Schooling and Constructions of Citizenship: Some Reflections on Student Agency and Choice

A national system of education in modern nation-states is usually geared towards nation-building and schools play a significant role in grooming children as future citizens. While the dominant and powerful usually emerge as the ‘ideal citizen’ in the national imagination, the marginalized are constructed as the ‘other’, vilified, and stigmatised. The school, with its overt and hidden curriculum, operates as a major site for the reproduction of dominant ideology while at the same time creating opportunities for exercising human agency. This article, an ethnographic study, conducted in a government co-educational school in Delhi examines how it sought to mould the students into ‘ideal’ citizens and how this was received by them. Belonging to a relatively lower socio-economic background compared to the teaching community did they give their acquiescence? Or were they able to exercise their agency to challenge the entrenched power structures in society? Were their responses shaped by their specific social locations and the unfolding of ‘cultural politics’? Moreover, when the nature of ‘official knowledge’ itself has undergone radical shifts and the idea of citizenship has been redefined with the introduction of the National Curriculum Framework 2005, were the students able to leverage the epistemological shifts embodied in the textbooks to reimagine and construct ideas of citizenship regarding marginalised communities? These are some questions that the present article seeks to address.