Elite Schools, Caste, Class and Power Structures

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.