The Social Contract and India's Right to Education

India's 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act presents an idealized social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors to uphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children's access to a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract assumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutual responsibilities as well as actors’ agreement to do so. Qualitative data from Bihar and Rajasthan show how state actors, parents, community groups and teachers negotiate and contest the RTE Act norms. The analysis illuminates the unequal conditions and ever-present politics of accountability relations in education. It problematizes the idealization of the social contract in education reform: it proposes that if the relations of power and domination through which ‘contracts’ are entered into remain unaddressed, then expressions of ‘mutual’ responsibility are unlikely to do other than reproduce injustice. It argues that policy discourses need to recognize and attend to the socially situated contingencies of accountability relations, and that doing so would offer an alternative pathway towards addressing structural inequalities and their manifestations in education

Learning with the Past: Racism, Education and Reparative Futures

This paper sets out to show the importance of historical thinking for futures-oriented policy in education. The future has become a site of intervention, a profoundly significant theatre of human action. Whilst all past authorities have in some sense attempted to plan for the future – to realise unbridled opportunities or sidestep catastrophic changes – the ‘Age of Internationalism’ born in 1945 marked a distinctive turn towards coordinated and highly technocratic futures-thinking on a global scale. The Bretton Woods Institutions and the newly-minted UN agencies in particular were mandated to steer the future of human welfare globally – addressing, for example, disease and ill-health (WHO), acute hunger and agriculture poverty (FAO) unemployment and economic hardship (ILO) and the long-term educational needs of children and society (UNESCO). Today, as we face another global emergency, one that threatens the entire edifice of the post-War international order, collective projects of long-term planning must, we argue, learn from past future-making efforts. In this paper we investigate an earlier attempt to steer the future: UNESCO’s ambitious programme in the immediate post-War years to identify and install through education a universal humanism. Education – understood as a set of institutional policies and practices but also as an arena in which social and psychological theories are contested – is by definition a future-oriented activity; it shapes how people – often children and young people – prepare for and relate to what is to come. In this sense, imagined futures already ‘act’ upon the present through education. Efforts to manage, make and even ‘use’ the future through education reveal a great deal about its politics of knowledge: how educational problems are framed; what voices and institutions are presented as authorities; and what alternatives or ‘disobedient’ futures of education are undermined, dismissed or erased. UNESCO’s early search for a ‘new’ universal humanism remained constrained by racialized discourses precisely because of a knowledge-politics that closed down the emancipatory potential of reckoning with the past in the present. An historical lens, we suggest, can help understand the knowledge-politics of current futures-oriented policy in education, particularly to address the ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ that uphold systems of racial domination. As such, we submit that past futures can be a critical tool for futures-thinking in education. First, we show how history is not merely ‘background context’, rather, it has a constitutive force – past choices shape ‘possible’, ‘probable’, and ‘preferred’ educational futures. This is to say, the future of education is never outside of history. Second, history helps train our attention on the contingencies of the future – how the future has always been struggled over, and at critical junctures multiple visions of the future compete for a hearing. Indeed, history focuses our attention on the concentrations and mechanisms of power that made particular past visions of the future gain momentum and achieve dominance. Thirdly, history opens up a space for thinking about how educational futures can be reparative; how past injustices can be recognised, addressed and repaired through critical pedagogical practices. The possibilities for reparative futures, we argue, must be made central to global discussions on the futures of education. Learning from the past – and from past struggles over the future – is a key way in which education can be held open as a mode of critique. This is crucial if the future of education is to be democratic rather than delegated or predetermined

The contributions of Bernstein's sociology to education development research

Global and national agendas to improve the ‘quality’ of Education For All have brought focus to pedagogic processes in developing country contexts. How can development research pay attention to the social and political significance of pedagogical projects and understand the microprocesses of classroom reform? This paper considers how Basil Bernstein’s sociological theories helped develop a nuanced account of pedagogic reform in a study of Indian primary education. I explore how the analysis encouraged by Bernstein’s concepts of recontextualisation and educational codes may contribute to current thinking on the role and significance of pedagogy in development research and evaluation activities. The paper also raises caution about the selectiveness and limits of efforts to capture, identify, measure or assess pedagogic processes and change. A Bernsteinian research approach is not immune from producing the kinds of reductionist accounts of pedagogy of which the analysis is wary

'Joyful Learning' in rural Indian primary schools:An analysis of social control in the context of child-centred discourses

Efforts to improve the ‘quality’ of education for all in government primary schools in India have seen a shift towards child-centred teaching. This paper examines the ‘Joyful Learning’ programme, an example of a pedagogic reform implemented in rural primary schools in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Through an empirical analysis of teachers’ pedagogic discourses, I explore what it means to introduce child-centred pedagogic principles in low-income, rural Indian contexts. Of particular interest to this paper is how new forms of pedagogic control in child centred approaches might be understood and mediated by teachers. The analysis reveals how the social controls of knowledge acquisition can remain unchallenged, and hidden, by the rhetoric of this child-centred pedagogy. The discussions reflect on the need for more complex and contextual considerations of pedagogy in attempts to achieve ‘quality’ universal education

Reparations: theorising just futures of education

This conceptual paper examines reparations as a vital yet under-researched orientation to justice in education. The idea of reparations requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. It implies that until injustices are actively addressed they can endure in social institutions – like education – which also shape lives-to-come. The paper explores material, epistemic, and pedagogic approaches to reparations in education. It argues that attention to reparations can upturn conventional scholarly and political approaches which frame education either as a force of social reproduction or as a track to upward social mobility. Instead, models of reparative justice ask: what sorts of futures of education can emerge from taking seriously the righting of past and present educational wrongs? Injustice is not an inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, horizons of theory and practice for the field