Ducked or Bulldozed? Education of Deprived Urban Children in India

In complacent contrast the school textbook maintains an inert distance and refuses to acknowledge their lives, its turbulent flows and fears, its sense of time or timelessness. It deals with the issue of water or housing in a sterile manner, assuming that everyone lives in a brick and mortar bungalow provided with tapped water, and preaches “water conservation” so that taps are not kept running while brushing one’s teeth. It also deliberately evades any conflicting issues seen as “uncomfortable” by its middle-class urban authors, and unabashedly pontificates on what “they” – the poor and the unclean – must do to keep themselves and the city clean. There is an implicit understanding that while education must inform “those backward” children on how to conduct their lives “properly,” it should project only happy and “positive” situations to protect the “innocence” of the privileged. Textbooks for government schools, fast becoming sites of social relegation, therefore contain highly prescriptive and moralistic lessons (about hygiene, cleanliness, hard work, etc.) together with naive but insipid generalizations about the perceived needs of the poor.