2. The “Magic” of Class 10: Schooling in India in the long shadow of the Board Exam

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Proposal

Much of publicly-funded – ‘government school’ – education in India is lived out in between the “all pass” rules of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, and the high-stakes Board Exam in class 10 that gatekeeps entry into higher education. While RTE guarantees that ‘all [students] pass,’ irrespective of their exam-performance in the first eight years of schooling, the ‘Board Exam’ in class 10 is an altogether different beast: not only sorting students into preferred ‘science groups’ in higher education but – for students failing to achieve a 35% passing-score – marking the end of their schooling. How do students and teachers experience, make sense of and respond to this jarring shift from all-pass classrooms to Board Exam-driven, high-stakes classrooms?
We offer a view from two government schools in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu – one rural, the other urban – that serve marginalized populations with significant numbers of resource-poor and SC/ST (Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe) households. A view, in particular, from the lives of twenty deliberately-selected ‘focal’ students in class 9, whom we followed on their return to school in 2021 (after 18 months of pandemic-related closures) and as they moved up into class 10 in 2022. Drawing on focal student observations and interviews – and on school and classroom observations as well as interviews with teachers, parents and policy-makers – we describe and unpack the “magic” of class 10.
This “magic” – quite distinct from the narratives of stress/anxiety/pressure that have predominated scholarly work on Board Exams in India – refers, in the first instance, to frequently proclaimed beliefs, shared by students and teachers (and parents), that a new world of “serious” education appears the moment class 10 commences. Marked by new ritual performances (extra-classes, handwriting-exercises, weekly-tests, study-groups, evening-tuitions, guide-books, “revision-revision-revision,” 35%-focus) and rules (no cell-phones for students, no TV-watching for parents and no ‘official-work’ teachers in class 10), this “magic,” we demonstrate, both sustains and is sustained by a resource-shift. School infrastructure (the best classrooms and instructional resources, for instance), teachers’ time and attention, and parental investment all tend to be funneled towards and focused on the Board Exam classes – not only performing the “magic” of class 10 but, in its shadow, producing the non-magic, meagrely-resourced and learning-poor classrooms leading up to it.
It is such class 10 “magic,” we argue, that perniciously reframes a narrow, exam-focused education as ‘relevant,’ in particular, to future (educational and employment) opportunity. In the process, not only sustaining magical-thinking among students, teachers and parents about aspirational futures in white-collar employment, but disappearing from view the persistent under-funding of government schools, further exacerbated by post-pandemic pressures of rising student enrolment and widespread ‘learning losses’ (ASER, 2021; RTE Forum, 2021; APU 2021).

Authors

• Miriam Thangaraj

• Arpith Thomas Isaac, Michigan State University

• Amita Chudgar, Michigan State University