Growing up Poor: Early Family Life and Education

Abstract

Children’s experiences in families, schools and neighbourhoods influence their childhoods as individuals learn to act in meaningful ways within social institutions. Many recent research works document challenges that economic and culturally disadvantaged students experience at colleges due to incongruence between their backgrounds and the culture at higher educational institutions. Rarely has early life experiences at one’s home and family been the focal point of inquiry. The present article explores the accounts of early family life provided by students first in their families to pursue higher education. It discusses the ways in which socialisation impacts one’s life trajectories related to education. Through emphasising on the process, the article focuses on the lived experiences of students marked by constraints due to poverty at home and its relation to the shaping of their academic decisions. In depth interviews with nine participants from Delhi studying in reputed colleges affiliated to a university at Delhi shows how one’s economic and cultural position affect one’s sense of belonging at home and educational spaces wherein students negotiate relationships and identity that are restructured and transformed while they navigate through them. Attempting to study student’s self-constructions, the article shows how formal education continues to function as a project of western modernity creating fragmented bourgeoisie subjects out of poor children.

Pedagogy and Diversity: Difference or Deficit

“…The burden of negative attitudes which children from scheduled caste and tribe communities deal with was brought to the fore in mainstream sociology of education discussions from the 1960s onwards, where 'attitudes of teachers' and the 'need to change attitudes of teachers' were major concerns (Gore et al, 1967). Several studies in the last two decades, that have looked into the classrooms and schools and have talked with teachers and students, have reminded us of the persistence and scale of this problem following the inclusion of hitherto excluded children through our achievements of universal access to education and the Right to Education (RtE; Bose, 2020;Dalal, 2015;Naorem & Ramachandran, 2013). The difference in schools and classrooms where teachers have a positive attitude towards their children versus where they have a negative attitude is palpable and visible; negative attitudes are more generally encountered in government schools than in private schools.…”