The Same Child Left Behind: School Readiness in India and the Politics of Language

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Moving Beyond Western Ideals: Reframing Cultural Borders

Abstract

This paper would present how parents, teachers and administrators in a private preschool program that catered to high SES families, and a non-profit run preschool center that catered to children from low SES families in Delhi, India, think about English language as a way to succeed in life and get move up the social ladder. I use theories of neocolonialism and Lisa Delpit's work on culture of power to argue that decolonization is an extremely complex construct and need to be examined in the larger context in order for it to be socially just. Data comes from a larger comparative multi-sited, multivocal, video-cued ethnographic study on school readiness in 2 preschool classrooms.

Author

• Shubhi Sachdeva, San Francisco State University