School as a Democratic Public Sphere: A Note on Being and Becoming

This article revisits the old question of the promise and possibility of a democratic, public-spirited and pedagogically critical common school system with a new urgency. Arguably, this is a time when its opposite—a centralised, standardised and marketised system of education—is increasingly being projected as the new normal. Acknowledging the atmosphere of gloom that surrounds the idea and practice of common schooling, this article at once insists that school can be and become a space for collective pursuit of critical thinking and learning together. With a fleeting empirical focus on the Indian state of West Bengal, this article makes three basic arguments. First, the commonness of the common school system cannot be straightforwardly taken to be educationally desirable or beneficial. On the contrary, the common tedium that afflicts classroom life in a majority of public schools often stifles rather than stokes children’s imagination. Also, in a school open to all in principle, those from marginalised backgrounds may still experience unequal inclusion or discrimination due to cultural domination by their privileged peers. Second, such dispiriting actualities in a common school notwithstanding, by virtue of its being a public rather than a private pursuit, the common school system constitutes a potential space for nurturing the intellectual lives of children as well as their imaginative empathy for others, and thus for cultivating the broader goals of equity, justice and democracy. Third, reforming the common school is thus both possible and desirable, if we strive to expand the intermediate range of possibilities between the polar positions of its inevitable progress on the one hand and its utter failure on the other.