- and national-level quantitative data on employment and poverty, a crucial methodological move which enables a sociocultural perspective on childhoods to be integrated with a political-economic one.
What are the most important stories that the book tells?
There are stories of rural-urban migration and ‘making do’ in the face of uncertainty, stories of freedom and what I have called un-freedom at home and on the streets, stories of disengaging from learning at school and of children asserting their right and ability to learn, and finally stories of children questioning gender inequalities as well as teachers’ moral authority to judge pupils. The monograph places stories of schooling within the wider context of children’s struggles to survive in the city as individuals and as part of families.
Almost all the parents in wage work were informally employed and almost all children were making a contribution through their productive and/or social reproductive labour. But knowing parents’ stories of back-breaking labour and unfair working conditions helps understand children’s work as a material condition for the family’s survival rather than as a ‘cultural’ choice made by parents. Restrictions on girls and their burden of unpaid work are also a consequence of complex interplay between financial difficulties and wider caste and class hierarchies rather than simply a function of parental attitudes. Similarly, boys’ engagement in paid work is not a straightforward consequence of patriarchal beliefs but emerges in the intersection of a family’s financial condition with wider gender roles and relations and boys’ sense of achievement and pride in paid work, something that they fail to find in schoolwork.
Children’s stories capture important changes on the ground, like boys’ increasing participation in housework alongside girls’ rising participation in school and higher education. These stories also bring to light messy contradictions in parents’ lives, for example, mothers fighting for their daughters’ freedom to dress and attend school even as they seek to monitor and control these girls’ movement and friendships. Young boys’ recognition of the changing routes to survival and mobility in cities is, perhaps, one of the most interesting findings; partly due to the need to solve financial and other problems and partly due to lack of leisure spaces many disadvantaged boys seek to build social and political networks in urban India. This networking then leads to involvement in local electoral politics and conflicts as well as routes to paid work and self-employment.
…and stories from school?
However, in their classrooms none of pupils’ gendered and classed struggles against poverty, uncertainty or patriarchy are recognised or appreciated. This institutionalised upper caste, middle class ignorance of children’s experiences of disadvantage means that most teachers fail to value children’s commitment to attending school and learning despite their relentless survival struggles. In cramped classrooms and ill-resourced schools, teachers tend to zero in on concepts children fail to learn, and rules they fail to follow rather than on their slow, pain-staking efforts to learn to write, read, do long-division or prepare for a test. Underlining the significance of ethnographic research, the book uses instances of classroom interactions to offer a nuanced account of teacher-pupil relations, analyse differences between teachers and highlight the impact of inadequate infrastructure on classroom social relations.
Then there are stories of the ‘moral curriculum’ prescribed for ‘labour class’ children which offer a systematic critique of how Brahmanical patriarchy shapes gendered disciplinary practices in classrooms. The book provides a rare, detailed account of gender relations in the classrooms as well as students’ and teachers’ practices of policing gender roles and images. Interrogating the intersections between caste, gender and class relations allows us to also understand why school brings welcome anonymity and escape from everyday monitoring for some girls, while others find schools far more restrictive and regressive than home in matters of dress and friendships!
Who would find the book useful?
It is helpful for students and scholars of education, childhood and development because it is an example of rich and critical ethnographic fieldwork and writing; and of building and using a conceptual framework to link children’s micro experiences with macro structures.
Findings presented in the book matter for policymakers. It can feed into a more joined-up policy that sees the question of schooling as closely linked to wider questions of breaking caste-occupation links, greater social security, fair and more formalised working conditions and women’s rights. Providing schools is the first step; it should be followed up with high quality infrastructure and minimum standards of living for all families and children to ensure meaningful participation and an equitable right to education.
The book, especially chapters 3-6 would be a good resource for teachers and teacher educators whose pupils constantly battle poverty.