Origins of India's "Textbook Culture"

Kumar, Krishna

doi:10.1086/446796

Cited by 79 publications

(34 citation statements)

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“…Even my ETC students who had attended low‐cost English‐medium schools provided accounts of how they had been taught and how they had studied that corresponded very closely with the patterns I observed during my fieldwork. These patterns of teaching and learning also corresponded with Kumar’s () descriptions of pedagogical authoritarianism and a ‘textbook culture in the Indian education system, and bore some similarities to the styles of teaching described by Advani (), LaDousa (), Sarangapani (), Smith et al (), and Vaish (). I will then discuss the factors that promoted the use of these methods.…”

Section: Teaching and Learning In English Mediumsupporting

confidence: 77%

English‐Medium: Schooling, Social Mobility, and Inequality in Bangalore, India

Jayadeva

2019

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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Focusing on low-cost English-medium schools, this article investigates whether the ideology of the transformative potential of English-medium education squares with most people's experiences of this education in urban India. It shows how such schools enable socioeconomic mobility among the middle classes while also creating new forms of inequality. It argues that a meaningful evaluation of education outcomes requires understanding students' and their parents' experiences of an education system and its impact on their lives. [English-medium schools, social mobility, postliberalization India, education outcomes, Affordable Private Schools] Volume 50, 2019 152 so their increasing popularity-rather than enabling socio-economic mobility for large sections of the population-merely contributes to the reproduction of existing inequalities (Annamalai 2005; Mohanty, Panda, and Pal 2010). It has also been argued that low-cost English-medium schools in fact doubly disadvantage students because when instruction is offered in a language in which teachers are not proficient, students' access not just to English, but education more generally, is compromised (Bhattacharya 2013; Sarangapani 2009).However, only a handful of studies have examined "education in practice" in the classrooms of low-cost English-medium schools (Bhattacharya 2013;LaDousa 2014;Smith et al. 2005). Furthermore, the outcomes of study at low-cost English-medium schools have tended to be explored in terms of "objective" indicators such as exam scores rather than in terms of the views of the students or graduates of these schools and their families. Finally, while Indian parents' views about the importance of English for their children's lives and future prospects have been examined (Faust and Nagar 2001; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009), and how parents imagine English-medium education and vernacular-medium education has been explored (LaDousa 2014), parental expectations from low-cost English-medium schooling have received less attention. Given that low-cost English-medium schools account for the majority of education provision in many Indian cities, and are attended by a significant proportion of the Indian school-going population, it is important to understand the kind of teaching and learning that take place in these schools, the kind of outcomes that result, and how they match up to parents' and students' expectations. This article attempts to provide such an understanding, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bangalore. In doing so, this article joins anthropological scholarship that has examined whether people's experiences of education match prevalent narratives of education's value. Writing about India, scholars like Jeffrey et al. (2008) and Froerer (2012)-drawing on Bourdieu's work on education, aspiration, and inequality (1974, 1984, 2000)-have argued that education is best thought of as a "contradictory resource" (Levinson et al. 1996, 1), as a person needs to have economic resources and social connections in order to reap its promised be...

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Section: Teaching and Learning In English Mediumsupporting

confidence: 77%

English‐Medium: Schooling, Social Mobility, and Inequality in Bangalore, India

Jayadeva

2019

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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“…Bhutanese teachers inherited a British‐Indian legacy of severe teacher‐centered practices (Dewan ; Gupta ; Kumar ), not to mention the existing Buddhist monastic educational tradition that emphasized rote memorization, mimicry, and downplayed enquiry and critical questioning (Karma Phuntsho ). These views of education in which knowledge is static and objectively approached through strict independent study and whole‐group lectures was constructed at a time when formal schooling was only available for a narrow minority of the population that excelled at that kind of learning.…”

Section: Constructing the “Disabled Person”mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cultural Production of the “Disabled” Person: Constructing Difference in Bhutanese Schools

Schuelka

2018

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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The Himalayan country of Bhutan has witnessed monumental social and cultural changes in only the last fifty years with the implementation and institutionalization of mass secular schooling. This “modern” schooling has also served to newly sort, produce, and construct “disabled” persons. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, I explored this construction of disability through the institution of schooling and have organized these observations into four forms: physical, pedagogical, curricular, and linguistic.

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“…By contrast, young men arriving in Meerut to study typically found little to structure their days. The British had established a system of higher education in India that was organized around yearly written examinations and that provided little scope for coursework (Kumar 1988, 1994; Spivak 2004). Students in Meerut obtained the majority of their knowledge in the period immediately preceding examinations from textbooks, often written by their professors.…”

Section: Suffering Timepassmentioning

confidence: 99%

Timepass: Youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India

Jeffrey¹

2010

American Ethnologist

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Unemployment among educated young men has become a central feature of globalization. In this article, I examine the experiences and strategies of unemployed young men in the north Indian city of Meerut. Many of these men complain that they are “just passing time” (doing “timepass”) in run‐down government universities. But they also use this idea of themselves in limbo to fashion novel cultures of masculinity that partially bridge caste divides. I use a discussion of these young men's predicament to argue for an ethnographically sensitive political‐economy approach to the study of youth, culture, and neoliberal transformation, one attuned to both the durability of social inequalities and counterintuitive cultural practice.

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Origins of India's "Textbook Culture"

Cited by 79 publications

References 0 publications

English‐Medium: Schooling, Social Mobility, and Inequality in Bangalore, India

English‐Medium: Schooling, Social Mobility, and Inequality in Bangalore, India

The Cultural Production of the “Disabled” Person: Constructing Difference in Bhutanese Schools

Timepass: Youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India

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