Reproducing Inequality Through "Aspiration Shaming": English and Primary Schooling in Liberalizing Kerala (India)

• In Event: Roundtable Session 36
  In Roundtable Session: International Perspectives on Education Policy and Inequality

Abstract

New markets and commodities are flooding a previously austere, socialist, Indian economy, and private English schooling is yet another relatively low-cost commodity sweeping through present day India. Drawing on data from an ethnographic project in the southern state of Kerala, I analyze interviews with head-teachers, teacher educators, and textbook writers in the state educational system to detail the ways in which non-elite aspirations are denigrated and low-fee English-medium parents are positioned as vernacular-literate and “un-educated”. Building on Bartlett’s (2007a; 2007b) notion of “literacy shaming” I call this emergent discrediting of parental educational desires “aspiration shaming” and argue that while marginalized families assert their rights to more just and desirable futures, dominant groups simultaneously deepen their power by stabilizing discourse.

Author

• Leya Mathew, University of Pennsylvania