Costs Security and Discipline: Gendering the debate on school choice in India

Article

Costs, Security and Discipline: Gendering the Debate on School Choice in India

Nirmali Goswami1

Abstract

There is growing evidence of expansion of public and private schools in India. The notional increase in parental choice of schools which is presumed to accompany the expansion has received mixed responses in academic and development research. While some have celebrated the increase in options available to parents, others have critiqued the framing of the issue and highlighted the structural inequalities which continue to influence educational access in India. However, both these kinds of research have been found deficient in their attention to the gender discourses which shape educational decisions in family settings in India. The present article argues for a gender sensitive understanding of the issue by locating school choice in the multi-lingual and multi-religious context of rural Assam. A close analysis of interviews with students, family members and teachers suggest that educational choices exercised in these working class families are connected with issues of marriage, work and gendered norms of conduct. Apart from considerations of costs, gendered ideas of school proximity, security and discipline are of prime significance in their choice of high school for children and particularly for daughters.

Indian Journal of Gender Studies22(2) 1–22

© 2015 CWDSSAGE Publications

sagepub.in/home.navDOI: 10.1177/0971521515578245

http://ijg.sagepub.com

Corresponding author: Nirmali Goswami, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam. E-mail: [email protected]

1Department of Sociology, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam

2 Indian Journal of Gender Studies 22(2)

Keywords

Parental choice, transition to high school, daughters’ schooling, costs, discipline, security

The idea of choice can be deceptive. A little sensitivity to the social con-text reveals several forms of constraints within which choice is exercised by real people in the real world. Yet, it remains a useful analytical tool to examine the complex dynamics of social life. The idea of school choice has emerged at a certain political economic moment when the role of state vis-à-vis public schooling is changing, and when parental choice of schools is being celebrated.1 However, this conception of the social space in which parental choice of school is to be exercised has been questioned from several quarters. The framing of the issue in individual-istic terms of consumption at the expense of social process of choice has also been questioned by some scholars, while others point out how the capacity of, and the inclination towards, making choice vary with class-based and gendered practices of parenting (Bowe, Gewirtz & Ball, 1994; Ball & Vincent, 1998; Reay, 1996, 1998; Sarangapani & Winch, 2010). In India, however, relatively few studies have portrayed the classed and gendered nature of parental choice in the context of school market expan-sion. In a widely cited Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) Revisited, it is reported that there is a larger proportion of boys as compared to girls attending private schools, as private schooling entails higher investment (De, Khera, Samson & Kumar, 2011, p. 50, 57). While there is no denying the fact that considerations of costs continue to influence girls’ schooling in India, this argument does not give a full account of the myriad ways in which class, gender and community identities articulate in a localised context. For example, several studies which have examined family strategies of schooling across class have also presented situations where girls rather than boys are sent to high-cost private schools (Chopra, 2005; Nambissan, 2010).

This article seeks to problematise the understanding of school choice at the family level by proposing it to be a process which, apart from being affected by class positions of students, is also deeply gendered in nature. The first part of the article discusses the need to contextualise the notion of school choice in India. The second part presents the dynamics of expansion of schooling in a multi-ethnic village of Assam. It also shows the methodological approach adopted for the empirical study involving a set of students and their families located in the village. The third part focuses on the gendered nature of constraints and choices

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regarding schooling options negotiated by parents and children at the stage of transition to high school.

Contextualising School Choice in India

The concept of choice has to be examined in a social context informed by interactions of class, gender and ethnicity. But a decontextualised conception of choice gains prominence in a certain political economic discourse where actors are conceived of as ‘consumers’ of ‘goods’ and ‘services’. In such a discursive sphere, the social processual nature of schooling gets marginalised and schools are viewed as goods to be selected and consumed by consumer-parents with little understanding of the social world which they inhabit and act upon.

Debates on school choice have also gained attention in the South Asian context in recent years, especially in reference to the category of the urban poor (Alderman, Orazem & Paterno, 2001; Tooley, 2009). Empirical evidences of expansion of private schools in urban India are presented as acts of resistance by the poor against the state-controlled bureaucratic education system that fails to deliver quality education (Tooley, 2009; Tooley, Dixon & Gomathi, 2007). These studies emerge at a significant political and economic moment of shifts in the nature of the state and its role in education. It is not surprising, therefore, that the critiques of such pro-choice studies have brought attention to the need to understand the social context of schooling in South Asia and have found flaws with attribution of quality to low-cost private schools (Sarangapani, 2009; Sarangapani & Winch, 2010). Others have highlighted the role of advocacy networks across the globe in presenting and proliferating these pro-choice concerns across the world (Nambissan & Ball, 2010). Some recent works have also focused on the class strategies made by relatively well-off groups to convert their economic capital into cultural capital. Nambissan (2010) has reviewed the reproduction of educational advan-tages produced by middle classes in India. In their attempt at highlight-ing the class aspect of family strategies, many of these studies have tended to overlook the fact that the schooling process itself is shaped by and is constitutive of gender relations in a family setting.

In Tooley’s study, low-cost private schools are seen as providing the necessary numbers, quality and security to parents concerned about girls’ education. In his account of private schools for the poor in Kenya, China and Hyderabad, he documents narratives of parents concerned about quality education and safety of their daughters. They rely more on


low-cost private schools for the same reasons. These narratives of paren-tal choice for girls’ education show them simply as urban poor bereft of any history and social identity (2009, p. 107). While examining parental preferences, one has to also uncover the dynamics of class, caste, ethnic-ity and gender in a given social setting. There is another approach to understanding girls’ schooling as presented by Hill et al. (2011) in their revisit of PROBE in a village in Rajasthan. The study locates the issue of parental choice beyond that of an expanded school market through a study of class and caste relations in a village. But even in this study, the gender issue has been examined only through the prism of cost of schooling and does not talk about variation in gender norms by class and caste groups.

There are inadequate scholarly attempts to examine the gendered pattern of the processes of choice making and reproduction of social inequality through intersections of class, community and gender. For example, very few studies have attempted to examine schooling pat-terns in light of the advances made in feminist scholarship in family and kinship studies (Chanana, 1993). Gender concerns regarding schooling in India are often expressed through macro indicators of gender gaps in dropouts and enrolments of students from various categories (Govinda & Bandopadhyay, 2012). More nuanced investigation of gendered pro-cesses implicated in the schooling process and situated in family con-texts is rare.

At the family level, decisions regarding the future roles of children are deeply influenced by hierarchies of sex and age, and ideologies of conduct which shape gendered identities of young men and women. These identities are played out differently in a plural society where dif-ferent communities have their own ways of preparing young generations for adult roles. In South Asian societies, the upbringing of children is marked by gender ideologies of seclusion and segregation (Dube, 1997). These ideologies have shaped girls’ schooling among Hindu and Muslim families through institutions of zenana education since the colonial period (Chanana, 2001; Hasan & Menon, 2005). Among more recent studies in post-Independence India, Radhika Chopra (2005) presents the linkages of educational choices with particular acts of feminine identity constructions to gain access to a globalised marriage market among landowning caste families in agrarian Punjab. She argues for an under-standing of differential choices within a family, not just on the basis of gender but also in terms of age and sexualised identity of marriageable woman. In India, the linkages between family structures, gendered norms of marriage and girls’ schooling have been reported in several

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studies (Chanana, 1993; Hasan & Menon, 2005; Manjarekar, 2003; Seymour, 1999). But the implications of the linkages between ideologies of sexual segregation and educational choices have not been examined in the context of the expansion of the school market in recent years.

This article seeks to understand how class, gender and community identity influence and get constructed in the process of educational decision making by parents from an informal working class background. It is based on field materials drawn from a village in Assam with a heterogeneous population in terms of religion, language and settling patterns. In-depth interviews with students, parents, relatives and teachers suggest that educational choices exercised in these families are invariably connected with issues of marriage, work and gendered norms of conduct. For them, apart from costs, considerations of proximity, security and discipline are of prime significance while discussing their choice of school for children.

Schooling in Assam: Setting and Methodology

The PROBE report and other studies of government schools in India have indicated that even lower-income group families are moving away from government schools to private schools in rural areas (Hill et al., 2011). But one must acknowledge that private schools constitute a heterogeneous category comprising schools widely varying in their human and physical resources and in their degree of independence from the state. In Assam the number of private schools is increasing, but there has also been an increase in the number of private schools which seek government support, especially for secure teaching positions. There is a trend of demand for regularisation of venture schools2 which are set up through local community initiatives. Such demands have been raised from several quarters, through teachers’ professional associations and also through civil society organisations such as students’ unions and literary associations of various ethnic groups.3 Through the process of regularisation of teaching posts (also known as provincialisation), schools receive government aid for teachers’ salaries. The state depart-ment of education releases the names of schools which are provincial-ised through the Provincialisation Act 2011. In rural areas of Assam, many of the venture private schools, both at the primary and secondary levels, are fighting a battle for state recognition for financial stability and secure teaching positions. In settings where government agencies are viewed as the most powerful players, the dynamics of market and state


in the provision of education is likely to unfold differently than in urban centres with more developed private school markets. The trajectory of expansion of schools gets further complicated in a state like Assam which is multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Historically, it has been attracting immigration from across the current national bounda-ries as well as from other regions of India (Sharma, 2012). The plural social fabric is marked by a high sense of community consciousness and inter-ethnic conflict among various communities which is often attrib-uted to the colonial politics of ethnic segregation and the developmental policy of the post-Independence Indian state (Gohain, 1997). If we examine the socio-linguistic landscape of the state, the development of identity politics has resulted in some groups assimilating themselves into the Assamese fold, with others claiming separate ethno-linguistic status. For example, Na-asomiya or Bengali-Muslims are often seen as groups which have been adopting the Assamese language and way of living (Hussein, 2000; Sharma, 2012). In recent years there has been a greater trend towards assertion of separate linguistic identities, especially among the indigenous tribal groups. This is also reflected in the census profile of linguistic distribution in Assam where Assamese-speakers constitute less than 50 per cent of the total population, followed by Bengali, Hindi, Bodo, Nepali, Karbi and Mishing among the major languages listed in the 2001 census. All these developments have constituted the site of edu-cation as an important battleground to resolve questions of community and gender.4 The complexity of identity politics which permeates the history of expansion of schooling in Assam helped one to contextualise the educational scenario in the state and develop the methodology. The methodology is based on an understanding that a study of schooling and its reception by people has to be located in its specific political and eco-nomic context, and the act of choice making by parents and students has to be understood, as Bowe et al. (1994, p. 72) suggested, within ‘their own particular social milieu’. In their deliberations on matters of method, representation and analysis in existing research studies on parental choice, Bowe et al. critique the deliberate attempt to bring a certainty which does not exist:

… both representations fail to capture the messy, multi-dimensional, intui-tive and seemingly irrational or non-rational elements of choice. Not only do they eradicate luck and chance, but they exclude social relations, history, context, influences and doubt. Matters of compromise, mind chang-ing and vicissitude are replaced by simple certainties. (Bowe et al., 1994, pp. 74–75)

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The present research is guided by a similar understanding that elements of choice making could be ‘messy’, ‘multi-dimensional’ and ‘seemingly irrational’. It locates the study in a way that is sensitive to social rela-tions, history and context and tries to account for influences as well as doubt.

The study is based on field materials gathered from a set of families and schools located in a village of Sonitpur district in Assam. The village was set up in a riverine area in the 1930s through British administrative measures. It has seen immigration of Nepalis, former tea-garden work-ers, known as Adibasis,5 and subsequently of Bengali-Muslims6 and Bengali-Hindus from East Bengal during the colonial period, and of other groups from different parts of India after independence. In the last couple of decades, the settlement and livelihood patterns of villagers have also been affected by the changing course of the river Jiya Bharali and its flooding. This kind of migration has disrupted schooling of children in many families. The principal occupations in the village have been cultivation, cattle rearing and poultry farming, small-scale business and wage labour. More recent years have seen an expansion of economic opportunity in the informal service sector and there is a surge in demand for contractual, semi-skilled and unskilled labour in construction projects, brick-kiln centres, and in security agencies operat-ing in the state.

The literacy rate in the village is 64 per cent; for men and women it is 68 and 60, respectively. A Centre for Agricultural Science and a Central University has been set up in the adjoining villages in the last two decades. Schools were established in the 1950s and schooling options in and around the village have gradually expanded. There are two govern-ment schools in the village, one a primary and the other a middle vernacular school,7 and two private schools, one till class eight the other a high school. The two private schools were established in the last decade and attracted many students from relatively better-off families. The primary level private school has been popular among the local residents and many of the villagers think of it as an ‘English school’ even though the medium of instruction is Assamese. In the last couple of years, there has been a decline in the number of students in both these schools following a shortage of stable teachers. Many teachers from these schools joined the government primary and high school after clear-ing the state level teachers’ eligibility tests (TET) conducted in 2011.

This study draws primarily on data collected from a set of students and their families. It also relied on secondary data from DISE 2011–2012 for Sonitpur and a district-level study based on a survey of 40 schools


and case studies of four schools.8 The latter included a detailed study of the middle-vernacular government school (MVS) located in the village, and helped in identifying patterns in the schooling preferences of boys and girls and in selecting the sample for the study. The article seeks to understand the context as well as the process of educational decision making regarding children in families, particularly in reference to their daughters.

While examining the families, I have drawn from Diane Reay’s work on gendered aspects of schooling, and conceptualise choice in terms of ‘decision-making engaged in at a small number of key stages during a child’s educational career’ (1998, p. 1). In this context, the transition to high school is being considered as a crucial stage for a family and in a child’s life. I focused on 12 students from diverse ethnic backgrounds in their final year, that is, class eight of middle-level government school (MVS). At this stage of transition, children with a working class back-ground are confronted with many options that compete with those of schooling, including work and marriage. From a class of 30 enrolled students, the set of 12 students was purposively selected to represent five boys and seven girls from the major linguistic and religious communities of the village, that is, Nepali and Bengali–Muslim communities. The group also included two students each from the Bengali and Adibasi communities. There were repeated interactions with this group of stu-dents and their parents, mostly at their homes. However, these interac-tions were preceded by two classroom interactions with students.

All the families were nuclear but of varying size in terms of number of people working on a regular or part-time basis. In half the families, mothers also worked to supplement the family income. In about one-fourth of them, siblings also worked and in one case the girl student combined her schooling with part-time work. Details about these fami-lies are presented in Table1. Almost every family relied on wage work

Table1. Families by Size and Members Engaged in Paid Work

Family Size No. Members in Paid Work No.

4 5 Father 125 2 Mother 66 2 Siblings 47 3 Student 1Total 12 Total 12

Source: Based on primary data collected by the author.

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Table 2. High Schools by Various Indicators

GS MS KS

Management Department of Education, Assam

Private Provincialised*

School fee Nil `200/Month `25/MonthDistance & location

Up to 3 km Within the habitation

Up to 3 km

Availability of public transportation

Yes Not required No

No. of teachers 16 4 19Regular teaching positions

14 None 13

Percentage of girl students in high school**

31 55 60

Source: *KS is shown as private aided as per DISE 2011–2012, but gets the status of provincialised school in the year 2013.

**FROM DISE 2011–2012 for Sonitpur. The rest of the data is for the year 2013.

and combined it with seasonal cultivation and/or poultry and cattle farm-ing to supplement their income. Most of the parents had basic literacy through primary schooling, except in the case of three families where mothers reported never attending any school. The rest of the mothers claimed to have basic literacy through primary schooling. In one family the father was a graduate but did not have regular employment.

While discussing future schooling options with the students and their parents, three schools emerged prominently: one was the government high school (to be referred as GS) in the neighbouring village which was around 2.5 km away from their current village and school; Khan school (to be referred as KS), a recently provincialised private school, also removed from the village and the main road; and the third was a recog-nised private modern school (to be referred as MS) which was located in the same village adjacent to the building of their current school. Table 2 provides details of the three schools in terms of distance from students’ current habitation, management type, fee and students’ composition. Other, more reputed, government and private schools located in town were not mentioned in this exercise. Three teachers from the aforemen-tioned high schools, also residents of the same village, were interviewed in their family settings about their schools.


All the interviews were in the mode of guided conversations about their family history in terms of work and education patterns, and their plans for their children’s future education. These were conducted in Assamese, in their homes in the afternoons, and on Sundays when both children and adult members of the family would be available. Except in the case of male teachers and four other families where the fathers took the initiative, mothers or female relatives of the students interacted with me. I was more interested in uncovering the underlying concerns through which people articulate choice, rather than focusing on a pre-decided set of criteria. The following accounts of family members are illustrative of the various processes through which decisions regarding schooling are taken. Three overlapping themes of costs, security and discipline have emerged from this exercise. Rather than assigning a deterministic value to these concerns, I am more interested in examining how these are constructed and what kind of meaning is attributed to each of them. It is remarkable to note how each of these concerns is constituted through gendered norms of appropriate conduct specific to their class and com-munity context.

Costs of Schooling: Negotiating with What is Given

In a given familial context, strategies about schooling may be conceived of as consisting of a range of actions regarding the beginning, continu-ing, switching and discontinuing to attend schools. The limits to these possible actions were set by various constraints. Some of these were identified as limited resources in terms of net income and provision of low-cost schooling. It is important to note that in these families, expan-sion of educational provisions through the government seems to have made the choice of schooling much easier for the children’s generation as compared to their parents. The majority of parents said they them-selves did not have as many facilities such as free meals, uniforms and books. Even the school infrastructure was reported to have been very poor. They had to sit on mats, sometimes without a pukka shed. Yet, the cost of schooling children continued to be a common concern across families. The costs included not just school fee, but many other associ-ated expenses on transportation, stationary requirements, uniform, among others. This is especially true when the child moves into high school, a crucial stage for both the child and family in terms of overall increase in costs of schooling. At this stage, the government schools are

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not necessarily available in the vicinity and both boys and girls begin to disappear from school registers. When we inquired about the missing boys and girls at class nine level, the teacher from GS remarked that many girls get married after class eight, while boys begin to join the work force. They are at the right age for work, having acquired gaar gothon (physical build) and can help with the family budget.

When it comes to schooling decisions within a family, costs are not merely calculated in monetary terms, and even when they are, the calcu-lations are not the same for every child in the family. It is these calcula-tions which decide who goes to school and for how long. The calculations are affected by the net average income of the family. In my interactions, the smaller families with relatively stable sources of income were more forthcoming in their plans about higher education of their children. In the case of large families, typically the elder child had less exposure to schooling than the younger child. The net cost of schooling per child changed when other family members started joining the workforce, thereby giving the younger ones more time to continue with schooling. However, who gets into the job market and/or marriage at this stage is also influenced by community-specific gendered discourse of appropri-ate age for school, marriage and work. The following cases from the same batch of students with contrasting experience will reveal these complexities.

Tina belongs to a Christian Adibasi family and lives with her parents, two sisters and an older brother. Her parents are barely literate and rear poultry and pigs to make a living. Her sisters and brother left school before class eight. The eldest sister is now married and the other siblings work on a part-time basis. Marrying late and engaging in work before marriage is common in their family. But, according to her father, Tina being the youngest and the brightest among all children would continue her schooling to higher levels than her siblings. He is also hopeful that she might be taken into one of the missionary schools with hostels.

Tina’s neighbour and classmate Heena’s family, however, is different. Heena’s mother has never been to school. Her father has studied in the village madrasa. He works as a mason and as a local maulavi. Both her sisters studied till class seven or eight and were married off afterwards. Her brother also left school at the same stage. He then started working on construction sites. The women in their family cannot go to work outside the home or be schooled beyond a certain age. Heena is unlikely to con-tinue her schooling after class eight and her mother explains that because of limited income, they cannot both school their children and arrange for


their marriage as well. However, her father is keen that she continues her education in a local madrasa.

Here we can argue that the assessment of costs of schooling is influ-enced by the notion of appropriate duration of schooling which, in turn, is influenced by appropriate age for boys and girls to get married and/or be engaged in remunerative work. And for this set of children, the decision to send a particular child to high school was, to a large extent, contingent on the absence of an urgency of marriage and/or work. In other words, given income constraints, gendered norms of work and marriage underlie parents’ ideas about the desirability of schooling as well as the duration of schooling.

The process of selection of an appropriate high school for these children was constrained by costs and a community-specific code of conduct at this age. Nevertheless, the students as well as the parents were negotiating with these constraints by engaging in the exercise of choice making. Many of the students, both boys and girls, were in consultation with their peers at school, family and neighbourhood about their future school. Among the three schools mentioned, GS was being considered by a group of five to six girl students from the class. Through this, they also wanted to retain their ties with friends by planning to travel to school together which was easily accessible through shared autorickshaws and cycles. Boys, on the other hand, had their own plans. Some of them had more concrete information about particular schools from their older siblings, parents, or from neighbourhood friends. Manoj and Kamal decided to move to KS in the more distant village because it was reputed to have produced good results. Their parents’ mode of engagement with these schools was more indirect in nature. They relied on informal social networks for any necessary information about schools. Accessing formal information about schools through advertisements and by visiting the school itself is a cumbersome task and sometimes has to be done at the expense of the daily wage. Manisha’s mother, for example, tried to inquire about the government girls’ high school located in town. However, she was not able to secure admission for her elder daughter as the last date for submission of forms was over. But she lost her wages in the process. Finally she got her admitted to the neighbouring MS school.

Parents as well as children are engaged in exploring the options avail-able to them. However, these options were severely limited by their social class positions, the physical availability and accessibility of schools and the discourses of appropriate education for children. The next two sections discuss such cultural discourses which shaped their selection of one school over the other.

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Secure and Strict Schools in the Neighbourhood and Beyond

Parents and children shared their ideas about available and desirable schools from a given range of options available to them. The choices expressed were mainly localised and schools were compared against each other on various attributes. Reference to distance and school location kept recurring. As Mousumi’s father said, gari-bhara (transport costs) to the nearest government school everyday would cost more than paying a monthly fixed sum to the nearby private school. But closer analysis revealed that the articulation of school choice in terms of location were also ethnicised and gendered in their preference for a school which ensured maximum security for their children, particularly daughters. It emerged on various occasions that the proximity of school location is expressed not just in physical but also in cultural terms.

There was a striking pattern among the majority of Nepali families in their preference for the private MS for their daughters’ education. In families with more than one child, the parents were inclined to send the younger siblings to the same school as the older child. It was also corroborated by the school principal, who asserted that their school caters to the village girls who do not wish to attend schools in other villages. Table 2 shows a higher proportion (around 58) of girls in MS in comparison to GS where it was just 31. This pattern of selecting a local private school for girls’ high school education becomes particularly significant in an ethnically heterogeneous setting with differential patterns of migration for various communities, as discussed in the sec-ond section. The parents weigh distance and safety considerations while making calculations about how far is not too far when it concerns the daughters of the family. Here the choice of a private school over a gov-ernment administered one does not necessarily reflect a search for qual-ity of education. In fact, the private school was not the popular choice among students in our classroom discussions. Among students and the majority of parents it was seen as one with too few teachers for proper functioning. For this reason, Reetu Devi and her friends thought of join-ing GS over MS. Her elder sister was already enrolled in MS, but was similarly dissatisfied with her school. Her mother shared their view, but was not convinced about the location of the GS in a village which she identified as primarily inhabited by the miyan people9 (Bengali–Muslim community).

It is important to note that preference for a familiar location in terms of people inhabiting the area plays an important role in working class


families’ decisions about school choice. As Reay and Ball have sug-gested in their research on parents from varying class positions, ‘for many working class families, locality and community represent security, belonging and connection; places and spaces to feel (relatively) safe and comfortable in’ (Gewirtz et al. 1995 as cited in Reay & Ball, 1998, p. 433). In this ethnically diverse setting, the conception of safe and comfortable spaces for working class parents tended to be ethnicised and gendered. It is important to note that this sense of threat from the cultural ‘others’ arose quite often in conversations with mothers, but mainly in reference to their daughters’ safety. Manoj and Meena’s mother was more explicit in stating that she preferred MS for her daughters’ educa-tion as the boys of GS are rough and might tease the girls on their way to school. When I further inquired if similar problems were faced by boys as well, she responded in the negative by saying that boys never face such problems. In contrast to her plans for her daughter, she was considering KS for her son.

Assessments about choice of school between GS and MS were, at times, influenced by ethnic considerations regarding who was in charge of affairs. However, such consciousness does not surface in the case of each and every school and parents were seen negotiating their community identity in their concerns about school quality. If we examine the option of KS, we find it to be popular among parents irrespective of community. It is pertinent to note that KS was founded as a private school by a Muslim and has recently been provincialised. The majority of its teaching positions have been regularised by the state government. The school has also earned a reputation of producing good results in matriculation exams for over a couple of years. One major attribute that parents identified with the school was its insistence on maintaining discipline. The perception was not necessarily built on an informed anal-ysis of school activities, but more through observance and accounts of other children who attended the school. The assessments about school discipline become most visible at the time of shifting from one school to another. We examine one particular case.

Kamal was in class eight of MVS when his brother Bimal dropped out of class nine of MS. Their father is a cultivator and a part-time teacher in a private school. He was in a relatively better position to evaluate the functioning of his son’s school and he made the decision to discontinue his older son’s schooling and was contemplating a shift to a KS. His son fared poorly in his tests and he was not allowed by his father to sit for the class nine final examination. He no longer wanted to spend money on his son’s education in MS. He was particularly critical about a lack of

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shason or discipline which is important for students to learn in school. As he elaborated his ideas of an ideal school in terms of shason, he assessed the two schools, one set up by his own people (MS) and the other (KS), the strict one:

Discipline is important…I am also a teacher, I have to hit some students to make them learn…. This school (MS) was started by our own people and I trusted them…but there is no discipline…one teacher was teaching 4 subjects…. The teachers would leave the school at 12 …much before the lunch time….There (KS) they have complete staff for all the subjects…and they are very strict…. They will give you time to mukhasta (memorise) your lesson and if you don’t know the answers they will hit you hard.

To this Kamal also added that his elder cousin, a student of KS, told him that they are given 25 shabdartha (words) to memorise in a single day. Here the father is clearly articulating his choice for a school with regular teachers and discipline to ensure better learning for his son. The combination of stability of teachers and disciplined environment is what convinces the father to withdraw his son from the private school run by ‘their own people’.

Disciplining Daughters through School

Parental perceptions of discipline and strictness of a school emerges as an overarching theme cutting across community affiliations, especially in reference to the daughters’ education. A common yardstick of disci-pline in schools is to keep feminine sexuality safely in check within school premises. And a lack of supervision of boys and girls was enough to earn the school a bad reputation for parents, as we have seen in the preceding discussions about GS.

In a striking example of what appears to be an unusual choice in this regard can be seen in the case of Joyita, a student of class 11 in GS where her father is a teacher. She followed the usual route of high school in MS and thereafter was admitted into GS for higher secondary education. She was well aware of the bad reputation of her school and had internalised the idea of the students acting as a potential threat to her own conduct. In an ironical choice of words she said how she nevertheless felt secure in the school because of the supervising presence of her father: ‘My school is full of mischievous boys but I can’t do any mischief if I am being watched over by papa.’


But this was an exception. Families of working class students usually have a limited role to play in school and cannot extend their supervising gaze to the school like Joyita’s family could. One afternoon an extended discussion took place at Gauhar’s house between her cousins and aunt about her future school. Her aunt and cousins were in agreement that KS is a better choice as compared to GS, even though it is some distance away. In their estimation, while GS was notorious for its unruly boys who do not respect their own teachers at school, the teachers of KS were very strict and would not allow any kind of indiscipline. Her aunt Khaleda, who worked as a domestic worker, had sent both her daughters to this school. She was quite confident of her choice and wanted the same for Gauhar. She asserted that the school was instrumental in protecting her daughters from village boys in her absence from home for work.

I work all day leaving my daughters behind…my daughter is not spoilt by staying at home and talking to the village boys….All the girls should be sent to this (KS) school…these days girls keep clicking their own pictures through mobile phone…the teachers are very kara (strict) there…they don’t allow anything…they won’t let girls wear clips or bindi in school…they maintain shason…

The anxieties and tensions about women’s sexuality are ever strongly expressed with a consciousness of changing times, when the material cultural symbols are rapidly changing across class. Therefore, in an age when the daughters may have access to mobile phones, which not only opens up channels of communication but may also raise awareness about one’s sexuality, the selection of a strict school is particularly significant. Rashida, Gauhar’s older cousin, once a student of KS, has a higher status among peers because she attends college in town. She adds her own experience about school discipline and the shaming techniques employed by teachers in KS:

(In KS) if we go wearing anything other than the school uniform sir will scold us by asking if we have come to entice boys… it would shame us so much.

These anecdotal references to the disciplinarian measures of the school, gathered from neighbours and extended kin members, added to the school’s reliability in taking custody of girls in their growing age. It is important to note the difference in the meanings of the term shason used by Bimal’s father and by Khaleda. Bimal’s father used it to describe the modality of school functioning in academic matters vis-à-vis its students

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in KS and the absence of the same in MS. Some of the parents who pre-ferred MS might have been aware of the absence of such shason but they found it secure because its location assured that ‘other’ boys would be kept away from their daughters. On the other hand, Khaleda used shason to describe the right kind of supervision for her daughter’s conduct as well as appearance in the school.

Even though the forms and expressions through which concern for discipline were articulated may have been different, the concern for safety and security of their girls cut across community lines among both Hindu and Muslim families and was achieved through various strategies of schooling which had a common process of elimination of the most unsafe choice (GS). This led to the selection of either a private school in the neighbourhood or a strict school at a distant location.

Conclusion

The basic premise of this article is that while discussing the process of school choice one must take into account political and economic contexts and cultural discourses which in all manner of ways structure experiences of people located in a particular setting. I have examined the process of school choice among a set of working class families from ethnically diverse communities in a village in Assam. In all these accounts, it is the overarching concerns of costs, security and discipline through which a deeply gendered choice is exercised by these parents with implications for who goes to what kind of school and for how long. The study, though limited in scope, is insightful in suggesting that for these families, the options were severely limited by their structural positions even in a time of expansion of the school market in the village. In this process, costs of schooling did loom large on the decisions but it varied within a family and between different children. Although we did not find evidence of use of available resources exclusively for boys at the expense of girls, we did come across a gendered process of decision making about who will work, get married, or be at school and at what age.

Parents whose children were to set out for high school education had to choose from within a limited range of localised schools with varying degrees of reliance on state funding. Here the choice between public and private schools did not operate through the simple logic of people mak-ing a move to private schools in search of quality. The process was much more complicated once we account for the heterogeneous setting and the nature of expansion of schooling in rural Assam. At the family level, it


was reflected in strategies of selection through assessments of schools on a variety of dimensions including distance and location on the one hand, and perceived notions of security and discipline on the other. At one level, schooling choices were mediated by a sense of security through factors external to school, such as its distance from home and its location. In some families there were concerns regarding the ‘good mix’10 which was specific to an ethnically heterogeneous setting. However, when a school was perceived as functional and disciplined, the concerns about the mix or school composition were relaxed in the case of boys from the same families. Even distance and location did not seem to matter much in the case of boys’ education. Therefore, one can argue that as far as issues of security and discipline are concerned, they are articulated more strongly in the case of girls in both communities. One may infer that even in a setting where consciousness of ethnic difference is strong, the process of choice making is primarily a gendered one, across communities influenced by norms of appropriate conduct for boys and girls. It was clearly reflected in the centrality of discourse of control and segregation through which school preferences were expressed, particularly for daughters. In the South Asian context, segregation is funda- mental to the process of ensuring daughters’ safety while negotiating with education (Chanana, 2001; Dube, 1997). Sexually segregated schooling for girls has been employed as a strategy across communities during the initial phase of engaging with modern/colonial education. Through this strategy, some form of control was exercised over women in a community’s tryst with modernity. This sense of control is still echoed in parental concern about the right kind of school with the right kind of shason. A school has to be seen as credible enough to provide that sense of control. But the meaning of control differs for boys and for girls. For boys, control is achieved through school activities, while for girls it manifests very differently. A completely dysfunctional school may be seen as providing minimum control on women simply by virtue of its location; a nearby school minimises the fear of safety while commuting. It functions by keeping the daughters within a range of movement which is considered safe. The schools, alternatively, are expected to complement the disciplining role of parents and community by strictly curbing any overt expressions of sexuality through physical adornments. A similar supervisory role is envisaged by Joyita for her father-teacher in the GS, a role which assures she keeps away from wrong conduct.

These ideas are more strongly pronounced in studies focusing on the gendered nature of control mechanisms employed in a school

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environment. Yet, they need to be reiterated at a time when the school environment has seen expansion, as is the case in India. Unlike studies on parental choice which make a simple association between school management type and quality of school, I make an argument that among other things, gendered ideologies of security and discipline are promi-nent themes through which particular choices are articulated in this con-text. While discussing Tooley’s work on low-cost private schools, we have already seen that he mentions parental concern for daughters’ secu-rity. Such examples, perhaps inadvertently, glorify the capacity of the private school market to capitalise on parental concern for security of their daughters in a social context which puts a premium on strategies of control on women’s movement. What is needed, on the other hand, is a more context-embedded critical reflection on the expansion of school choices through an analysis of the ideologies of control that have dictated girls’ schooling in the South Asian context.

Notes

1. A significant amount of research in Britain has emerged on the issue of parental choice in reference to Education Acts of 1980 (with respect to Scotland), 1986 and 1988 (with respect to England and Wales). See Bowe et al. (1994) and Byrne (2006).

2. These schools are started by the local community in the hope of receiving educational grants from the government. Venture schools came into exist-ence during the colonial period through the provisions of the Assam Primary Education Act 1926, which made it easy to set up schools through the pro-viso that any local authority with a majority of two-thirds of the members present in a meeting may resolve to introduce compulsory education for children between 6 and 11 years of age, and the same resolution needed to be submitted to the government for permission. The cost of education was to be shared between the government and the local authority (Choudhury & Dutta, 2013, p. 16).

3. After the introduction of the Assam Venture Educational Institutions (Provincialisation of Services) Act 2011, which sets norms for teaching positions to be provincialised, many organisations have asked for exemp-tions and relaxations of norms, with the Asom Siksha Karmachari Aikya Mancha (ASKAM) even demanding that all institutions be provincialised (see ASKAM, 2013).

4. In Assam, many identity-based movements have raised educational issues from the colonial period onwards. For example, modern Assamese gets con-structed and shaped by challenging Bengali as the official language and as the medium of instruction in schools. In the post-independence period, similar conflicts pitched Bodo against the Assamese language (see Baruah, 2001).


There is also an important gender dimension to these demands when each of these mobilisations led not just to deciding the appropriate language of educa-tion for school and higher education, but also in selecting the appropriate dress for girl students at the secondary level— such as Sador mekhela for Assamese students; Saree for Bengali’s; and Dokhona for Bodo women.

5. Adibasi refers to a heterogeneous group of workers who were brought to Assam during the colonial period to work in tea plantations. They are cate-gorised as Other Backward Castes and not as Scheduled Tribes (see Sharma, 2012).

6. The category of Bengali-Muslims has been a contested one in academic scholarship and popular perceptions. There are disputes about the appropri-ate term to be used which is sensitive to the historic context in which ethno-linguistic distinction among Muslims becomes politically significant (see Hussein, 2000).

7. A Middle-Vernacular school is defined as the middle school where English may not be taught as one of the compulsory subjects, unlike the Middle English school. The distinction is not relevant any more as all the middle schools are now teaching English as one of the compulsory subjects.

8. The study was conducted in Sonitpur District of Assam in 2012–2014 as part of a UGC-funded research project.

9. As we have already indicated in note 6, Muslims in Assam constitute a het-erogeneous category, one of which is that of Bengali-Muslims (Hussein, 2000). In the Brahmaputra valley they are commonly referred to as Miyans, to distinguish them from Assamese-speaking Asomiya Muslims and Hindi speaking Bihari Muslims. Some of these students also identified their lan-guage at home as Miyan bhaxa.

10. The concept of good mix has been used by Byrne (2006) in her work on White middle class parents’ concerns about school with an appropriate mix in terms of race and class.

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Costs Security and Discipline: Gendering the debate on school choice in India

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