Reading
portions from Michael Apple’s influential Ideology
and Curriculum (1990) and attending a fascinating course on Curriculum and
School, allowed me to think about the connections between elite schools, caste,
class and politics.
While
discussing the different positions that Gramsci, Illiah, Paulo Friere and Gardner
take, the course instructor laid out for us the hierarchy of the inbuilt
messages that certain pedagogies carry in different schools. In elite schools,
teaching is carried out through dialogue, meaning making on the part of the
student, though still operating in a very Gardner way. The implicit message
that this pedagogy carries is such that the students here will go on to occupy
positions of power- as bosses, rulers, and so on. This pedagogy and elite
school is then producing rulers, the students consider it their natural right to
occupy positions of power. Consider graduates from the Indian Institute of
Technology who consider it their birthright to want to change the world and
occupy positions of power. If you are in a municipal school, you cannot dream
of that, you are considered successful if you manage to hold on to a decent
job.
In
middle standard schools, the emphasis is on textbooks and memorising and rote
learning. The students here will aspire to fit somewhere in the social
structure. The municipal schools operate with the assumption that it is enough
for the student to acquire literacy and numerical ability and the thrust is on taming
and domesticating the students to behave well. These students then consider
themselves lucky that they fit somewhere.
These
types of pedagogies and the schools in which they function are then producing
distinct classes of rulers, and subordinate positions. One needn’t look far to
know that there are caste and class dimensions to these schools. The elite
schools mostly admit upper caste and upper class students while the non-elite
ones admit lower caste and lower class students.
The
pedagogic messages that students receive in these schools then reproduce power
structures and aid in keeping them in place. The Gramscian and Illiah way of addressing
these power structures is to give the non-elite the same opportunities and access
to resources that the elite get. I do not question this project. But what this
does is that it leaves untouched and unchallenged the elite and their power
structures.
It
is desirable for the non-elite to have access to elite schools and thus the
cultural capital that they offer. This kind of upward movement is always seen
favourably. What is not seen favourably is the downward move. There is nothing
in the existing structure which makes the elite, or the child of an elite, move
from an elite to a non elite school. The reasons for these might sound fairly
clear- why should the child move downward when she/he has the possibility to
move upward.
But
what this lack of downward movement produces is the maintenance and status quo
of the existing power structures. An elite child will not only have only a
social circle of elite friends, but it will maintain this strict segregation even
when the elite child goes on to ‘rule’ or occupy a position of power. What
happens then is that the elite schools, the pedagogic messages reproduce and
maintain the status quo. The elite never seem to really understand the non-elite
and their problems, they are too distant. As a ruling elite, when they
formulate policies and make decisions, the ideologies of the elite schools that
they carry never really deconstruct themselves. The elite schools reproduce the
elite discourse on caste and gender and represent the elite ideology and these
get passed on, often unchallenged. There is no real dialogue between the elite
and the non-elite, because thought a handful of the non-elite may have learnt
the elite language, the elite have not learnt the non-elite language. And this
makes dialogue almost impossible. There seems to be no space left for dialogue.
The
elite schooling system then becomes one of ways through which the power
structures of caste and class are kept in its place.