Educational enthusiasm in the countryside

1Modern Expert Public School: “Please! Contact in the Office as Soon as Possible for Bright Future of Your Children, Because Best Quality and Best Education is Only Requried (sic) to Develop the Mind of Your Child.” This is the inscription, written in white on a red background, on the already dilapidated large billboard which, from the top of its two bamboo stems, welcomes us as we enter the classroom of a private school in Bihar. In this northern Indian state, such billboard, which offers a variety of educational opportunities in more than a rough English, is far from being an exception. Advertisements for schools or other private education centres are scattered all over the landscape, both urban and rural. From tall buildings along a road, a wall where they are painted or glued in series as posters, an electric pole stuck between a betel merchant’s shack, a chai seller’s stall to the trunk of a lonely tree in the middle of a field, the advertisements for these schools and private study centres try to draw attention everywhere. They give themselves suggestive names such as “Mat’s Guru Rahul Sir Classes”, “Ambition Success Centre” or “Royal Academy”, and boast such extraordinary merits as being “The first-ever event on best learning practices around the world”, “A pioneer institute for success”, “100% Job Oriented” or “ranked as one of the top 100 schools across India”.

“Modern Expert Public School” and its billboard, Bihar Campaign, India.

2Within the Indian states, Bihar has many demographic indicators such as poverty, unemployment and illiteracy. While it has the highest population density and growth (from 82 to 104 million people between 2001 and 2011) within the Union, its structural shortage of jobs makes it a notorious supplier for the seasonal poor, unskilled labour force of India’s megacities and even the Gulf countries. Moreover, nine-tenths of its population is rural and particularly young (one-third is under 15 years of age), with the highest rural illiteracy rate within the Union, which is 40%. The proliferation of advertising described above, while not exclusive to the State, is nevertheless particularly intense and reflects the existence of a very dynamic market of educational offers, from kindergarten to university entrance exams and state civil service competitions.

3More than a simple request, these advertisements explain through their vocabulary – “modernity”, “development”, “success” – the existence of a dominant imaginary linked to the school and several subjective representations acting within the local population. Indeed, despite the extremely deficient direct previous contact with the school on the part of families, expectations related to education have considerably increased over the past two decades and the launch of a proper programme of universal access to free primary school in 2001. Although the ethnographic fieldwork that I carried out in Bihar makes it possible to affirm that parents today massively adhere to the opportunity offered to them to send their children to school, this dynamic, nonetheless, raises more precise questions. What hopes do these families, practically deprived of educational capital, have when they send their children to school? What is their daily conduct regarding schooling and formal education in general? Finally, and on a more general level, what social transformations and real changes in people’s lives are taking place as a result of the current democratization of education and mass schooling in contemporary India?

The map of the literacy rate by states in India. With a literacy rate of 63.8%, Bihar is 10% below the national average.

Distribution of a free lunch

The history of mass schooling in India and families’ motivations

4The profound transformation carried out by the school began to materialize in these solid buildings, most of which were built between 2000 and 2010. The pink colour of their facade, which has become emblematic, and the size of the buildings make them stand out from afar, especially in the villages where they contrast sharply with the rest of the more modest and dull buildings. However, the school’s appeal is not only due to its free schooling but also due to the material and symbolic infrastructure’s presence. Another reason for its appeal is the particular incentive programmes, such as the distribution of free lunches, scholarships, textbooks and uniforms, which the parents of the pupils, which I met, found very appealing. Above all, the Mid-Day Meal, the famous free mid-day meal provided at the school, has alone been responsible for a significant part of the enrolment increases, especially for girls from low-income families (Afridi, 2011) over the last ten years or so. Some girls are sent to school with their younger siblings so that they can both benefit from the free lunches, even if they are too young to go to school. In many public schools, the number of girls now outnumbering boys is even higher, because families send their boys to private schools as a priority and only send their sisters to private schools when their finances allow them to do so.

5While the effective implementation of free and universal primary education for all 6-14-year olds has so far been weak due to chronic underfunding of this sector at the State level, the campaign in the 2000s did not come to a standstill. Since the country’s independence in 1947, the promises of social mobility and of a better future had time to find its way into the inegalitarian imaginary mixed with the democratic values of the society. India’s dramatic economic rise and enrichment during this period, to which the poor population was contributing without sharing the benefits (Shah & Lerche et al., 2018), had gradually instilled the idea that the whole population was invited to take part in the “vikâs” (development in Hindi) of the Nation and that education would be affordable for all – reinforced by the introduction of a quota system for all to have access to universities and civil service posts, which was introduced at the time of independence and has been considerably expanded since then. The perception that through education, it was possible to fulfil the aspirations of the humblest people for dignity, and that the social hierarchy was beginning to be written differently, has gradually gained ground.

A public primary school classroom in a village in Bihar, India. Lack of equipment in public schools is partly responsible for migration to the private sector.

The market for educational offers, social distinction and a multi-speed school system

6Significantly, the growing influx of children from modest backgrounds into public schools rapidly led to the desertion in the 2000s of those from the local elite and wealthier families who then turned to private education, whose supply rapidly exploded. According to my interlocutors within the field, this sudden defection seems to have led to a sharp decline in the quality of public education. Without taking a position on the veracity of this statement, it is well known that this helps to justify the unbridled social differentiation efforts in the effervescent private education market in a society in which the educational pathway is an increasingly reliable social and symbolic marker. The result of this competition is a renewal of social segregation in schools and, more broadly, a multi-speed process of educating the population. This widening gap is particularly marked between the poor populations, which on the one hand, hopes to improve their means of subsistence by gradually gaining a foothold in public education, where they are in any case implicitly confined, and on the other hand, the middle and upper-class populations, which mobilize all their economic, social and educational resources in favour of ambitious educational strategies implemented from the earliest age of children (Donner, 2006).

7However, the creation of inequalities on the school ground does not lie in this segregation alone. It is also because low-income families are running out of energy when it comes to their long-term schooling efforts, mainly due to a lack of conviction, tangible professional prospects and financial means. Thus, compared to an enrolment rate of 97% in elementary education in 2015-2016, this number declines to 49% in secondary education (years 10 and 11 in the British system), then to 20% in upper secondary education (years 12 and 13 in the British system) and finally to 15% in higher education. These figures are 89%, 51%, 32% and 25% respectively at the national level for comparison.

Becoming a graduate: between a new identity and a shortage of opportunities

8Despite these inequalities, mass schooling nevertheless produces a population of educated young adults from modest backgrounds, who rely on their level of education and the acquisition of skilled work to overcome the precarious condition of their parents. Moreover, these young people, who are usually the first in their families to receive such schooling, find themselves the bearers of a self-image that no longer makes it conceivable for them to continue working on their parents’ farms or doing the hard work that their parents did since in the collective consciousness they are attached inseparably to the status of “illiterate”. In the eyes of the people around them, they are in fact the custodians of the distinctive values for which they were sent to school (self-discipline, respect for the authorities, civic morality, personal hygiene, cleanliness of clothing), and this gives them a special identity and respectability (Jeffrey, Jeffery & Jeffery, 2004).

Private lessons take place twice a day, before and after the actual formal school (public or private).

9However, in Indian society, where about 90 % of jobs are in the informal sector, the challenges of confronting all these expectations as well as the reality of the labour market are often harsh. Most of these young people are usually obliged to immediately join a form of underemployment after their studies (Jeffrey, Jeffery & Jeffery, 2008). As a result, given the lack of job opportunities, they persist in preparing and attempting, often for several years in a row, for a series of state civil service competitions that offer only a minimal number of places compared to the vast number of applicants.

10However, in line with the need of contributing to the family’s income, many of these educated young people either join the contingent of teachers in private schools (public schools only accept trained teachers), or open evening and morning classes at home, which for some time now have met with massive participation, except for the poorest children, as current opinion considers them indispensable for academic success in addition to formal school courses. In principle, these young graduates, thus, find an outlet worthy of their education’s level and which gives them the feeling of being able to give something back to the community in terms of the knowledge and skills they have acquired. Fifteen years later, here they are, excluded as young people, the small hands of a private system whose growth and diversity they are now helping to build, as shown by the countless billboards all over the Indian landscape.