77.4
Cultural Capital and Educational Inequality: A Lesson from India
Byasa Moharana, Sai Thakur and Shweta Choubey
Education is supposed to play a major role in bridging the gap between the haves and the have-nots through generating cultural capital. In case of third-world countries such as India, the quality of education that is provided to the poor has been grossly inadequate for the purpose. As a result the gap between the elite and the masses is increasing every passing decade. With liberalization of economy in India since 1990s, the state is increasingly withdrawing from welfare sectors, and therefore, the quality of education has suffered. While the elite depend on the private schools, the rural and the urban poor depend on the poor quality of education in government schools. In terms of content of the syllabus and the pedagogical methods adopted to teach them, schooling is not a pleasurable experience for the children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. Thus they drop out from the school or are poorly qualified to receive higher education.
While this is the dark reality, there is a ray of hope as some of the organizations have stepped in to help tackle the situation primarily through alternative pedagogical interventions. These new methods of teaching science and mathematics etc. have helped the poor students to perform better in schools and get motivated for higher education. In fact, the program was adopted by one of the provincial governments in all schools, but later discontinued due to pressure from World Bank.
Analysing field-based data, the authors argue that these methods, though not the only solution, are one potent way of providing an enabling platform for generation of cultural capital for the rural and urban poor to compete with the elite students.
Key-words: Education and inequality, Cultural capital, alternative pedagogies, Education in India