Abstract
This paper attempts to develop a social understanding of the ‘urban’ and urban schooling in the city of Kolkata (Kolkata is the capital city of the Indian State of West Bengal). With a brief foray into the socio-economic history of the city and its education system, it examines the role of upper middle classes in fashioning the dominant discourse and practice of schooling in the city in recent times. The overriding ethos of education that permeates the city environment is then analyzed more closely in terms of the urban penchant for privatized school choice, the growing trend to view education as a business under the shadow of capitalist urbanism, and the rising obsession with test-intensive education. All these have the effect, the paper argues, of generating homogeneous educational thinking, without however equalizing educational opportunities for children across all social classes. Consequently, spatial and school segregation are both evident in the city. If the ‘outside’- i.e. social and structural forces- shapes the ‘inside’, that is to say, the functioning of schools, the paper explores to what extent the converse also holds. To put it differently, to what extent can schools and schoolteachers make a difference to schooling experiences of children especially children from disadvantaged backgrounds? The paper suggests that the equity-enhancing potential of schoolteachers is neither inevitable nor impossible. The promises that such potential unleashes will hopefully lead us to revisit the purpose of education and rethink how to kindle both curiosity and ‘imaginative sympathy’ among children. The twenty-first century city cannot but address this first-order question.
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; manabimajumdar@gmail.com. I am most grateful to Geetha Nambissan for the opportunity she has given me to work on this subject and for her insightful comments on an earlier version of the paper, many of which have been incorporated here. I also thank William Pink for constructive suggestions. I owe very special thanks to Kumar Rana, Sangram Mukherjee and Ranjit Kumar Guha for their helpful suggestions and their invaluable help in some parts of the data analyses and school ethnography that the paper draws on. I am indebted to Partha Chatterjee, Keya Dasgupta and Priya Sangameswaran for very useful discussions on the past and the present of the city under study.
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Notes
- 1.
Rural land has been a major site of such dispossession in many developing countries that are going through a phase of capitalist development; in addition the dispossession of urban land for private investment is also quite visible. Some details of similar development in the city of Kolkata are discussed below.
- 2.
The recent demographic trough, that the city experiences, is largely due to its falling Total Fertility Rate (TFR).
- 3.
Kolkata is the capital city of the State of West Bengal. The contribution of industry in the Gross State Domestic Product of West Bengal has shrunk according to recent statistics (The Hindu 2013). The trend to downsize public sector employment- employment in the Central government institutions in the State in particular- started in the 1990s. However, the share of employment in the public sector still far outweighs the corresponding share of the organised private sector in the State (Economic Review 2011–2012). Among the major States of India, West Bengal is a middle-order performer as far as employment rates are concerned (Economic Survey 2012–2013). On balance, economic performance of the State is unexceptional, neither exemplary nor miserable comparatively speaking.
- 4.
There are some definitional issues here too. For example, official documents mention that some of the grant receiving schools, formerly known as private aided schools, especially those that get dearness allowance (DA), are re-defined as Departmental (i.e. state-run) schools. This acknowledged, state schools are still prominent in the urban landscape in the State of West Bengal, particularly when we take note of the schooling options of the underprivileged. According to the latest NSSO survey in 2014 (Government of India 2015), in urban West Bengal (city-specific data are not available) at all levels of school education the poorest income classes send their children mainly to government run schools (about 82–92 %). In contrast, about 60 % of the primary school going children from the richest income classes opts for private unaided schools in urban Bengal. At the post-primary level the corresponding figure is 38 %, which declines further to less than 30 % at the post elementary level. Again, it is well to point out that out of all the private unaided schools in Kolkata, nearly 50 % are Bengali, Hindi or Urdu medium schools. Put differently, private unaided schools cannot be automatically taken to be English medium schools.
- 5.
The sample of schools for which the website analysis is done includes 19 schools.
- 6.
The focus group meetings were held at two separate teacher-training centres in the city. A recent attempt is apparently being made by the Department of Education to orient schoolteachers and improve their competencies to address ‘the educational and social needs’ of disprivileged children.
- 7.
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Majumdar, M. (2017). Homogenized Educational Imagination and Polarized Educational Opportunities: Schooling in Contemporary Kolkata. In: Pink, W., Noblit, G. (eds) Second International Handbook of Urban Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40317-5_20
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