Decontextualized schooling and (child) development: Adivasi communities’ negotiations of early childhood care and education and schooling provisions in India

This paper examines the assimilatory politics of modern schooling as embodied in the spatial and temporal logics of the state’s educational apparatus. Drawing upon a study of early childhood care and education in Gudalur, India, it demonstrates how modern schooling, even during preschool years, deprioritizes indigenous Adivasi commmunities’ socio-cultural practices surrounding children. The separations produced by state educational institutions, between home and school, children’s work and (economic) work of adults, (in contrast to the continuities they assume for communities) are central to this. Adivasi communities negotiate the decontextualized state educational provisions, without completely rejecting them, cognizant of its implications for their lives. Demanding greater accountability from educational institutions, they show how educational institutions include without attending to their socio-political histories and changing relationships with forests, which requires children to be prepared for the present and future, economic and social life, and through intergenerational continuity in knowledge.