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.

The gender-neutral school and the implicit Madonna-Whore complex- Draft 1

Elaborating on my previous post on the problem of a gender-neutral school policy, I want to explore here how gender inequality can exist in such spaces too.

Many maintain that prejudice against women or gender inequality does not exist in developed or ‘progressive’ societies or communities. Ours is an equal community, people say. Women and men are given equal opportunities: both get to work, both get to use the same resources etc. and thus we don’t need feminism. But prejudice, in these cases, operates in more implicit and invisible ways. Women are invisibly divided into the Madonna/whore complex. It is not only about equal resources and equal treatment by the authority, but also equal treatment within the peers themselves.

This is the case of the gender-neutral school. Though the authority claim to be gender neutral and gender-less, since they allot the same resources and treatment to both boys and girls, the gender-neutral policy in itself does not do away with a certain idea of inherent misogyny. Merely having a policy about equal access to resources does not make any space gender-neutral or even gender-less, or equal. The socialisation of students among themselves betrays a deep seated sense about pre-conceived ideas about women. It does not change a boy’s mind’s dichotomy of the Madonna-whore complex. Let me give an instance.

When I turned 21, in my final year in college, I was gifted my first mobile phone. It was very basic and only allowed me to make and receive calls and messages among a few other basic functions like the calculator, alarm clock etc. Some of my friends too had a mobile, and as young people in the first decade of the 21^st century, we gladly exchanged jokes via the medium of messages. One such kind of jokes which was circulating among my friends and me during that time, let me specify here: mostly female friend, and a select few male ones, were ‘non-veg jokes’ or jokes with a certain degree of sexual content. One day I sent one such joke, a witty one at that, to a female friend. When she received my message, she was intercepted by a male friend who on reading the message, immediately exclaimed with much shock along the following lines “what a dirty joke, oh my god, she sends these kinds of jokes!” And the news spread. Before I knew, everyone knew that I sent and received non-veg jokes via sms. I was immediately told by some friends that the jokes that I sent to a male friend in the hostel was read by all the boys there. Boys started telling me that I sent dirty jokes, and that they would not communicate with me through sms. It came to the point where boys refused to have my mobile number because I sent ‘dirty jokes’!

At that time I was amused at the whole incident. It did not really strike me as basically problematic. But now I am reminded about it as I read Rebecca Watson’s post on sexism among sceptics, and I can read the complexities of the whole ‘harmless little’ incident.

The reaction to the message came from the male quarter. And suddenly the very men who would watch porn slyly on the side, became scandalised by a woman exchanging a witty joke with sexual material with another woman. It was almost as if, for the men in question, the woman who was worth keeping in touch with or considering part of one’s social circle was someone who was devoid of any interest in sexuality or sexual material.It was as I said earlier, the Madonna-Whore complex, played out so very subtly and complexly that one could have almost missed out the dichotomy inherent in the whole incident.

And this took place in a context which prided itself on being ‘equal’ to men and women, which thought that gender identity was not imposed on any of its students. But I’m sure if you ask the women, they would tell of many more such incidents. What then happens in such places is that because of the gender neutral policy, the space to talk meaningfully about prejudices is missing. And this is something that needs to be uncovered and challenged.

Note on a 'hypothetical' gender-neutral/gender-less school policy

When one removes gender, when one says let us go beyond gender and not distinguish between boys and girls and have a surface equality in school, the danger that one runs is that one removes the space in which one can resist any sort of gender inequality. Though the school policies might follow a certain gender equality, in practice there might be subtle forms of gender power relations and disciplining of the female body and a mutated form of a male dominated world. Here, boys and girls study together, play together, get the same treatment from authority, yet gender socialisation points out that certain disciplinary norms are at work. For instance in a heterogeneous group comprised of boys and girls, boys might prefer the fairer girls and might exclude the ones who are not fair. Or they might tease the ones who are fat or pay more attention to the one who adhere to a normative sense of the feminine. Their might also be a mutated gender role play in sports and dance. When these happen, the space to protest, resist or seek some form of equality and justice is suddenly missing. This is so because the school space, which is supposed to be ‘gender-neutral’ or ‘gender-transcendental’ does not recognise these every day acts of the disciplining of the female body. Those who protest or dissent then carry the burden of being gendered, or worrying too much about gender in a gender-less world, just like those who talk about caste discrimination suddenly carry the burden of caste, absolving the higher castes of any caste identity.

Dance and Gender Performance: A Brief Personal Account, Draft 1

At this very time of the year in 2011 Kavya Krishnan, a PhD scholar in Cultural Studies had made a presentation of her important work on gender performance and dance. She had analysed how dance, specifically looking at Mohiniattam in Kerala, becomes a site for gender performance and how it disciplines and orders the female body into certain gendered performances of femininity. The ideas that she had shared with us as the Feminist Workshop in Kerala stayed with me for a year. Yesterday, when watching Rama Vaidyanathan perform the classical Bharatnatyam repertoire of Allaripu, Varnam and Tillana at TISS, things suddenly became clear to me. Taking off from Kavya’s core ideas on gender performance and dance, I would like to briefly trace how dance, especially Bharatnatyam, has been critical in forming a certain gendered identity in my life.

I started learning Bharatnatyam, a classical dance form, at the age of 10. I was never really good at it- I could not co-ordinate my arms and legs, my body was stiff. Dance was a means then to loosen up my body and make it suppler. Despite my inability to dance I continued, with the support of parents and a patient teacher.

During that period, from pre-puberty, to teenage years, I maintained very short hair. We called it ‘boy-cut’ since it was cropped short like those that boys were often forced to have. I never wore makeup, nor accessories and preferred shorts. Skirts were for special occasions, and while my friends were complimented on how pretty they looked, signs of distinct femininity, I was told how smart I looked, a gender-wise ambiguous statement. Most mistook me for a boy and family and friends all lamented as to when I would become a ‘girl’.

I was fairly comfortable in what I wore and the way I looked, I could not make myself grow my hair or wear other sort of clothes. Because I was amongst the taller girls in my class and there were few boys, I was given the boy’s role in dance, plays and even in dance-dramas. Strangely, I found that unfair. Why couldn’t I wear frocks and saris and dresses like the other girls? Why did I always have to wear a dhoti, a suit and pants on stage? Despite being typecast into certain performative roles and judged by the strict codes of what being a ‘girl’ meant, I continued to learn dance.

Dance and school plays were also the only spaces which upset the non-‘girly’ existence that I led. Dance performances were the only time when I wore lipstick and make up and it made me feel very weird. Suddenly I had to don jewellery, put flowers in my hair and I must admit that it was all in good fun, like a fancy dress party. It was through dance performance then that I first wore makeup and it was only in those spaces that I was suddenly made to perform the role of normative femininity. Dance was also the only activity for which I bought my first salwar kameez, a dress which women historically wore in certain parts of north India, and which has now come to typify a certain type of Indian femininity. I wore that one dress only for practicing dance and not otherwise. Thus dance became the only space which made me perform a certain gender identity which differed from my daily gendered existence.

When I was 17, we performed for a small audience of parents and teachers. After the performance, a parent approached me and said “You dance so well, but why don’t you look like a girl? If you grew your hair it would be so good, it would add to your performance”. That was the moment when I ‘sold out’. I grew my hair, not long and thick till my hips, but long enough to occasionally reach my shoulders. Being more like a ‘girl’ was what would make me a more convincing dancer. One could say it was because of dance that I experienced a shift in my gender identity. Dance constructed my non-conformative gender into a more normative feminine one.  

The other occasion that dance had to shape my gender identity was when we performed the dance drama Naukacharitam by Tyagaraja. By then I was twenty and I got the role of a Gopi, a female devotee of the Hindu god Krishna. The role of the gopi required me to flirt, romance, be gentle, and most importantly act coy. These were behavioural traits I didn’t know and which did not come ‘naturally’ to me. I had to learn them. I had to learn how to be coy and flirt. I had to learn how to bat my eyelids and lower my head in modesty. These where normative feminine traits which I learnt during that dance drama. And it was very difficult learning to be feminine. It was difficult learning to act coy. It was alien, just as playing the male role in the previous dance dramas and theatre plays were.

I realise now that the male roles and the female roles in dance and theatre were both alien to me. I was not comfortable playing the man, nor the woman. Dance, like most patriarchal social structures, has these strict dichotomous divisions of what is masculine and what is feminine. Anything in between, or outside of it does not exist. It also has a defining category of what is feminine and masculine, not allowing space for a fluidity which marks most gendered existence. It upsets those, who do not subscribe to and occupy the fluid spaces in between, who do not confirm to either one definite category but float in the interstices.

Retourner Chez Soi

Retourner chez soi,

Savourer les odeurs, les bruits,

La nuit toute noire qui engouffre tout,

La mer salée qui crache dans la bouche.

La lumière de la lune,

Les ombres longues et parfaites

Les doigts des arbres qui appellent.

Retourner chez soi,

Ressentir la chaleur qui enveloppe

La lumière qui perce les yeux

Le soleil tout nu, qui veut avaler,

La peau toute chaude.

La sueur qui coule

Entre les seins, mettant en feu

Le désir de s’immerger,

Dans la froideur du liquide.

Retourner chez soi,

Etre debout au milieu,

De la mer,

Le vent qui coule

Caressant légèrement les cheveux,

L’eau qui se cogne contre les genoux

La robe qui s’étale dans l’océan.

Retourner chez soi,

Toucher les couleurs qui s’entremêlent,

La confusion de l’âme

Qui veut courir, mais ne peut pas

La violence qui s’appuis sur le corps,

Qui ne permet pas,

De s’élancer.

Retourner chez soi,

Retrouver les pièces de rêves

Les arbres de l’enfance

Le lit de l’adolescence.

Retrouver

La sensualité, perdue quelque part

Dans l’armoire, entre les étoffes.

Retourner chez soi,

Retrouver la table couverte de livres,

La musique berçante, cachée dans les murs.

Retrouver le visage tout doux

De la mère,

Attendant au balcon.

Hyderabad 2011