Debating Education in India: Issues and Concerns

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The essays in this volume amply highlight that education as a component of cultural inheritance remains a contentious issue. Representing the transfer of knowledge, skill endowment and so on, education harbours the tendency to support and reproduce social hierarchy, as well as the countervailing propensity towards amelioration of vulnerable socioeconomic groups. A rich body of work cutting across disciplines, this volume seeks to establish the contentious past, ambivalent present and uncertain future of education. Concerns deliberated in the volume have resonance with issues that are debated internationally during the era of an intensifying neoliberal shift.

Maya John teaches history at the University of Delhi (India). She is a prominent social activist who has been writing on issues of health, education, labour, gender, social movements, transformative politics and social theory. She has recently co-edited forthcoming volume, Who Cares? Care Extraction and the Struggles of Indian Health Workers.

The contemporary conjuncture of the twenty-first century has been identified by academics, educationalists and activists as a moment of 'crisis' in education. Yet others have questioned this emphasis on a 'crisis', given the continuities between existing and earlier education systems and paradigms. To take these discussions forward, the current volume offers critical perspectives from historical, sociological, philosophical and other social science disciplines. Several of the essays speak to each other and elicit much-required introspection on the arguments claimed about India's educational experience. Reflecting on the importance of formal public-funded mass education, this volume strives to highlight the crucial fault lines of contemporary educational policy in India, as well as the long trajectory of educational inequalities against whose backdrop the recent policy paradigms need to be assessed.

Historically speaking, the idea of formal mass education and the attempts for its gradual realization in the Indian subcontinent can be traced to the modern era of colonial conquest, anti-colonial struggles and post- colonial state formation. There was, nonetheless, a diversity in the provisioning of 'indigenous' education, which was imparted at home, in temples, tols, chatuspadis, gurukuls, makhtabs and pathshalas that together offered education in religiously endowed as well as secular subjects. In this regard, we have evidence of a diversity of reputed centres of learning which were funded by royal grants and other public donations. Likewise, local communities pooled resources to financially support village schools or pathshalas that offered basic/elementary education to select social groups. Such education was mostly suited to the local requirements of parents and students.