Education in early postcolonial India: expansion, experimentation and planned self-help

Abstract

After independence India's leaders, including its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, committed the country to democracy with universal franchise and to pursuing a socialistic pattern of society. As part of these interlocking projects, it was widely recognised that India's educational systems needed reform. However, with scarce resources, Indian policy-makers faced the dilemma of whether to improve the existing system, which served a narrow, urban elite, or expand it to the entire population, as the Constitution promised they would. This overview of education policy in the first two decades after 1947 finds that at the Centre, Indian planning did not monopolise control over education. Rather, India's was a socialism of scarcity, which relied on self-help efforts by the people to build the institutions of the welfare state. However, by relying on communities to use their own resources to build local schools, this DIY socialism entrenched existing inequalities.

Revisiting the “Great Levelling”: The limits of Piketty’sCapital and Ideologyfor understanding the rise of late 20th century inequality

“…However, such schemes fell far short of what was required for universal provision, leaving local communities largely alone to manage educational funding and available government support. As historian Taylor Sherman (2018) shows, the decentralized and underfunded educational schemes of the Nehruvian era exacerbated inequalities, making it harder for politically and socially disadvantages communities and regions to access government education. The period between 1951 and 1953 also witnessed major reforms in South Africa, during which education moved from private providers into the state sector.…”

History of Colonial Education: Key Reflections

“…Similarly, the key change in educational provision between 1900 and 1947 was the participation of Indians in government following the Government of India Act 1919 (Sherman 2018;Allender 2009;Ellis 2017). Under the new constitutional settlement, education as a relatively unimportant department was devolved to regional control.…”

“…It remains widely accepted that education is the key to social mobility and the widening of material and cultural opportunities, a claim which underpinned the introduction of the Right to Education Act 2009. This assumption fundamentally underestimates, or perhaps chooses to ignore, the complexity of education and the ways in which experiences of schooling have merely confirmed or entrenched the marginalization of communities through the practices of schooling or the assumptions of teachers about the "backwardness" of the community and family (Kumar 2019;Sherman 2018;Bagchi 2014). Three groupsgirls, Dalits, and Muslimsmarginalized on the basis of gender, caste, and religion have been the subject of intense academic interest in recent years.…”

‘A new type of revolution’: socialist thought in India, 1940s–1960s

“…Not only did the plans promise to pursue full employment, but planners and governments made frequent appeals to citizens to engage in self-help, in everything from producing khadi (home-spun cloth) to digging their own irrigation channels and building their own village schools. 39 There were some shades of differentiation in how work was understood between the different strands of socialist thought. For the Gandhians, work included not just village industries such as making cloth, paper, and bamboo products, but also hard manual labour.…”