Education is Not A Magic Wand To Eliminate Poverty In India
January 1, 2024
By Annavajhula J C Bose*
The dominant view in debates about development and national policy in India and other developing countries is that education is the magic wand that will eliminate poverty.
Reva Yunus’s book, ‘Labor Class’ Children’s Schooling in Urban India: A Sociological Account seeks to debunk that view. She does this by exploring the links between the economic hardship and caste-based inequalities experienced by students from poor, labour families and their classroom experience.
The book, published this month, is based on Yunus’s PhD thesis. For her thesis, she interviewed teenage students and their parents in Indore, a city of more than three million people in Madhya Pradesh, India.
Yunus challenges the tenet which holds individuals responsible for overcoming odds to acquire a good education. She argues that structural conditions, which produce and reproduce socio-economic inequalities, need to be tackled first to improve the level of education for the poor in India.
She discusses how poverty, patriarchy and caste affect individuals and families, how people negotiate these structural relations and the constraints such relations place on an individual’s ability to challenge and overcome their circumstances.
It is well known that an Indian family’s socio-economic condition decides whether a child can get a school education, whether they can pay fees so that a child can better education at a private school, instead of a free state-run school, and the age till which a child can continue to stay in school.
In addition, intra-family dynamics determine what responsibilities a child has to fulfil, alongside attending school. For instance, whether a teenage girl, unlike her brother, can finish her high school education or if she has to cook, clean and wash clothes or bring in income by doing similar tasks in another household or even get married at an early age.
Given the lack of jobs in rural India, labourers and poor farmers migrate to cities like Indore. In the cities, their caste determines the locality and type of house they live in and whether their children can attend private schools, even if the parents have sufficient income to pay the school fees.
Parents, who are low down in the class-caste hierarchy, have physically demanding and insecure jobs, with little or no access to social benefits in case of injuries and ill-health. This means, Yunus notes, that when a parent cannot work, children have to neglect school and take up a job to contribute to the family income, with girls working in Indore’s garment manufacturing units or as domestic workers in other households.
Schools reinforce class, caste and gender hierarchies and divisions, writes Yunus. Most teachers, being from middle class and upper-caste families, have a dim view of students from labour class families. Teachers are also frustrated since they are overloaded with work, including administrative responsibilities.
Some teachers and school administrators say that students from poor families have an attitude problem, that they have little interest in education. Yunus points out the problem is the stressful family conditions of the students, including the fact that many of the students have to work at home or for a wage. The poor students do not get any financial or other support from government welfare schemes, which could ease their burden.
Some teachers view their work as if they are doing a favour for the students and their families. Also, when they discuss cleanliness, specifically, hand washing, menstrual hygiene, and substance abuse, many teachers hint that these are problems confined to low class and low caste students and their families.
Teachers and administrators expect a girl from a poor family, Yunus writes, to be model of chaste femininity uninterested in her appearance and sexuality. She must only be interested in studies; continuing schooling is the way to save her from an early marriage.
Photo: Reva Yunus
Since 2021, Yunus has been a lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Earlier, she was an Assistant Professor at the Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India and a postdoctoral Fellow at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Warwick, U.K., in 2018.
The last chapter of Yunus’s book should be read first to understand an Indian child’s experience at home, work, and school.
The book is priced for libraries at major academic institutions: $170 hardback and $46 e-book. It is also not easy to read, even for an academic like me who is unfamiliar with sociological theories, perspectives and terms. But those who can access the book at a library, and are patient enough, will gain several insights.
*Annavajhula J.C. Bose teaches Economics at the Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi, India - ajc.bose@srcc.du.ac.in
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