Modern Schooling and Trajectories of Exclusion: Childhoods in India [Paperback]

A timely enquiry into the disjuncture between schooling and society, this book aims to examine the specific spatialities and temporalities of modern schooling through which non-normative childhoods are constructed as the provincial other.

Divya Kannan is Assistant Professor, Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, India, and focuses on Histories of Childhood and Youth in South Asia.

R. Maithreyi is Strategic Lead - Adolescent Health Thematic, at Karnataka Health Promotion Trust, India. Her work spans the areas of childhood and youth, intervention, and research.

A timely enquiry into the disjuncture between schooling and society, this book aims to examine the specific spatialities and temporalities of modern schooling through which non-normative childhoods are constructed as the provincial other.

A large body of critical scholarship has engaged with the ways in which modern schooling draws upon certain situated, normative ideals of child development and is uneasy in its attempts to accommodate childhoods that are situated outside of this normative framework. The COVID-19 pandemic, in fact, was a further reminder of how schooling, in its current form, is limited in its abilities to address childhoods that spatio-temporally disrupt the assumptions of the normal and stable. Together, the authors of this edited volume examine the ways in which modern schooling, excludes, despite set policies for inclusion, and how provincialized children respond to this. Cutting across a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to sociology and childhood studies, statistics and demography, and a range of research methodologies, from archival to ethnographic, the chapters draw upon these various disciplines in unpacking the structures of modern schooling.

Modern Schooling and Trajectories lt