INCLUSIVE EDUCATION AND SCHOOL REFORM IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA

Mousumi Mukherjee MA, MPhil, Calcutta University; MA Loyola University Chicago; EdM University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Education Policy and Leadership Melbourne Graduate School of Education University of Melbourne [5 June 2015]

Keywords

Inclusive Education, Equity, Democratic School Reform, Girls’ Education, Missionary Education, Postcolonial theory, Globalization, Development

Inclusive Education and School Reform in Postcolonial India i

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a converging discourse has emerged around the world concerning the importance of socially inclusive education. In India, the idea of inclusive education is not new, and is consistent with the key principles underpinning the Indian constitution. It has been promoted by a number of educational thinkers of modern India such as Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Azad and Tagore. However, the idea of inclusive education has been unevenly and inadequately implemented in Indian schools, which have remained largely socially segregated.

There are of course major exceptions, with some schools valiantly seeking to realize social inclusion. One such school is in Kolkata, which has been nationally and globally celebrated as an example of best practice. The main aim of this thesis is to examine the initiative of inclusive educational reform that this school represents. It analyses the school’s understanding of inclusive education; provides an account of how the school promoted its achievements, not only within its own community but also around the world; and critically assesses the extent to which the initiatives are sustainable in the long term.

Methodologically, the research reported in this thesis involves an ethnographic case study of the school. Interdisciplinary in its approach to data analysis, the thesis utilizes both international and indigenous theoretical resources, taking into account both local experiences, as well as transnational processes. It suggests that while the school has been enormously successful in establishing a program of reform that is inclusive in many respects, consistent with both global designs and local conceptions of inclusive education. However, it represents a model that is hard to sustain in light of the changes in its leadership, the context of a highly competitive education system in India, shifting student and parent aspirations, and the emerging neoliberal pressures under which most Indian institutions now have to work.

ii Inclusive Education and School Reform in Postcolonial India

Table of Contents

Keywords ...... i Abstract ...... ii Table of Contents ...... iii List of Figures and Tables ...... vi List of Images ...... vii List of Abbreviations ...... i Statement of Original Authorship ...... i Acknowledgements ...... ii Chapter 1…...... 3 Introduction ...... 3 Converging Global Discourse of Inclusive Education ...... 8 Inclusive Education within the Indian Context...... 11 Barriers to Reform ...... 16 The Case: Delphine Hart School ...... 18 Research Questions ...... 24 Structure of the Thesis ...... 24 Chapter 2…...... 27 Global Design and Local Histories ...... 27 Introduction ...... 27 Recent Debates on Inclusive Education...... 28 Shifting Focus of Global “Policyscape” ...... 31 Local Histories of exclusion in the South ...... 34 Postcolonial Conceptual Dilemmas ...... 39 Beyond Provincializing ...... 42 Possibility of a “Southern Theory” ...... 44 Tagore’s Humanist Philosophy of Education ...... 47 Contemporary Relevance of Tagore ...... 54 Chapter 3…...... 61 Accounting for Success ...... 61 Introduction ...... 61 Missionaries and Progressive School Reform ...... 63 Indian Education and Development ...... 66

Inclusive Education and School Reform in Postcolonial India iii

A Success Story in the Middle of Doom and Gloom ...... 69 From an Exclusive to an Inclusive “School for All” ...... 72 School Success Promoting “Education for All”...... 73 Evidence of School Success from Academic Research ...... 79 Chapter 4…...... 87 Research Design and Methods ...... 87 Introduction ...... 87 Research Methods ...... 88 Vertical Case Study Design ...... 89 Micro-Level Understanding ...... 93 Subaltern Reason and Embodied Knowing ...... 95 Double Consciousness and Intercultural Dialogue ...... 100 Volunteer Work as Research Practice ...... 101 A Relational Approach ...... 104 Global-Local Forces, Connections and Imaginaries ...... 107 Chapter 5…...... 111 Conceptualizing Inclusive Education ...... 111 Introduction ...... 111 Interpreting Local Needs ...... 111 Role of School Leadership ...... 120 Educating the Heart and the Mind ...... 125 Values Education Curriculum ...... 130 Teachers’ Training ...... 133 Policies and Practices ...... 136 Conclusion ...... 140 Chapter 6…...... 141 Promoting Inclusive Education Reform ...... 141 Introduction ...... 141 Bhadrolok Subculture and Resistance ...... 142 Internal Resistance ...... 149 Community Resistance ...... 153 Institutionalizing Inclusive School Culture ...... 155 “Prefigurative Politics” ...... 157 Capitalizing for the Subaltern ...... 160 Global Justice Movement ...... 163 Leadership Marshalling Support ...... 166

iv Inclusive Education and School Reform in Postcolonial India

Interconnected Reform Agendas...... 169 Leadership Enabling Resources ...... 176 Risks and Issues of Sustainability ...... 179 Conclusion ...... 181 Chapter 7…...... 183 Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms ...... 183 Introduction ...... 183 Leadership Change and Organizational Restructuring ...... 184 Global Financial Crisis and Changing Local Expectations ...... 191 Pedagogic Re-structuring ...... 196 Youth Social Action in New Times ...... 202 Challenges for New Leadership ...... 214 Negotiations over Conflicting Demands ...... 221 Conclusion ...... 225 Chapter 8…...... 227 Conclusion… ...... 227 Key Research Findings ...... 229 Lessons from Delphine Hart School ...... 234 School Leadership for Inclusive Education ...... 237 Beyond the Discourse of the Educated Girls as Saviour ...... 240 Conceptual Adoption ...... 242 Some Final Thoughts ...... 247 Bibliography ...... 249

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List of Figures and Tables

Figuere1: Comparative Chart of Public Investment in Education………………....13 Figure 2: Difference in Educational Indicators of Exclude Groups……………….36 Figure 3: UN Quality Standards in Care…………………………………………...81 Figure 4: Multi-level Vertical Case Study Design………………………………....89 Figure 5: Tagore’s Holistic Model of Education…………………………………129 Figure 6: New Organization of the School’s Work………………………………186 Figure 7: Stages in the Adoption Cycle of A Social Innovation…………………236

Table 1: Education Indicators of Major Groups of Excluded Children…………...35 Table 2: List of Interviews with Local and Global Research Participants………...92

vi Inclusive Education and School Reform in Postcolonial India

List of Images

Image 1: Delphine Hart School’s Inclusive Approach………………………….123 Image 2: A Poster of the Golden Rule at the School……………………………126 Image 3: Teachers Training Hand-out on Head and Heart Values……………...127 Image 4: Front Cover of Book on Values Education Curriculum………………130 Image 5: Declaration of Child Rights in “We are the World”…………………..131 Image 6: Teachers’ Training on Human Rights…………………………………133 Image 7: Teachers’ Training Hand-out on Freedom…………………………….134 Image 8: Global Network of the Jesuitess from their website…………………..161 Image 9: Front Cover of book on Human Rights Education……………………169 Image10: Diagram from “A Toolkit for Teachers”……………………………...175 Image11: Poster of Childline at the School……………………………………...179 Image12: Older Organization of the School’s Work…………………………….185 Image13: DHS School Girls Small Group Teaching in Village School………...186 Image14: Group of Australian High School Students and Teachers...... …...187 Image15: A Brickfield School…………………………………………….……..188 Image16: Art-work by students on new school website...... 195 Image17: School Girls Performing Skit on Domestic Abuse…………………....204 Image18: Students Exhibiting Posters on Human Rights Day…………………..206 Image19: School Girls Performing “Aqua Lore” on Sports Day………………...207 Image20: School Girls Participating in 1 Billion Rising Campaign……………..208 Image21: New Homepage of DHS during local Durga Puja Festival…………....213

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List of Abbreviations

If appropriate, list any abbreviations used in the thesis.

Delphine Hart School- DHS Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan- SSA Sarva Shikshya Mission- SSM The National Institute of Open Schooling- NIOS District Primary Education Programme - DPEP Right to Education Act- RTE Public Report on Basic Education- PROBE India Exclusion Report- IE report Ministry of Human Resource and Development- MHRD Education for All- EFA Intergovernmental Organization- IGO Non-governmental Organization- NGO Department for International Development- DFID United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization- UNESCO United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund- UNICEF Oxford Committee for Famine Relief- Oxfam European Union- EU Global Justice Movement- GJM

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Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature: ___Mousumi Mukherjee______

Date: ____31st May 2015______

Inclusive Education and School Reform in Postcolonial India i

Acknowledgements

I am very thankful for the support and mentoring I have received for this thesis research and writing from my PhD research supervisor, Prof. Fazal Rizvi and research co-supervisor, Prof. Julie McLeod. Their constant support and valuable feedback has enriched my work in number of ways by challenging me methodologically to explore the research questions for this thesis and to explore non- dominant epistemologies in data analysis. Life has been particularly very challenging and has thrown many unexpected bad surprises through the PhD process. Despite these challenges of life, I should acknowledge that I am very lucky to be working with two extremely nurturing and intellectually rigorous supervisors. They have complemented each other beautifully throughout this period of time by providing moral support, as well as intellectual mentoring. I am deeply grateful particularly to my main research supervisor, Prof. Fazal Rizvi for constantly challenging me intellectually and keeping me focused on the task.

I don’t have words adequate enough to express my gratitude for having such loving parents, constantly providing me support long distance by calling me on phone and skype. Though we are physically far apart, they have been always with me and constant source of inspiration through the PhD process. I owe deep gratitude to my old Kolkata colleague, Preeti Moitra, who has been like a sister to me and my Calcutta University professor, Dr. Sanjukta Dasgupta, who has been my local adviser during fieldwork and dedicated mentor for many years, even when I am abroad for the past 10 years. I thank all my friends in Melbourne, who have supported me while living alone here. I would also like to thank my colleague and best friend back in Chicago, Dr. Janet Fair for her moral support even in the middle of her deep personal loss. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my long-time friend and well-wisher, Dr. Mary Ellis Gibson, whom I first met in my native city, Kolkata in 2004 researching on her book- “Indian Angles”. She has been a constant support for me almost like a family member back in the US and even while I am in Australia. I couldn’t have conducted my research and written this thesis without the love and support from all these wonderful people in life.

ii Inclusive Education and School Reform in Postcolonial India

Chapter 1

Introduction

In recent years, the idea of inclusive education has become part of a globally converging discourse in both developed and developing countries. It has been promoted by a range of scholars and policy activists not only as a moral imperative but also necessary for sustainable political and economic development. In his recent book, Sachs (2014) for example, writes, “the goal of social inclusion is unfinished business in almost all parts of the world” (p.219). The goal of inclusive Education continues to be promoted not only by Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs), such as the European Union (EU), but also embraced by national governments around the world.

Despite its almost universal appeal, the idea has however been interpreted and enacted in a wide variety of different ways. In Britain, for example, the concept of social inclusion emerged in the 1990s around a new politics associated with The Third Way, first theorized by sociologist Anthony Giddens and then embraced by the Blair Labour Government. In the context of the developing countries, in contrast, the UNESCO has used the idea of inclusive education to articulate its commitment to Education for All (EFA) to meet basic literacy and participation targets. In the context of Special Education, inclusive education has acquired a specific meaning relating to the ‘inclusion’ of students with disability into the mainstream classroom.

These examples indicate how the idea of inclusive education has diverse meanings in contexts and countries with different political, cultural and educational histories. This has led Evans (1999) to note that, “at an international level, the concept of inclusive education carries a wide variety of meanings. It is self-evident that the guiding philosophy is one of human rights and social justice, but the goals for each country would be different” (p. 232). Despite wide variety of meanings, Slee (1999) argues, “’inclusive education’ refers to education for all comers. It is a

Chapter1: Introduction 3

reaction against educational discourses that exclude on the basis of a range of student characteristics, including class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, perceived level of ability or disability, or age” (p.195).

In India, the idea of inclusive education has a distinctive history stretching back to the colonial period and to modern Indian thinkers like Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Azad and Tagore. While the ideas of their thinking about how inclusivity should be promoted through education differed from one another, probably because of their different social location and personal experiences within the diverse Indian society, philosophically they sought the social inclusion of the marginalised of the Indian society through education. While Vivekananda, Aurobindo, and Gandhi were thinking from within dominant Hindu society; Ambedkar, Azad and Tagore approached the idea of inclusive education from outside the dominant Hindu society for the upliftment of the “subalterns”. The educational practice and humanist educational philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore in particular set education the task of freeing the minds of people from colonial shackles, as well as from all kinds of parochial thinking and discrimination based on social class, caste, gender, race, religion and even nationality (Dasgupta 1998, 2009; O’Connell 2003, 2010; Nussbaum 2006, 2010; Bhattacharya 2013; Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh 2010, Collins 2011, Guha 2013; Mukherjee 2013).

The importance of social inclusion was reaffirmed after independence in the modern Indian constitution. Though initially social and economic rights were not included in the same way as civil and political rights --as fundamental rights in the Indian constitution --progressive Supreme Court rulings recognized social rights as an extension of the fundamental Right to Life guaranteed by Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. This became evident in the judgement of Justice P. Bhagwati following the case of Francis Coralie Mullin vs. The Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi and Ors (1981), as cited recently in the first “India Exclusion Report” (Centre for Equity Studies, 2014, p. 3):

The fundamental right to life which is the most precious human right and which forms the arc of all other rights must therefore be interpreted in a broad and expansive spirit so as to invest it with significance and vitality which may endure for years to come and enhance the dignity of the individual and the worth of the human person. We think that the right to life includes right to live with human dignity and all that goes along with it,

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namely, the bare necessaries of life such as adequate nutrition, clothing, and shelter and facilities for reading, writing, and expressing oneself in diverse forms, freely moving about, and mixing and commingling with fellow human beings. Later amendment bills and acts of the Indian parliament began to view education as a social right. For example, the 93rd Constitution Amendment Bill in 2001 was followed by the 86th Constitutional Amendment Act in 2002, affirming elementary education as a fundamental right of every child with the guarantee of eight years of elementary education for each and every child (Juneja, 2003). More recently, with the legislation of the Right to Education (RTE) Act 2010, the value of inclusive education appears to have become legally incontestable within the Indian context, since the Clause 12 of the Act mandates all unaided non-minority private schools to admit at least 25% children from low SES backgrounds. This is now widely considered as a revolutionary mandate to end “economic apartheid” according to some scholars, since the schools within the Indian context had been largely socioeconomically segregated (Juneja 2014, Govinda 2011, Nambissan 2010). However, such acceptance of education as a social right is often only at a symbolic level, since many of the legal mandates of the law have been criticized as limiting inclusive education, rather than promoting it. Dubey (2010), for example, argues, “Several of the measures mentioned in the Act may be devices to distract attention from the systemic problems facing school education”. Since RTE came into force, it has led to the closure of several low-cost private schools serving the poor coupled with inadequate funds allocated by the government to implement universal schooling for all children. Though clause 12 of RTE has created provision for poor children to get access into supposedly good English medium private schools within the Indian context, early research response on this provision has not been promising. Within the hierarchical Indian context, patterns of exclusion persist where multiple layers of discrimination continue to operate due to the intersectionality of class, caste, gender and religion. Several critical scholars have argued that rather than strengthening the existing state system in the delivery of quality education for all children and investing adequate funds for it, the clause 12 focus for public-private partnership for inclusive education of 25% children from low SES backgrounds in private English medium schools have further promoted privatisation and abdication of State responsibility to deliver quality education for all.

Chapter1: Introduction 5

Some scholars who have reviewed how this partnership is working in the delivery of quality education also argue with evidence that in many cases serious discrimination persist in these private schools against children from low SES backgrounds. Moreover, the government has not been efficient in reimbursing the basic minimum cost to educate these children, further leading to discrimination against these children within the schooling system. These scholars have highlighted the difficulty of instituting inclusive education for all children under the clause 12 of RTE due to existing social prejudices against those from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as poor state investment, not just for reimbursement but also for adequate teachers training for inclusive classrooms and pedagogic practices (Subrahmanian 2003; Aradhya and Kashyap 2006; Jain and Dholakia 2009; Naṭarājan̲ 2012; Ohara 2013; Srivastava 2013; Srivastava and Noronha 2014). However, despite these gaps in framing policy and implementation, Thapliyal (2012, 2014) has also studied and highlighted strong grassroots social and political movements within the country for Right to Education. Social discrimination within the Indian system is both indigenous and a vestige of colonial history. It became rooted in the modern Indian educational system, which was established during British colonial times to educate the natives Indians to share local governance. Historians appear divided in their interpretation of whether this British educational project in India was deliberate in its attempt to rule through a system of differentiated education. However, it would be naïve to deny the power- knowledge relationship between the colonizer and the colonized (Allender 2006, Seth 2007, Rizvi 2014). The local elites, who were in a relative position of advantage compared to the masses of poor Indians had benefitted greatly from the educational opportunities that colonialism presented them. As a result of their education, they came to occupy public offices serving the interest of the British Raj. The education system during colonialism thus helped to reproduce a group of “colonial class surrogates” (Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh 2010).

This divide continued even after independence in 1947, as the country struggled economically and the region as a whole struggled politically following the partition to form Pakistan and later Bangladesh out of East Pakistan. Despite the strong inclusive sentiments created through the freedom movement and establishment of sovereign Indian constitution on 26th January 1950, in practice the

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Indian society remained segregated in many ways, not just because of internal ethnic and religious divides but also because of the rich-poor educational divide. Though arguably “racial apartheid” no longer exists, patterns of segregation continue to operate in the form of strong “economic apartheid” (Juneja 2014) and “class apartheid” (Spivak 2004) reproduced through education. Public investment in education has remained poor in postcolonial India --much less than 4% of GDP, combining Central government and State government allocations. Moreover, since the larger share of the investment in education is a State responsibility, in historically poorer States of India public investment in education hovers around 2% with only 0.71% of GDP Central allocation for education even in 2010-2011 (Srivastava and Noronha 2014, Dreze and Sen 2013, Jha et al. 2008). The schooling sector therefore remains segregated based on socioeconomic class and the resource starved public sector is besought with perennial problems of not just poor infrastructure but also teacher shortage and teacher absenteeism, which has now almost taken the shape of a cultural formation within public schools. According to a recent UNESCO (2014) report, India has made significant progress in recent years in terms of reducing the numbers of out-of-school children to 11.9 million primary and lower secondary school age children. Though 287 million adults in India, almost equal to the entire population of the United States, are still illiterate and they cannot even write their names. This deprives them of their democratic rights of participation in society, even as the constitution has granted all citizens, including the poor and illiterate, the right to vote. Moreover, the report also suggests that the significant decline in public investment and aid in education in recent years might affect the progress made in reducing numbers of out-of-school children.

Despite these entrenched inequalities, across India, there have been many educational attempts to bridge this social class divide. Some of these initiatives are widely recognized and celebrated. One such initiative involves Delphine Hart School (DHS)1, whose socially inclusive educational work since the late 1970s has been widely studied and promoted as exemplary by academic scholars as well as global development agencies- both government agencies, such as UK government’s

1 The name of the school and all research participants have been anonymised following research ethics code of the University of Melbourne.

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Department for International Development (DFID), and non-governmental organizations, such as OXFAM, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and others. The school is a recipient of the UNESCO NOMA award for spreading literacy in 1994 and was also cited as a successful case study in the Indian government’s “Sarva Sikhsya Abhiyan” (Education for All) publication (MHRD, 2011). This thesis aims to analyse the ways in which the school has conceptualised inclusive education within its specific historic, political, cultural and sociological context. What forces, connections and imaginaries (Buroway et al. 2000) have shaped its conception of inclusive education? How has the school promoted its model of inclusive education not only within its own community but also nationally and globally? Finally, this thesis examines the extent to which its model of inclusive education is sustainable, especially in light of the shifting cultural, political and economic conditions?

Converging Global Discourse of Inclusive Education

The idea of inclusive education offers the possibility of building an inclusive society in the future. It has been a utopian promise for philosophers, poets, educators and the idealists of the world to reduce (if not eliminate) prejudices and discrimination locally, nationally and internationally. From the early 1950s, in the developed economies of Europe, North America and Australia; policies of inclusive education gained importance with rising social movements among marginalized groups, such as women, racial and ethnic minorities and persons with disability for social inclusion. In the United States, for example, inclusive education became a major civil rights movement for school desegregation following the decision of Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954 which stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Postcolonial cultural critic, Spivak (2004) argues that, the global discourse about inclusive education as a human right for all is in a way an attempt for “righting wrongs” of the “apartheid” colonial policies of the past.

However, policies for inclusive education are much debated and contested among academic scholars globally. Armstrong et al. (2011), for example, write: “The introduction of these policies to education systems both in the new Europe and in the ‘developing countries’ of post-colonial global world is underpinned by a complex and contested process of social change. While social policy is dominated by the

8 Chapter1: Introduction

rhetoric of inclusion, the reality for many remains one of exclusion and the panacea of ‘inclusion’ masks many sins.” (p. 30) In 2013, the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova quoted from Pablo Neruda in her address to the Organization of American States to insist on the scale of the challenges at stake: “Education will be our epic challenge! Education is the most demanding task, the sum of what human beings have done and what they are capable of doing.”2 Indeed, inclusive education continues to be a major political issue in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and the post-colonial countries of the global South. Slee (1999, p.196-197) cites Basil Bernstein’s (1996) work to argue that the colonial historic legacy of “apartheid” policies and “a spurious biology or set of biological metaphors” originating from the practices of French physicians like Itard and Seguin divert people’s attention from the social construction of failure in educational outcome and the need to consider inclusive education as a project of democratic education. Theoretically and ideologically, inclusive education is central to the vision of building an inclusive society with social justice and democratic participation at its core (Barton 1997). While examining the enormous challenges that the principle of inclusivity demands of education, Berlach and Chambers (2011) highlight what is actually involved in translating the principle into effective change. Citing Forlin (2004), they argue that while inclusion is about bringing all children into the mainstream classroom, inclusivity is about providing all of them equal learning opportunity. They further quote Foreman (2008) to insist that inclusivity “is a concept that extends well beyond students with a disability, and encompasses the idea that all schools should strive to provide optimal learning environments for all their students, regardless of their social, cultural or ethnic background, or their ability or disability” (Berlach and Chambers 2011, p. 31).

Despite Booth and Ainscow’s (2000) attempt to develop an index of inclusion to measure levels of social inclusion in schools, there is no global consensus about the definition of inclusive education. Scholars, policymakers, school administrators and educators have interpreted the idea in vastly different ways. Indeed, Slee (2006) has critiqued the attempts to forge a single universal definition of inclusive education by citing Edward Said (2000) in his influential essay, “Traveling Theory Revisited”:

2 See; http://www.oas.org/en/ser/dia/lecture/lectures/ibokova.asp

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The first time a human experience is recorded and then given theoretical formulation, its force comes from being directly connected to and organically provoked by real historical circumstances. Later versions of the theory cannot replicate its original power; because the situation has quieted down and changed, the theory is degraded and subdued, made into a relatively tame academic substitute for the real thing, whose purpose in the work I analyzed was political change. (Said 2000 as cited in Slee 2006, p. 113) What this insight suggests is that the idea of inclusive education is best understood in its specific historical and political context, always dynamic and contested.

In the context of developing countries, the policy discourse of inclusive education has gained currency following the “universal” declaration of “Education for All” (EFA) in 1990 during the Jomtien World Conference, which confirmed education as basic human right. Since then countries around the world have set up their regional EFA offices and have struggled to balance educational access and expansion with the quality of education delivered. Following the EFA declaration, during the Salamanca World Conference in 1994 on “Special Needs Education: Access and Quality”, UNESCO (1994) coined a definition of inclusive education:

Inclusive education is based on the right of all learners to a quality education that meets basic learning needs and enriches lives. Focusing particularly on vulnerable and marginalized groups, it seeks to develop the full potential of every individual. The ultimate goal of inclusive education is to end all forms of discrimination and foster social cohesion. Furthermore, the Salamanca declaration insisted that inclusive schools “are the most effective means of combating discriminatory attitudes, creating welcoming communities, building an inclusive society and achieving education for all; moreover they provide an effective education to the majority of children and improve the efficiency and ultimately the cost-effectiveness of the entire education system” (UNESCO, 1994, p. ix).

Despite these declarations, there is a growing debate among scholars and policy makers about the problematic aspects associated with the implementation of these goals. A number of scholars (Ainscow, Booth and Dyson 2006; Hardy and Woodcock 2014) argue that neoliberal policies of economic growth fostering competition in education, cost-effectiveness and efficiency (as it is evident from the UNCESCO quote above) often work against the values of social inclusion of the marginalized and vulnerable. Moreover, the legacy of competition-based colonial

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systems, postcolonial social imaginary and identity politics in the global South runs contrary to the values of social inclusion and cooperation for a reconciled cosmopolitan future (Barton and Slee 1999, Soudien 1998). Drawing on a range of critical sociological studies of education policy over two decades in England and Wales, and of Soudien’s (1998) study in South Africa, Barton and Slee (1999) argue how the market discourse of “competition” and “selection” are in effect contrary to the values of inclusion not just in a postcolonial context like South Africa but also in developed countries such as England. Barton and Slee (1999) insist that the implementation of inclusive education for all needs to pay attention to issues of identity, recognition and redistribution in ways that cannot be easily accommodated by the market discourse.

Inclusive Education within the Indian Context

Within the Indian context, attempts to implement the principles of inclusive education raise additional challenges. In order to understand these challenges, with respect to girls in particular, it is important to understand the history of exclusion in Indian system of education. As in European societies, historically, in India education was the privilege of men belonging to certain privileged family backgrounds. However, noted Indian economist and philosopher, Sen (2005) and historian Seth (2007) have argued that there were some highly educated and politically empowered women in ancient India. Seth (2007) engages in an extensive discussion about the decline of the status of women during British colonial times, which ironically led to great debates among colonialists and nationalists about the ways in which the status of Indian women could be revived or resurrected. Seth (2007) further notes that “The education of women was not high on the agenda in Britain at that time, and the small resources to be devoted to educating England’s Indian subjects were not to be wasted on the lower classes or on women. Thus the earliest efforts at providing formal education for girls came from private agency --from the private initiative of colonial officials and most notably from missionaries” (p.137).

Historical studies of Indian education also reveal how formal school education for women and marginalized communities in India began to expand during British colonial rule in the mid-19th Century, but in ways that were highly

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problematic and complex. Educational initiatives for girls were established through transnational networks of exchange between indigenous collaborators, European settlers, missionaries and expatriates, transcending the binary of colony and metropole. Although these transnational networks and exchanges for expansion of educational opportunities for girls sometimes met the needs of the empire by subduing demand, they were not always aligned in any coherent fashion with the policies of the British Raj (Bara 2000, Belleniot 2014, Allender 2009).

Evidence of systematic formation of policies designed to provide education for all is not available until the creation of the postcolonial Indian nation-state. As Basu (1987) notes, the notion of education for all at the primary level only emerged as a directive principle in Article 45 of the Indian Constitution3, to be progressively realized over a period of 10 years. Yet this constitutional provision was deferred time and again by successive governments, as they argued that the economy was severely depressed and lacked the capacity to invest in education at the levels needed. It was not until the global declaration of “Education for All” (EFA) that the Indian Government finally established its flagship Sarva Shikshya Abhiyan (SSA) program, which only became operational in 2000-2001, mandated by the 86th amendment to the Constitution of India making free and compulsory education for children of 6-14 years of age as a Fundamental Right.

However, some tentative attempts to promote universal primary education at the policy level had begun earlier. In 1993-94, for example, a community based District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) was set up over several phases. It now covers 272 districts and 18 states of the country. The expenditure on the program was shared by the Central Indian Government (85%) and the State Governments. However, the Central government’s share was provided by a number of external agencies, including the World Bank, DFID and UNICEF (Jalan and Glinskaya, n.d.). It is worth noting here that in May 2014, the World Bank again granted $1 Billion loan to the Indian Government for its flagship Sarva Shikshya

3 The Indian constitution is the longest constitution in the world. With suitable amendments made to suit the needs of the Indian context, the constitution actually borrowed from several constitutions around the world which included the US Bill of Rights. (see. Basu 1987)

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Abhiyan (SSA)4 program to promote “Education for All” and public investment in education by the Indian government continue to be very low compared to other developing and developed economies, despite the growing Indian economy in recent years.

Figure 1: Comparative Chart of Public Investment in Education

As the comparative chart above shows, India’s public spending on education is one of the poorest in the world compared to major developed and developing economies and is far below the global average. The Kothari Commission (1966) recommendation to invest at least 6% of GDP on education was never materialised and total public investment in education (both Central and State government) has remained poor over the years and hovers around 3.5% of GDP. Though the Right to Education Act (2010) was passed despite strong opposition of the elites of the Indian society, none of the funding allocations were made to implement it as per the Tapas Majumdar Committee (January 1999) recommendation. Hence, government run public schools often lack even basic infrastructure like a classroom and a well-trained teacher! (Dreze and Sen 2013, Jha et al. 2008, Sadgopal 2012, Ghosh 2012) It is to be noted here that, though there has been significant increase in teacher salaries in recent years (Dreze and Sen, 2013), the system is still short of lakhs of teachers and

4 See: http://www.livemint.com/Politics/zS9qkb0ITXOKtoM7SsnSbP/India-inks-1-bn-loan-pact-with- World-Bank.html

Chapter1: Introduction 13

much of the system is run primarily by poorly educated and poorly paid para- teachers5. (Chandra 2015) Contrary to constitutional promises, most scholars of Indian education therefore observe that the Indian education system continues to be characterized by “inequity” and “exclusion”, citing a complex set of historical and sociocultural reasons (Govinda, 2011, Nambissan 2010, Juneja 2005). Singal (2006, p. 353) provides a grim picture of educational landscape in India. Quoting from Appasamy, Guhan, Hema, Majumdar and Vaidyanathan (1995), Singal notes:

…continued existence of “multiple forms of inequality—‘market inequality’ (poverty), ‘status inequality’, ‘spatial and sexual disparity’—which continue to render certain social groups incapable of achieving freedom from illiteracy and innumeracy” (p. 42). Government documents (such as Ministry of Human Resource Development, 1986, 1992a) note that children belonging to certain groups—such as those from schedule caste (SC) groups/schedule tribes (ST), girls, children from various religious, linguistic and ethnic minority groups, and children with disabilities—are more likely to be excluded than others. While affirming that inclusive education has become a global concept, Singal (2006) insists on the need to develop a contextual understanding of inclusive education, one that reflects the specific educational concerns within India. Although her study focuses mostly on social inclusion of students with disability, Singal (2008) suggests that the rhetoric of inclusion is often not matched by effective practice. The findings from her own study in 11 well-publicized “inclusive schools” in New Delhi which included 3 private, 7 government aided-private and 1 government school show that schooling practices in these schools are far from being inclusive. She concludes that the problems are deeper than simply the lack of funds and resources, but relate also to the need to challenge the existing values, beliefs and attitudes of teachers and pedagogic practices.

More recently, drawing on interview data from a study of eleven private English-medium schools from the city of Kolkata, two of which proudly proclaim themselves as “inclusive schools”, Johansson (2014) notes that for most teachers in these schools the concept of “inclusive education” remains unfamiliar. She argues

5 See: A special report on the issues & matters concerning the private & para teachers in India by Rajya Sabha TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KthvTwN8h10

14 Chapter1: Introduction

that while there are diverse interpretations of terms “inclusive education, inclusive schools and the included child” (much like in many other countries around the world) within the Indian context, the idea of inclusive education is mostly understood as referring to children with disability, probably because much of the rhetoric of inclusive education emerged within public discourse and National policy documents in India following the UNESCO Salamanca Declaration in 1994 on “Special Needs Education: Access and Quality”.

Conceptually then there appears to be a lack of understanding about the democratic underpinnings of the concept of “inclusive education”, even if, as Johansson (2014) argues, there is a general consciousness of the “goodness” of the concept and a sense of “political correctness” in adopting the language of “inclusive education” in policy documents. In Indian policy circles, while there has been much discussion already about “what” and “why” of inclusive education (i.e. children with disability as they are considered most marginalized within that context like elsewhere in the world) there are no clear policy directions of “how” its implementation should be coordinated and assessed. Beyond providing superficial infrastructural inputs, little attention is paid to the need for changing teachers’ pedagogic practices.

This concern about pedagogic practices that are contrary to the principles of inclusive education is also raised by Singal (2008). She refers to Rao, Cheng and Narain’s (2003) comparative work in India and China to argue how teachers are typically regarded as transmitters of knowledge, rather than facilitators of learning within both systems. Not surprisingly therefore they contradict the policies of inclusion, since teaching practices are mostly driven by teaching to the tests, together with an emphasis on completing the requirements of the rigid syllabus resulting in high pressure on teachers and students to achieve good grades in exams. Singal (2006) argues that, in this way, the mainstream system of Indian education necessarily excludes diverse learning needs of all students. To support her conclusion, she cites similar concerns expressed by various stake-holders in the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) study about the detrimental effect of an education system largely driven by examinations.

http://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/india-faces-shortage-of-five-lakh-teachers-

Chapter1: Introduction 15

Barriers to Reform

A number of scholars have attempted to explain why it has been so difficult to implement programs of inclusive educational reform in India. Their explanations have variously focused on historical, political and cultural considerations. During the British colonial period such reforms were clearly difficult because they were seldom fully supported by the colonial authorities. After independence, the barriers to the expansion of mass education for social inclusion included not only the legacy of colonialism but also the unrealistic expectations inherent in anti-colonial nationalist sentiments and postcolonial social imaginary of the people. Also, as I have noted earlier, successive Indian governments did not have the economic resources to fund educational expansion. Driven by social democratic ideologies that favored public education, they were also reluctant to give a green light to privatization.

Taking a critical policy sociology approach, Kumar, Priyam and Saxena (2001) argue that in the mid-90s the Indian government began to liberalize its closed socialist planned economy, but this generated its own contradictions. Though taking a critical anthropological approach D’Costa (2012, p. 5) argued that, "Since independence India has been a capitalist economy but with a significant feudal hangover, circumscribed by modern social- democratic sentiments." According to his analysis, the economy was not well-integrated with the global markets, but socialism was more a constitutional rhetoric within postcolonial India imagined by the committee members who drafted the Indian constitution. Feudal capitalism continued to operate as a continuation of traditional cultural practices even after the colonial capitalists left the country. Kumar, Priyam and Saxena argue, for example, that the District Primary Education Program (DPEP) promoted privatization of education, as well as public-private partnerships, but the government tried to suppress information about how DPEP was in fact funded by external loans from the World Bank. According to Kumar, Priyam and Saxena, the setting up of the DPEP was part of the Washington led structural adjustment policies and the larger historical processes which encouraged already existing para-teachers and “maverick institutions (e g, 'alternative schools')” (p. 568) within the system, rather than helping to make

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16 Chapter1: Introduction

significant change in the formal structure of schools within the public system. This view is further corroborated by the empirical findings of scholars such as Nambissan (2000) and Srivastava (2007), who have raised serious concerns about the quality of some of these alternative private schools. Singal (2006) also argues that a focus on alternative systems takes attention away from examining exclusion within the mainstream system and on improving public education.

Moreover, a number of scholars have argued that the pressure from international organizations, such as the World Bank and also UNESCO, to promote certain kinds of policies for increasing access to education without long-term planning for delivery and sustainability of such access policy has actually undermined quality of education (King 2007, Kalyanpur 2008, Kumar 2010). More recently, Srivastava (2013) has noted that while the expansion of low-fee private schools, following the launch of Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (Education for All) in India, has increased access to education for children from low socioeconomic background, it has also contributed to the further segregation of the schooling sector in India by social class, whereby children from upper class and rich families attend exclusive private English medium schools, while the children from poor families study in poorly resourced government schools or low-fee private schools. Moreover, Srivastava (2013) argues that, the corrupt practices in which some of these low-fee private schools indulge to get recognition by the government also raise questions about their quality.

These criticisms of the Indian system of education relating to the unequal educational landscape based on competitive exams, poor provision in government schools and low-fee private schools, inappropriate teachers pedagogic practices for inclusive education appear somewhat different from arguments made by scholars such as Slee (2006), Ainscow, Booth and Dyson (2006) and Hardy and Woodcock (2014) within the western contexts. Within the western context scholars argue that recent neoliberal emphasis on privatization, competition and choice are in effect working against the democratic promise of inclusive education, not just for children with disability but for a wider section of marginalized students with varying learning needs. According to them the democratic inclusive promise of progressive educational traditions established in these contexts following social movements of

Chapter1: Introduction 17

the marginalized is being undermined in recent years due to neoliberal restructuring of education to meet the instrumental needs of the global economy.

However, the differences between the challenges of reform in the Indian and most western contexts are also significant because of India’s colonial history. The critical discussion of the theoretical concept of “inclusive education” by most Indian scholars as reviewed by Johansson (2014) highlight India’s legacy of colonialism. The Indian scholarship takes a more postcolonial critical approach. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007), for example, has taken such an approach in his book, Provincializing Europe, designed to contextualize theory within its indigenous historical circumstances. Indeed, some Indian scholars consider “inclusive education” to be a Western concept developed within specific socio-cultural, geopolitical and historical context of Western countries, which is being inappropriately imposed on developing countries in the global South as a hegemonic agenda of “neocolonialism in education” (Johansson, 2014). These critics have highlighted the problematic of school reform for inclusive education within the context of the specific issues that arise in India, especially with respect to the history of Indian education, along with the cultural politics that define its distinctive current challenges. It is in accordance with this line of thinking that the research reported in this thesis was conceptualized and carried out.

The Case: Delphine Hart School

The challenges of implementing school reform for inclusive education within the Indian system and the criticisms associated with the concept of “inclusive education” as western hegemonic imposition are now well-documented. Also available are studies of inclusive educational reforms that have been attempted in India (for example, Singal 2006, 2008; Johansson 2014). These studies have highlighted the poor conceptualization of the idea of inclusivity, the lack of resource, poor quality of teaching and the lack of long-term commitment. The challenges have thus been both conceptual and practical. Many reforms are established only to be abandoned within a few years due to a complex set of challenges in implementation.

There is however one school in India –Delphine Hart School (DHS)--whose work for inclusive education has been much extolled in the educational development

18 Chapter1: Introduction

literature, for its effectiveness in responding to local community needs and for its attempts to practice inclusivity in order to promote social justice and human rights. The socially inclusive reform program of DHS is most striking because it is a private English medium Catholic school (popularly known as convent school) and because convent schools within the postcolonial Indian society are often considered exclusive, accessible only to girls from higher social class. Moreover, the particular Catholic network of schools to which DHS belongs also holds a reputation for high standards in terms of their academic achievements, often achieved through highly selective admission and pedagogic practices.

The success that DHS has had in creating inclusive learning space for all children within such an exclusive network of educational institutions --not just those with disability but also those from poorer socioeconomic and diverse minority religious backgrounds -- is therefore intriguing, to say the least. Also significant is the fact that the work of DHS has been regarded as an inspiration for legislation of the Right to Education Act (MHRD 2009) which came into effect in 2010 mandating all (non-minority) private schools to admit 25% children from weaker section and disadvantaged groups. However, though it is a minority Catholic institution, according to a number of reports, Delphine Hart School already appeared to be successfully practicing inclusive education for a large section (50%) of children from poor socioeconomic backgrounds for a couple of decades before RTE came into force (MHRD 2011).

Delphine Hart School and several other sister schools under the Irish Catholic Jesuitess order were set up in the mid- 19th century as a result of an initiative taken by a German Priest, who spent some time as an apostolic in the Bengal province of South Asia during British colonial rule before settling in Australia. It is important to note here that the founding religious woman of the order back in Europe wanted to follow the scholarly order of the Society of Jesus, which is exclusively for Jesuit religious men. So, she instituted her own order of scholarly nuns as the “Jesuitess” of the Catholic order, even after facing much incarceration by the Vatican back in the early 17thC. While working in Bengal during colonial British India, the German Priest was much moved by the condition of the minority Catholics in the region, who were very poor and had little education. They comprised small portions of poor

Chapter1: Introduction 19

European population6, some mixed race descendants of Portuguese, French and other Europeans with Indians (known as Eurasians during colonial times) and some lower caste7 converted Indians. Because of a great deal of sectarianism among Christian denominations during those times, the colonial British government was indifferent and antagonistic towards this population. While there was some provision of schooling under the Jesuits for the boys, there was none for the girls. Hence, this German priest took the initiative to bring a group of Jesuitess nuns from Ireland to set up schools for these poor Catholic girls. The first school was set up in Calcutta, the then capital of colonial British India and then several schools were established under the order all across the Bengal province and also other parts of India (Nolan 2008, Colmcille 1968). DHS was one such school established in Calcutta.

According to a liberal view of globalization, this can be considered as an example of early form of globalization, as Sen (2001) wrote in International Herald Tribune:

Globalization is not new, nor is it just Westernization: over thousands of years, globalization has progressed through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences and dissemination of knowledge and understanding (including science and technology). Therefore it can be argued that the origin of the school is not rooted in British colonial history, but the travels of Portuguese, German and Irish missionaries. This could be viewed as the human side of early 19th Century globalization relating to migration of soldiers and religious preachers from Europe to Asia and Australia. In its long institutional history of over 150 years, DHS and the Jesuitess order in India thus witnessed freedom from colonial rule and had to meet the requirements of the modern independent nation-state, India. As such, the school connects the colonial history of Indian education to contemporary times. Currently DHS is part of a large interconnected global network of Jesuitess schools which operates in 24 countries and 6 continents around the world.

6 Refer to the literature on “poor white” community during British India as discussed in the following publications: Arnold (1979), Hawes (1996) and Stoler (1989). 7 The caste system in India has become a highly oppressive and discriminatory indigenous social practice, though some scholars claim that in ancient India these castes were mere professional labels like medieval European guilds.

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After Indian independence in 1947, while the Jesuitess schools kept a small percentage of their seats reserved for poor Catholic girls corresponding to their Catholic mission of social justice, they were mostly engaged to educate the daughters of native middleclass and social elites. However, taking its Catholic mission of social justice more seriously, Delphine Hart School changed its admission policy in the late 1970s and began to serve the needs of large numbers of poor students, irrespective of their religious or socio-economic background. Over the three decades since the 1980s, 50% of total student body has come from very poor socioeconomic backgrounds. The school was able to do this by utilizing strategically a range of financial, intellectual and human resources through its global Jesuitess network to not only meet the needs of a large body of underserved disadvantaged students, but also engage in various local community outreach programs for social equity and human rights.

After about a decade of dedicated work, DHS began to be widely recognized for its achievements, becoming a recipient of UNESCO NOMA award in 1994 for spreading literacy and promoting inclusive education. The work of the then Principal of Delphine Hart School, Sister Valentine, was noted in particular, leading her to receive invitations from around the world to attend education conferences, deliver workshops on values education and staff transformation seminars for inclusive pedagogy. She was widely consulted for the development of state and national policies on inclusive education. Furthermore, since the mid-1990s, the school has become the subject of a number of independent academic studies, as well as studies by global development agencies, such as DFID. OXFAM celebrated the work of the school as displaying “best practice” of a community oriented inclusive school for all children. The school’s work was also cited in documents by UNICEF and the World Bank for its work in addressing a range of issues regarding inclusive education. Scholars who have commented favorably on the work of the school include: Green (1995), Jessop (1998), Stephens (2003), Doggett (2005), Tembon and Fort (2008), Flatt (2008), Bajaj (2011), Dabir, Rego and Kapadia (2011), Allender (2014) and more recently, Chattopadhyay (2015).

The school’s work has been studied through a range of theoretical, methodological, ethical and political lens. Green (1995) has studied the school’s

Chapter1: Introduction 21

work through the lens of Deweyian “experiential learning” for community engagement among students. The school’s work has been also studied through Freirean critical lens for its values-based “critical consciousness” raising work in the area of human rights education by Bajaj (2011). Its work has been studied as a successful example of inclusive school culture by Chattopadhyay (2015). In a study funded by DFID, Jessop (1998) has studied the work of the school to draw a model of best practices, for a cost-effective inclusive school.

In this way DHS is now widely regarded as a very successful model for promoting and enacting inclusive “education for all”. Indeed, its fame is reminiscent of the popularity of poor “City of Joy”, popularized globally by the book and film of the same name. Sister Valentine’s educational work has been compared to the social work of Mother Teresa. With the rise of the global discourses of inclusive Education for all and Human Rights Education, DHS appears to have been highly successful in harnessing these discourses strategically to promote its work globally in a number of ways, which includes attracting much needed resources, gathering consent from local parents, even making middleclass girls and their parents active stakeholders for the education of marginalized subaltern girls within the hierarchical Indian society.

It cannot be denied that over the past three decades, DHS has successfully implemented a massive equity-based access policy for school admission by educating 50% children coming from very poor, destitute backgrounds with 50% children coming from well-off middleclass families in their school. It has also become engaged in coordinating several community outreach projects to share resources with neighboring village schools, provide teacher’s training to a range of para-teachers as well as government school teachers, develop curriculum for human rights education and also establish satellite schools for migrant children in the brickfields situated on the outer-fringes of the city of Kolkata and among fishing communities in a neighboring Indian state.

The Indian Government has recognized these massive achievements. In 2011, the school’s work was cited as one of the successful case studies in the Indian Government’s Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (Education for All) publication (MHRD, 2011). Prior to that, in 2007, the school’s Principal was awarded the fourth highest civilian award “Padma Shri” by the Indian Government, a major achievement for an

22 Chapter1: Introduction

Irish-born nun in postcolonial India. The school was publicized as operating like a central hub for “social transformation” coordinating the community outreach programs like the spokes of a wheel in collaboration with donor agencies, such as the UNICEF, Institute for Human Rights Education, Save the Children, and Indian Government’s Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan Office, Union Ministry of Women and Child Welfare and several other corporate beneficiaries.

While Delphine Hart School is located in a very poor region within India, its success in garnering a range of financial, intellectual and human resources globally and nationally to meet local needs of some of the most vulnerable marginalized children is truly remarkable. Moreover, it is evident that even prior to the global discourse of EFA and inclusive educational reform, the school has been instituting inclusive reforms driven by local community needs. As Reinke (2004) might argue, the school has probably “benefitted” from national and global discourses about social inclusion and inclusive education since the 1990s to further the work it had already begun.

Booth and Ainscow (2000) have identified three major areas for an inclusive school system- inclusive school culture, inclusive school policy and inclusive schooling practice. There is a great deal of evidence to show that Delphine Hart was able to establish inclusive school culture to further its own mission of social justice as a Catholic institution, as well as the agenda of national and global human rights organizations. Its work represents a model of best practice for inclusive education. Studying the work of this school, along with the work of several other small schools in India, Bajaj (2011) has suggested DHS represents a model of human rights education for social transformation.

Yet what is clear from this short discussion of DHS’s recent work in promoting inclusive education is that while the school’s success has been widely noted, and indeed celebrated, no systematic account of its strategies (i.e. policies and practices) of reform is available. Moreover, none of the earlier studies of DHS have analyzed in detail how the school conceptualized the idea of inclusive education, utilizing various national and global discourses. Nor have these studies analyzed how its idea of inclusive education was generated within its specific historic, cultural and sociological context. Neither is there an adequate account of the role the school’s

Chapter1: Introduction 23

global networks played in harnessing the resources it needed to implement its reforms. In short, what were the forces, connections and imaginaries (Burawoy et al., 2000) that shaped DHS to develop its strategies of reform, helping it to create an inclusive school culture? Furthermore, how sustainable are its reforms within the context of India’s fast-changing economic, social and political conditions?

Research Questions

This thesis seeks to address some of these issues through a case study of the school, framed around three main research questions:

• How is the conception of inclusive education that underlies the school’s attempts to pursue a series of reforms towards inclusivity constituted?

• How has the school mobilized a range of material, symbolic, human and financial resources, both local and global, to fund and support its program of reforms?

• In the view of shifting national policy priorities towards neoliberalism and the changes in school’s leadership, how sustainable is the school’s model of reforms towards inclusive education?

Structure of the Thesis

Following this introductory chapter, the second chapter of this thesis will examine some of the key aspects of the theoretical debates on inclusive education, its significance for school education in the developing world with specific reference to India. This includes a discussion of “exclusion” within the Indian system with regards to class divide based on provisions for private and public school education, as well as issues of religion and gender equity in education. This chapter will also analyse indigenous experiments and traditions of inclusive education, particularly by Rabindranath Tagore (Dasgupta 1998, 2009; O’Connell 2003, 2010; Nussbaum 2006, 2010; Bhattacharya 2009; Ghosh, Naseem, Vijh 2010 and Guha 2013) during early 20thCentury colonial British India, to argue for a possible “Southern Theory” of inclusive education within the Indian context.

24 Chapter1: Introduction

The third chapter will provide a review of the research literature and the history of missionary schooling in India. It will critically analyse the various perspectives from which Delphine Hart School’s work has been studied and interpreted by a diverse range of researchers- both independent academics as well as those who have studied the school’s work for development organizations, such as DFID and OXFAM, which were later cited in publications by the UNESCO and the World Bank. The fourth chapter will present the research design and the methodological approaches followed in data collection and writing this thesis. This chapter will explain some of the ethical dilemmas faced in engaging and disengaging with research participants and the problems faced to probe the research questions within a society where people are often keen to please visitors from outside.

Chapter five will provide an account of the reforms for inclusive education since the 1980s, which are much celebrated in the research literature on DHS. This chapter will also analyse how these reforms were driven by local needs following the politically turbulent 1970s Calcutta. It will suggest how these reforms were a product of a range of intellectual resources, which includes the history of Jesuitess educational mission in India, indigenous philosophy and intercultural dialogue between an Irish-born nun as the school Principal and some native school staff by analysing empirical data utilising educational theory and experiments of Tagore during early 20th Century British colonial India.

The sixth chapter will argue the way in which these reforms were strategically promoted utilizing institutional global networks following the national as well as a global discourse around Education for All. It will also analyse the role school leadership played in capitalizing on her personal and institutional networks to promote the school’s inclusive reform agenda and how a sense of “prefigurative politics” (Boggs 1977, Breines 1989) among a section of the school staff and the Principal drove the promotion of these reforms.

The seventh chapter analyses issues of sustainability of inclusive education reforms at DHS by drawing on field observations and ethnographic account of the changing city of Kolkata by other scholars. It shows how DHS as an old-style missionary school is struggling to adjust its mission for social justice and inclusive education, following changes in the school’s leadership and also the larger structural

Chapter1: Introduction 25

changes within Kolkata (Calcutta indigenised its name in 2001) and the Indian society. This chapter argues that increased competition from new corporate schools mushrooming with the opening up of the macro-economy and changing expectations of fee-paying new middleclass parents appear to be increasing demand-side pressure on the current school leadership to change school policies that appear contrary to the principles of inclusive education.

The eighth chapter draws together the arguments in chapters five, six and seven to suggest that the challenges of implementing and sustaining school reform for inclusive education within the Indian context are extremely complex, especially within the current neoliberal economic environment. This chapter argues that Delphine Hart School’s model of school reform towards inclusive education emerged over time within a particular postcolonial historic context in India, which will prove hard to sustain in the long run. However, insights gained from this case study suggest that policies, practices and strategies used by Delphine Hart School to implement inclusive educational reforms remain noteworthy and retain relevance, especially in attempts to improve pedagogic practices and school leadership in India.

26 Chapter1: Introduction

Chapter 2

Global Design and Local Histories

Introduction

This thesis is concerned with the idea of inclusive education. In this chapter, I begin with an account of the recent literature on inclusive education, addressing its meaning and significance for school education in postcolonial India. I engage with the major theoretical debates in the academic literature on inclusive education and examine their historical trajectories globally. I then examine the conceptual, political and practical dilemmas associated with the concept within the local Indian context, since critical scholars such as Chakrabarty (2007) and Connell (2007) point to the contextual limitations of theoretical accounts arising out of historical, social, economic and political circumstances of Euro-American societies. My discussion will attempt to illuminate some of the problematic aspects with the western ‘provincial’ understandings of the concept of inclusive education. Indeed, I will suggest that the concept of inclusive education has a rich history in the developing world. In doing so, I will discuss the work of scholars who argue for the need to examine indigenous historic and cultural traditions to identify a commitment towards inclusivity, as a way of broadening meaning-making and theoretical understanding of the concept of inclusive education.

It is widely argued (for example by Armstrong et al., 2010) that in order to explore the idea of inclusive education, it is important to first examine issues of “exclusion”. Therefore, in the second part of this chapter, I will describe some of the ways in which, within the Indian system of education, with regards to provisions for both private and public school education, children belonging to specific socioeconomic class, caste, tribe, religion, gender and different-ability (disability) are systemically “excluded” from receiving the benefits of education. Finally, drawing on Walter D. Mignolo’s (2000) notion of “subaltern knowledge” and Raewyn Connell’s

Chapter 2: Global Design and Local Histories 27

(2007) notion of “Southern Theory”, I will argue that an alternative epistemology and ethical understanding of inclusive education in its broadest sense can be found in the humanist educational philosophy and practice of Rabindranth Tagore in his experimental school and university during the early part of the 20th Century colonial India. I will argue that engaging with Tagore’s humanist philosophy of education theoretically can be most useful in contextually-specific meaning-making for inclusive education within the Indian context.

Recent Debates on Inclusive Education

What is meant by ‘Inclusion’?

The meaning of ‘inclusion’ is by no means clear and perhaps conveniently blurs the edges of social policy with a feel-good rhetoric that no one could be opposed to. What does it really mean to have an education system that is ‘inclusive’? Who is thought to be in need of inclusion and why? If education should be inclusive, then what practices is it contesting, what common values is it advocating, and by what criteria should its successes be judged? Armstrong, A., Armstrong, D., and Spandagou (2010, p. 5) As the above questions suggests, there is a lack of clarity about the meaning of inclusive education. Both in the developed and the developing world, inclusive education means different things, because experiences of exclusion vary according to context, and can only be adequately understood within the specificities of their history. Yet, inclusive education is often globally framed as an important universal social justice issue, acknowledged alongside other basic human rights as articulated, for example, in the UNESCO declaration of “Education for All” in the 1990. The UNESCO Salamanca Declaration (1994) states that inclusive education is "[a] developmental approach seeking to address the learning needs of all children, youth and adults with a specific focus on those who are vulnerable to marginalization and exclusion". Since the publication of these two major declarations, most national governments have adopted this policy characterization.

In recent decades, inclusive education is widely understood to be the inclusion of children with special needs into the mainstream schooling system. Furthermore, much of the recent research on inclusive education appears to be mostly limited to local policy response following global policy documents. Most research highlights the tension between these universal human rights based policies and local

28 Chapter 2: Global Design and Local Histories

exclusionary practices within schooling contexts. Moreover, following the Salamanca Declaration, research has also become more focused on inclusion of children with “disability”. Kiuppis and Peters (2014) have critiqued this trend and have urged comparative and international education scholars to advance research on inclusive education with broader conceptual framework following EFA and the MDGs. They affirm “Some children start school with more advantages than others—advantages of wealth and health among the most influential. Children in poverty and children with impairments, and all marginalized students (whether due to language, religion, race, ethnicity, or gender) do not have to be disadvantaged by their treatment in schools or by their exclusion from schools. If children are denied educational opportunities, then it is the lack of education and not their characteristics that limit them.” (p. 61) Foreman (2008, p. 31) emphasize that inclusive education is a concept that “extends well beyond students with disability, and encompasses the idea that all schools should strive to provide optimal learning environment for all their students, regardless of their social, cultural or ethnic background, or their ability or disability.” The focus of this thesis is also on “inclusive education” in this broader sense of education for social justice, human rights and equity for all marginalized students. According to Kozleski, Artiles and Waitoller (2011), much of the early theoretical debates on inclusive education within the scholarly community emerged in developed economies of the global North. The Scandinavian countries along with the United States, Canada and England are considered to be pioneers in the field. They are said to comprise the first generation of inclusive Education. Beginning in the 1960s, diverse social and political movements in these countries by social minorities, including the feminist movement, civil rights movement of the Black community in the US, movement of persons with disabilities and pressure groups of parents and activists led to the emergence of a public discourse on inclusive education. This first generation was followed by the second generation of inclusive education in postcolonial countries of the South in Asia, Africa and Latin America with very different historical trajectories because of their colonial histories and legacy. Yet, conceptually, the idea of inclusive education is often portrayed as a universal construct --a global utopia based on the principles of social justice, equity and human rights. The idea became popular particularly in the recent years that witnessed increasing mobility of people and ideas and an increase in social and

Chapter 2: Global Design and Local Histories 29

cultural diversity, leading policymakers to realize the importance of inclusive education for social cohesion. It is now no longer limited to developed economies of North America, Europe and Australia, but developing economies and postcolonial nation-states must now also make accommodations to implement it following the global policy mandates by organizations like UNESCO as noted by Armstrong et al. (2010) and Pijl et al. (1997). Loreman et al. (2011) have noted that in much of the early literature and popular discourse, two terms- inclusion and integration -- were used synonymously. This is also evident from some of the authors in the edited volume by Pijl et al. (1997) on “Inclusive Education: A Global Agenda”, where the terms integration and inclusion are used interchangeably, referring primarily to the integration of children with disability. In this literature, issues of student disadvantage based on such categories, such as linguistic, ethnic, racial and religious difference are not generally considered. However, the debates on inclusive education have now shifted from early focus on integration into the mainstream, to a broader focus on creating inclusive spaces within the mainstream schooling system, mindful of individual learning needs, personal histories, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds of students. There is now a clearer distinction drawn between the concepts of integration and inclusion. This has led to a more sophisticated discussion of the idea of inclusive education, consisting, for example, of three major areas for an inclusive school system- inclusive school culture, inclusive school policy and inclusive schooling practice (Ainscow et al. 2006).

Theoretically, most scholars of inclusive education consider it as an ideal which is hypothetically capable of creating a more inclusive society, helping to curb prejudice and discrimination. (Barton 1997, Ainscow 2005, Slee 2006) Based on a recent study of 727 teachers in Hong Kong, who participated in a university level course on inclusive education, Forlin, Sharma & Loreman (2014) argue that regardless of demographic diversity of students, better teacher preparation and training for inclusive education coupled with the knowledge of the significance of inclusive policy can improve “teaching efficacy for inclusive practice”. However, implementing the ideals of creating socially inclusive spaces for all children with diverse learning needs within regular schooling system is still a major challenge globally. It appears that in both the developed and developing world the dominant

30 Chapter 2: Global Design and Local Histories

norms of school and society still reproduce various structural inequalities within which the schools are embedded. (Yates 2014, Singal 2008, Johansson 2014)

Shifting Focus of Global “Policyscape”

Parallel to the academic theoretical debates discussed above, in recent times the neoliberal discourse of market efficiency and cost effectiveness have also entered into the global inclusive education agenda as referred to in the introductory chapter. This is evident from the definition of inclusive education below, where inclusive education is seen as effective in combating ‘discriminatory attitudes’, as well as a means for ‘efficiency’ and ‘cost effectiveness’ in unproblematic ways:

Regular schools with this inclusive orientation are the most effective means of combating discriminatory attitudes, creating welcoming communities, building an inclusive society and achieving education for all; moreover, they provide an effective education to the majority of children and improve the efficiency and ultimately the cost effectiveness of the entire education system. The Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994: ix) However, scholars argue that the early liberal humanist global policy imperative of inclusive “Education for All” is being increasingly contradicted by the neoliberal economic priorities of competition and choice which often runs contrary to the values of inclusion as argued by several scholars in recent years. Ainscow, Booth and Dyson (2007) highlighted the contradiction of “raising standards” and “social inclusion” within the schooling context in UK, where professionals, parents and students were found to be moving more towards an inclusive schooling system while “policies for raising standards, such as the emphasis on competition and choice, and the publication of test and examination results, [were] tending to discourage the use of teaching approaches that are responsive to student diversity”, though scholars have argued that strategies which promote the inclusion of marginalized groups can also improve learning outcomes for all learners.

Hardy and Woodcock (2014) argues that the global neoliberal policy discourse for market efficiency, cost-effectiveness and standardization of curriculum by organizations such as OECD and the World Bank, which has now been also adopted by UNESCO and UNICEF further appear to be excluding more and more children from marginalized vulnerable population from deriving the benefit of an

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education, not just for its instrumental purpose of employment but also for its intrinsic purpose of empowering them for decision-making in life and to give them voice to fight against discrimination and injustices in society. They take a critical policy sociology approach by analyzing key policy documents in Western settings like US, Canada, England and Australia where there have been a strong public advocacy and support for inclusion, as well as policy documents by global organizations like UNESCO and OECD to argue how policies can fail to provide adequate provision for diverse learning needs of students. Based on evidence from a wide range of policy documents across these countries they argue that inclusion is often constructed in problematic ways in policy documents.

They argue that, “Respect for difference can only be cultivated in educational systems if those responsible for enacting educational practices are supported by consistent and coherent policy messages which value diversity and challenge deficit.” (Hardy and Woodcock 2014, p. 22) They delineate the inherent contradictions in the liberal humanist imperative and policy discourse of organizations like UNESCO, which emphasized the values of collaboration to help create inclusive spaces for the learning needs of all children at the beginning vis-à-vis the later dilution of inclusive priorities because of the economic imperatives of organizations like OECD and the World Bank, that frame issues of equity and inclusion within the framework of economic competitiveness and productivity. Moreover, they suggest that the broader neoliberal pressures under which the policy documents have been formulated in their national contexts do not provide the right kind of language for successful implementation of inclusive education, which is conceptually very different from the idea of integration into the mainstream.

A review of the emerging literature on inclusive education thus reveals the inherent contradictions between the policy discourses circulating globally and the theoretical formulation of the philosophical idea of inclusive education. As Hardy and Woodcock (2014) have argued, “In the realm of public policy, words do matter, and need to be deployed carefully” (p. 22). The liberal humanist policy imperatives of inclusive “Education for All” are contradicted by the neoliberal economic priorities of competition and choice, which runs contrary to the values of inclusion and social cohesion. Following this disjuncture in the discourse of global

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“policyscape”, as Carney (2011) argued drawing on Appadurai’s (1990) theory of “scapes”, representing different global cultural flows; the individual Nation states decouple to formulate their own policies, which are thus often fractured and disjointed. Therefore, inclusion is construed in problematic ways as the policy documents at the level of nation-state and local governments include the “politically correct” rhetoric of inclusion without clear conceptual understanding of the notion of inclusion and little practical guideline for implementation.

Slee (2006) critiqued these later versions of the meaning of inclusive education as it is now being circulated globally through policy documents by IGOs, NGOs and government of individual Nation-States, by citing Edward Said’s “Travelling Theory Revisited”, to suggest that the social justice mission driving the movement for inclusive education following social movements of minorities for inclusion (not integration) within the mainstream society, has in many ways lost its force and “the theory is degraded and subdued” (p. 113) Armstrong et al. (2010, p. 5 and 2011, p. 30) also argued that, though social policy is dominated by the rhetoric of inclusion, exclusion persists in reality due to poor translation of the concept of inclusion and entrenched practices of exclusion “both in the countries of the North and in the ‘developing countries’ of post-colonial globalization”.

In this context what Pijl et al. (1997) suggested appears to be very relevant. They identified the need to move beyond just in-school factors to external factors of society to study inclusive education as a sociological and historical research agenda, since school as an institution operates within the larger society. They highlighted the need to move beyond evaluative study of the effect and “how-to” of inclusive education to conduct more “qualitative studies with inductive and ethnographic ambitions that can help understand social patterns and subjective experiences” (Pijl et al. 1997, p. 31). While arguing for urgently needed insights for future policy and research on inclusive education that is mindful of equity, Kozleski, Artiles and Waitoller (2011) also assert that since inclusive education has “far-reaching equity implications for marginalized groups across the globe, we ought to refine the theoretical formulation of this movement through a culturally and historically situated research program” (p.9). The following section of this chapter will therefore

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reflect on local histories of exclusion in the global South, with particular reference to India, as the context for this study.

Local Histories of exclusion in the South

The colonial histories in Southern postcolonial countries make the challenge of conceptualizing and implementing inclusive education even more complex because these nation-states were mostly formed out of the imaginary of modern- colonial world systems as Mignolo (2000) has argued. Prior to their colonial histories, most of these modern Southern nation-states were princely states with diverse linguistic and ethnic heritage. The political borders of the modern nation- states in Latin America, Africa and much of Asia were carved out of the colonial history of these regions. It sometimes divided indigenous ethnic (linguistic) groups across religious lines like in South Asia. In much of Latin America and Africa, it completely suppressed indigenous ethnic (linguistic) groups and divided these ethnic groups based on the territorial authority by dominant language groups of European Nations; creating English speaking Nigeria, French speaking Benin, Portuguese speaking Brazil and Spanish speaking Argentina.

Hence, since the formation of independent Nation-States, cultural integration for national identity formation through education has been purposeful state policies in these postcolonial countries. Social inclusion remains a contentious issue in most of these postcolonial modern nation-states, as the dominant cultural and ethnic group tries to impose their values on others for cultural integration and homogeneity in the name of postcolonial National identity formation. In their urge to assert a postcolonial National identity, which was ironically carved out of the colonial history; textbook narratives, curriculum framework and pedagogy in these postcolonial Nations often assert a dominant narrative of national identity undermining the rest as “others”. The recent incident of kidnapping over 200 young girls from a school by the “Boko Haram” (which means western education is sinful) nationalist militant group in Nigeria (Peters 2014), the postcolonial nationalist education agenda of “us” vs. “them” as evident from textbook narratives and nationalist curriculum framework in the South Asian nation states (see. Ghosh 2012 and Kamat 2004) are good examples to show how the colonial legacy and local

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histories in many of the Southern postcolonial countries might work against the ideals of inclusive education within these ethnically diverse communities.

The modern-colonial subjectivities of the elites of these societies to whom the colonizers transferred power, as well as the traditional postcolonial nationalists like the Boko Haram group in Nigeria or the Hindu Nationalist group in India, continue to subalternize indigenous knowledges and gnostic wisdom of diverse cultures of these plural postcolonial societies. The colonial legacy of the “apartheid” policy of either segregation or integration into the mainstream dominant culture of the colonizer, still continue to operate in many of these societies as the dominant groups seek to assert a singular Nationalist culture. These policies are in many ways embedded into the fabric of most social institutions, including schools within these postcolonial societies through curriculum, textbook narratives and didactic pedagogic approaches to teaching. They do not allow students to raise questions, but accept all that is written in textbooks as truth. The dominant state-narrative written into these textbooks by dominant groups systematically ignores the life-worlds and contributions of minority religious and ethnic groups.

Within the Indian context, the modern Indian constitution espoused inclusive values, yet exclusion and discrimination continued as part of entrenched cultural practices. Hence, indigenous tribal groups and other marginalized minorities of the society, such as women, Hindu outcasts i.e. “dalits”, Muslims and children with disabilities continue to face major challenges in education. The education of these marginalized groups is often disconnected from their life experiences and learning needs, as analyzed by the recently released first ever India Exclusion (IE) Report 2014 published by the New Delhi based independent research and advocacy organization, Center for Equity Studies (2014) drawing on data from various sources in collaboration with researchers within India and abroad. As evident from the table below adapted from the IE report, irrespective of socioeconomic class, large section of girls, dalits8, adivasis9, Muslims and children with disabilities are excluded from the schooling system. The statistics below is quite revealing.

8 Hindu social outcasts 9 They are the tribal aboriginal people of India, considered as the traditional owners and custodians of land. “Adi” is Sanskrit means ancient and “vasi” means resident.

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Literacy Rate Current Drop in (%) Attendance Enrolment Out-of- Rate Among 5- from School 2009- to Primary to 2011 Rate (%) 10 14 -year-olds Upper Primary (%) Level (%) Overall 73 68.3 87.1 51.8 4.28 Girls 64.6 57.7 85.8 51.4 4.71 Dalits 66.1 58.5 85.2 54.4 5.96 Adivasis 58.9 55.4 81.7 58.5 5.6 Muslims - 63.7 82.3 58.9 7.67 Children with 48.0* 45.3# - 63.3 34.12 Disabilities

* From Census of India 2001 # From NSS 58th Round (2002) Table 1: Education Indicators of Major groups of Excluded Children [Source: IE Report 2014, p. 47]

Figure 2: Difference in Educational Indicators of Excluded groups to the National Average [Source: IE Report 2014, p. 9]

Table 1 and Figure 2 adapted from the IE report (2014) portrays a grim picture of exclusion and suggests that the situation is worse for children, who experience layers of exclusion because of the intersectionality of different-ability, gender, religion,

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caste and tribal family backgrounds. The process of exclusion of these children from basic education is therefore systemic according to the report. Female literacy according to the 2011 census cited by the report was 64.6%, which is much below the male literacy average of 80.9% and overall national average of 73%. Similar low levels of attainment could be observed among other excluded groups like dalits, adivasis, Muslims and children with disabilities. A disabled girl belonging to a poor dalit, adivasi or Muslim background will therefore experience multiple layers of discrimination within the society and exclusion from the education system.

Singal and Jeffrey (2011) have argued that paucity of basic infrastructural resources and specialized training to implement inclusive education is also a big challenge in the context of the developing postcolonial world, particularly in India. This paucity of resources particularly in the public sector is also systemic as emphasized by the IE report. As it has been already argued in chapter 1 of the thesis, despite the Kothari Commission recommendation in 1966 to allocate 6% of GDP for education, public investment in education has been very low and hovered around 3.5% of GDP even in the 1990s and have reduced further below 3% in recent years. (Srivastava and Noronha 2014, Jha et al. 2008, Tilak 2004) Moreover, the IE report highlights that funds utilization has also decreased over the years and majority of it has gone into infrastructure development, rather than investment in teacher recruitment and teacher education for capacity development to improve student learning experience.

Therefore, in addition to exclusion based on these social groups, within the Indian system exclusion is also driven by public-private divide in the provision and delivery of quality education. While children from upper class backgrounds with “family sponsorship” for education are at an educational advantage, large masses of children are excluded from access to quality basic elementary education because of their poor socioeconomic backgrounds and experience “economic apartheid”. (Juneja 2014, Govinda 2011, Nambissan 2010) In most cases, students belonging to historically privileged elite families within the Indian context continue to get access to well-resourced elite fee-paying private schools built in the model of exclusive British public schools like Harrow and Eton during colonial times (Srivastava 1998; Rizvi 2015). Conceptually inclusive education is therefore very significant within the

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postcolonial Indian social and educational context characterized by extreme inequality because of its colonial legacy and “exclusion” from receiving the basic benefits of education based on socioeconomic class, caste, tribe, gender, religion and different ability.

These challenges of postcolonial developing societies because of severe need of necessary resources in the public sector and the legacy of colonial histories is also recognized by most critical scholars in the global North. This is evident from the very first introductory chapter of the edited volume on “Inclusive Education” by Artiles, Kozleski and Waitoller (2011) examining the issue through the analytical prism of equity on five continents. It begins with a quote from Edward Said’s “Culture and Imperialism” and, the last chapter of the book by McDemott, Edgar and Scarloss (2011, p. 223) begins with a quote from Antonio Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks” which states:

Statistical laws can be employed in the science and art of politics only so long as the great masses of the population remain (or at least are reputed to remain) essentially passive in relation to the questions which interest historians and politicians. The subject of implementing the emerging global educational agenda of inclusive education is therefore a contentious political issue, despite its noble ideals of inclusive education for all to participate as citizens with equal rights in a modern democratic society. Moreover, there is little research so far on inclusive education especially in postcolonial developing societies and they are mostly conducted by Northern scholars, who are in many ways far removed from subjective experience of the life-world of these economically developing complex postcolonial societies and their challenges.

Nonetheless, research conducted by scholars from the global South is also becoming more visible in academic journals. In recent years increasing number of scholars are included from the developing postcolonial world in edited volumes on inclusive education, such as the one edited by Artiles, Kozleski and Waitoller (2011). However, inclusive education is universally considered as a Euro-American theoretical construct of utopia in academic debates. It is considered to have transferred to the rest of the world through policy documents by IGOs, though within the field of comparative education extensive body of critical literature argue about

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the problematic of such policy transfer and the need to understand the local policy contexts (Beech 2006: Steiner-Khamsi 2004, 2012; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000).

Postcolonial Conceptual Dilemmas

A review of the recently emerging literature on inclusive education from the global South reveals that, these scholars continue to take a linear development historicist perspective even when they take a postcolonial approach in critiquing the global agenda for inclusive education. According to these postcolonial scholars, as Johansson (2014) has reviewed, the concept of inclusive education appears to be thrust on the developing third world countries like India without any clear policy direction about “how” to implement it. Therefore, scholars researching on inclusive education in these countries argue with evidence from the field that these countries are not developmentally ready to implement such global agenda, especially since these societies lack necessary infrastructural resources for implementation. To these scholars, inclusive education as a concept was developed within certain historic and geopolitical context of the Northern/Western countries, not always applicable in the global South.

The problem with such postcolonial critiques of the concept of inclusive education, is that these scholars are all responding to the concept as a hegemonic “neocolonial imposition” of western ideas on these societies through policy documents of IGOs. These scholars are not looking beyond their specific context and they are not taking into account the fact that successful implementation of inclusive education is a global problem. Even the richer western nations are struggling to successfully implement this abstract philosophical ideal. Since the arguments of these critical scholars are based on development economics and the problems of implementing inclusive education in a low-resource developing world context; their arguments also do not pay much attention to the social and cultural issues which act as barriers to successfully implement inclusive education.

Moreover, since the governments of most of these postcolonial Nations, including India have borrowed the concept from the policy documents of IGOs, such as the UNESCO Education for All and particularly Salamanca Declaration for

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inclusive education focusing on the rights of children with disability; ‘inclusive education’ as a concept has taken a very narrow focus in these countries without broader understanding of its democratic principles, which necessitates evaluation of excluded communities in need for inclusion within the schooling system. Hence, Singal (2008, 2006) argues that it is important to generate contextual local meaning and understanding of the concept of inclusive education. However, she also argues her case accepting the premise that inclusive education is understood as an international concept within the Indian context.

Such linear development historicist perspective of theorizing and conceptual thinking about inclusive education does not take into account the possibility that such thinking and practices for inclusive education might have been thought about and practiced in an “other” language/tongue as Mignolo (2000) and Arteaga (1994) would argue, elsewhere in the global South- prior to or in concurrence with such movement in the global North. This is also ironic within the postcolonial context, since Mignolo (2014) has critiqued this ‘linear global thinking’ as a colonial legacy. He writes; “Linear global thinking is the story of how Europe mapped the world for its own benefit and left a fiction that became an ontology: a division of the world into 'East' and 'West', 'South' and 'North', or 'First', 'Second', and 'Third'" 10

A linear thinking about development and inclusive education does not take into account “subaltern knowledge” (Mignolo 2000) of indigenous philosophical traditions like “Ubuntu” within the pan-African context, which in essence stands for a society and world of inclusiveness and equality. Philosophically speaking, “Ubuntu” is very similar to the philosophical ideals driving inclusive education for an inclusive society. According to scholars of Africana philosophy, the values of collective ethos embedded in the word “Ubuntu” is shared across the African continent. The specific term was popularized by various authors including Zulu novelist, scholar, and journalist Jordan Kush Ngubane in the 1950s and by public figures such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Philosophically, “Ubuntu” articulates a society and world of inclusiveness and equality. In the traditional Xhosa society to which Nelson Mandela belonged, it meant: “I am because we are”.

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However, a linear Eurocentric historicist thinking is also prevalent in much of postcolonial academic debates. Even postcolonial historians, such as Chakravarty (2007) acknowledges his own debt to European thought as a hybridized postcolonial subject when he utilizes Heideggerian notion of “worlding” to argue for historical difference and diverse ontological ways of being in the world in “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference”.

Similarly, Spivak (1999) acknowledges the usefulness of diverse intellectual resources from Kant to Marx as a Europeanist herself, and as someone who pioneered deconstructive criticism by translating Derrida’s work. Yet, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak (1999) critiqued much of contemporary postcolonial literature and sought to distance herself from the field with which she is most often identified. In the context of this discussion, it is important to note that Chen (2010) also suggested something similar while critiquing postcolonial cultural studies for its “obsessive critique of the West” (p.1) in his book “Asia as a Method”. He suggested the need to move beyond such postcolonial ideological critique by highlighting the limits of such critique, Chen (2010) therefore writes (p. 3):

The epistemological implication of Asian studies in Asia is clear. If “we” have been doing Asian studies, Europeans, North Americans, Latin Americans, and Africans have also been doing studies in relation to their own living spaces. That is, Martin Heideggar was actually doing European studies, as were Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jurgen Habermas. European experiences were their system of reference, Once we recognize how extremely limited the current conditions of knowledge are, we learn to be humble about our knowledge claims. The universalist assertions of theory are premature, for theory too must be deimperialized. Therefore, as suggested by inclusive education scholars, such as Armstrong et al. (2010), Artiles et al. (2011) and Singal and Jeffrey (2011), who argue for the need to contextualize the meaning of inclusive education, in the following sections of this chapter I would argue for a distinct tradition of inclusive education within the Indian context.

10 See: The North of the South and the West of the East: A Provocation to the Question: http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/108#_ftn2

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Beyond Provincializing

Moving beyond provincializing inclusive education as a hegemonic Northern theoretical construct and seeking to contextualize the meaning of inclusive education within the Indian context, I would like to draw on the first IE report (2014) and Singal and Jeffrey (2011)’s cultural historicist perspective. I would argue that the values of social inclusion were embedded in the very conception of the modern Indian constitution, as well as philosophical ideas and educational work of modern Indian intellectuals like Rabindranath Tagore, Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. The Indian constitution drew inspiration from the Indian freedom movement from colonial oppression in conjunction with several indigenous peasant and subaltern movements for social equality, as well as several social movements for democratic citizenship rights in Europe and America. This is exemplified by the fact that the chair of the drafting committee of the constitution, Ambedkar, was an indigenous social outcast “dalit” scholar, who received opportunities to study in elite universities in the UK and the US because of his merit and brilliance. However, it can be argued that the formation of such educated constituent assembly for the Indian constitution which looked at Euro-American models of constitution for inclusive policy formulation was actually a fruit of the long-standing grassroots social movement of people for political freedom against colonial rule and domination claiming self-rule or “swaraj” for India.

Here it can be also argued that, such social movement for freedom and inclusion did not happen through the colonial 19th Century ‘factory-model’ of education as critiqued by Tagore in his short story, “The Parrot’s Training”11; but through the “peasant” (the term used in the broader sense as Chakrabarty 2007, p. 11 uses it) practice of the native population revolting against colonial oppression and domination by walking out en-mass from colonial government-run schools and educational institutions. This is evident from the following quote by a student from

11 “ONCE UPON A time there was a bird. It was ignorant... according to the pundits, the first thing necessary for this bird's education was a suitable cage... he said: 'Text-books can never be too many for our purpose!'... With text-book in one hand and baton in the other, the pundits gave the poor bird what may fitly be called lessons!... The bird died....” See more: http://tagoreweb.in/Render/ShowContent.aspx?ct=Stories&bi=4A57AB73-A4A0-40D5- 551D-9502E9CD11FD&ti=4A57AB73-A4A0-4FB5-251D-9502E9CD11FD

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the southern Indian state of Kerala, who had studied in Tagore’s school in Shantiniketan (Dasgupta 1998, p. 270):

I had already taken part in Satyagraha. After that I could only continue my education in a nationalist institution. Shantiniketan and Sabarmati were the only two institutions which came to my mind in this connection. I had heard many brilliant students who had boycotted government colleges at Gandhi’s call and gone to Santiniketan and Sabarmati However, Tagore was far from being a parochial nationalist. He was an internationalist and as Purakayastha (2003) has argued drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (1996) term, Tagore was a “rooted-cosmopolitan”. He was one of the most travelled Indians of his times and had travelled to most continents around the world, except Australia, to raise funds for his school in Shantiniketan and to invite scholars to live, study and work in his school; though he was himself a school drop-out. He was scathingly critical of colonial economic exploitation, policies of divide and rule and 19thCentury industrial model of education. As a creative artist, Tagore conceptualized his educational ideas and expressed them through his numerous essays, poems, short stories, novels and dance dramas, primarily written in Bengali. Though he became renowned as the first non- European Nobel Prize winning poet, Collins (2011) argues that perhaps his philosophy of education will be seen as his most significant contribution in the future: "The Bengali poet, writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941) remains a unique, though still under-recognised genius. Tagore’s cultural production was vast, covering poetry, prose and plays; an astonishing volume of music which is played and sung throughout Bengal to this day (and includes the national anthems of two countries, India and Bangladesh); internationally acclaimed and exhibited paintings; social, political and philosophical essays; agrarian reform; pioneering environmentalism; the creation of a school and a university. His philosophy of education may yet come to be seen as one of his most significant contributions.” Hence, rather than taking a linear development historicist approach of first generation of inclusive education in Northern/Western countries followed by second generation of inclusive education in the Southern/postcolonial countries as theorized by Kozleski et al. (2011); the following sections of the chapter will explore the possibility of a “Southern Theory” (Connell 2007) of inclusive education as suggested by Armstrong et al. (2010) by critically engaging with the “subaltern knowledge” (Mignolo 2000) of Rabindranath Tagore’s humanist philosophy and

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inclusive educational experiments during early 20thCentury colonial British India. Thereafter, the chapter will argue about its significance for conceptual meaning- making of inclusive education within the Indian context.

Possibility of a “Southern Theory”

“Southern Theory” is a sociological term established by Raewyn Connell (2007), who argued for the inadequacy of applying theoretical formulations from Northern European countries to analyze sociological problems and data from Southern postcolonial countries. In many ways Connell’s (2007) arguments move beyond Chakrabarty’s (2007) arguments in “Provincializing Europe” about the inadequacy of established theoretical formulations within Western academia to properly understand social phenomenon in complex postcolonial contexts and suggests “theory too must be deimperialized”, as Chen (2010) argued. Connell (2007) begins with a critical examination of the hidden assumptions driving the work of several established social theorists from Euro-American background to emphasize the need to study the work of intellectuals from Southern postcolonial contexts in order to develop better understanding of the problems within these contexts.

Southern Theory highlights the global politics of knowledge, since the global South has been historically treated as a data mine, while the global North has been associated with the intellectual work of generating theory. The purpose of Southern theory was to move beyond the binary of North and South power dynamics in generation of knowledge. Here Connell’s work resonates with Argentine semiotician, Mignolo (1993, p.129-31), who argued that, “the Third World produces not only ‘cultures’ to be studied by anthropologists and ethnohistorians but also intellectuals who generate theories and reflect on their own culture and history.” Mignolo (2000, 2014) argues that the very division of the world into the binary of North vs. South, East vs, West and First world vs. Third world is a division drawn according to colonial logic.

Hence, drawing on several scholars from Africa, Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean and particularly Chicano poet and scholar, Alfred Arteaga’ work, Mignolo (2000) challenges his readers to think in “an other tongue”. He brings in theoretical concepts like “border thinking” and “subaltern knowledge” to describe the work

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intellectuals living within dominated colonized societies have done and are continuing to do as they “think in between languages” living at the epistemic borderland. Here Mignolo (2000) cites Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who often stated, “to deny that we write as people whose consciousness has been formed as colonial subjects is to deny our history. However, the consciousness of ourselves as colonial subjects is itself modified by our own experience and by the relation we establish to our intellectual tradition.” (p. 172)

In this context, this section of the chapter would argue that engaging with Tagore’s ideas and educational experiments during colonial India shows a different lineage of inclusive education within the Indian context. Engaging with Tagore’s humanist philosophy of education is useful to reposition the debate on inclusive education, which is by and large considered by postcolonial scholars as a hegemonic neocolonial imposition of a western concept. Tagore wrote about his ideas on education in series of essays written primarily in Bengali from 1892 analyzing the many problems of mainstream Indian education system during colonial times before setting up his own school in Shantiniketan as an alternative model. (Bhattacharya 2013, Mukherjee 2013)

By critically engaging with Tagore’s indigenous experiments of inclusive education reform during colonial India and reflecting on its relevance for the contemporary postcolonial Indian context, this section of the chapter also aims to critically reflect on the intellectual and cultural history of the region of Bengal, where the case study school is located. Thereby it seeks to contextualize the innovative reforms of Delphine Hart School as a legacy of not just its Jesuitess institutional history but also the intellectual and cultural history of the region of Bengal, where the East met the West in most profound ways in the form of Tagore’s educational experiments. There is also evidence of this legacy of intercultural dialogue within the Jesuitess order as revealed in the historical writings of Jesuitess historian and Australian nun, Colmcille (1968), who also taught Bengali and produced several of Tagore’s dance dramas while working in the Jesuitess schools in Calcutta.

However, Tagore’s progressive approach to establish an inclusive education system in his school for democratic citizenship and environmental sustainability has remained towards the fringes of the mainstream Indian society for some curious

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reasons, even after independence from colonial rule. Though, Mukherjee (2013) argues that there has been attempts at the policy level to implement several of his ideas on education post-independence, the mainstream system still follows a colonial “factory- model” of schooling. It is to be noted here that the socially inclusive school Tagore built in rural Shantiniketan was a self-reflexive critical response against indigenous inequalities, as well as “apartheid” colonial policies perpetuating segregation and exclusion. Tagore invited not just Indians across ethnic, religious, social class, caste and gender divide to attend his school; but he also invited students and scholars from abroad to his school to study and teach.

Therefore, engaging with the “subaltern knowledge” (Mignolo, 2000) of Tagore’s humanist philosophy of education and experiments during colonial India, provides an interesting possibility for exploring “Southern Theory” of inclusive education in its broadest sense. As Dasgupta, (2013) argues, “Rabindranath was seeking a world which has moved on from nationalism, patriotism, statism, and also capitalism- capitalism, because of his insistence on the best technology for Viswa- Bharati without the greed of profit…Indeed, my research on a history of Shantiniketan-Sriniketan-ViswaBharati has led me to believe that this education was a vision and an exercise in inclusion and variety, with its driving faith in the idea of a civilizational ‘meeting’ of the world’s races for an intercultural dialogue crafted through knowledge of history and the arts” (p. 280-281).

Tagore’s socially inclusive educational reform ideas sought to educate for equality, environmental sustainability and global consciousness during early 20thCentury colonial British India. A number of scholars such as Nussbaum (2006, 2010), O’Connell (2003, 2010) and Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh (2010) have argued that, Tagore’s progressive ideas of education are as relevant today as the educational ideas of major Euro-American educational thinkers like Socrates, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Alcott, Mann and Dewey. Popkewitz (2000, p.4 ) argued that educational philosophers like John Dewey and Paulo Freire have become “indigenous foreigners” in the postcolonial hybridized societies. It can be argued here that, Rabindranath Tagore, an intellectual contemporary of John Dewey and “intellectual forerunner” of Paulo Freire as Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh (2010) have argued, was an important “indigenous native” intellectual whose educational work

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needs to be considered seriously to understand the challenges of inclusive educational reforms even within the contemporary postcolonial Indian context.

Tagore’s Humanist Philosophy of Education

Tagore’s inclusive educational experiments in the school he built in rural Bengal, Shantiniketan, was both a product of the social and political upheavals during his times, as well as his own brief experience of formal schooling in both Bengali and English medium schools during colonial India. It is to be noted here that Tagore who went on to become the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize for literature was a school drop-out. As a highly sensitive and creative child, Tagore’s experience of formal schooling was that of exclusion. The 19th Century industrial factory model of schools did not pay any attention to the individual learning needs of a child. He was primarily home-schooled in a personalized learning environment because of his privileged and learned family background. In her doctoral thesis on “Tagore’s Education Theory and Practice”, Jalan (1976) quotes from Tagore’s essay “My School” to emphasize that his theory of education was rooted in his own educational experience of exclusion as a student. “I know what it was to which this school owes its origin. It was not any new theory of education, but the memory of my school day" (Tagore 1917 as quoted in Jalan 1976, p. 14)

Tagore wrote his first critical essay on education িশ�ার েহরেফর (Shiksar Herfer) in 1892 (published later by Viswa Bharati University in English as “Topsy- Turvy Education”). In Shiksar Herfer which was initially delivered as a speech in Bengali, Tagore for the first time critically reflected on his early educational experiences in both formal Bengali and English medium schools in Calcutta compared to English education in England. According to Tagore, while both the language and the content of education was integrally connected to English life and society, it was completely disconnected from the life of Bengali children during colonial India. Hence, it encouraged rote-memorizing rules of grammar and sentence structure more than critical thinking and understanding. Tagore argued that learning should be a joyous experience of mental and physical freedom for the child and learning should be connected to the child’s social and cultural environment. He also

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argued for a multilevel curriculum and well-trained teachers to stimulate critical thinking and creative imagination.

Tagore’s critique of education during colonial India was also published in the Bengali essay, িশ�뷍া সমস뷍া (Shiksa Shamasya meaning The Problem of Education) in 1906. Offering his sharp critic of the system of education prevalent during colonial India, Tagore, (1906) stated “what we now call a school in this country is really a factory, and the teachers are part of it….Later this learning is tested at examinations and labelled. One advantage of a factory is that it can make goods exactly to order. Moreover, the goods are easy to label, because there is not much difference between what the different machines turn out. But there is a good deal of difference between one man and another, and even between what the same man is on different days.” In his own artistic way through the medium of his satirical short story, “The Parrot’s Training”12, Tagore scathingly critiqued the “factory-model of schooling” which promoted pedagogy of “parrot’s training”. Paulo Freire (1993) critiqued a similar phenomenon as the “Banking system of education” within the Brazilian context. Tagore, further argued how the schooling systems in Europe were an integral part of their society, “but the schools in [India], far from being integrated to society, are imposed on it from outside” (Dasgupta 2009, p. 113).

It is to be noted here that his educational experiences and later his educational experiments were also embedded within a colonial world of domination and oppression, when the local elites during those times were busy to learn the colonial way of living in the world for materialistic gains in society, while the subalterns of the society were engaged in violent freedom struggle due to rising socioeconomic inequality between the haves and the have-nots. Within this colonized dominated society, “rote-memorizing” western knowledge for material gains in society and moral corruption of native population torn between traditional Indian beliefs and modern western knowledge became a matter of great concern for not just nationalists but also among colonial rulers, as it has been argued by Seth (2007). Tagore was also a major critic of the practice of “rote memorizing” and though he was in favour of Western scientific education, he considered education in English language as a major

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problem encouraging “rote memorizing”. Hence, he argued for early education in Mother Tongue and learning of multiple languages including English, like he did in his home-school. (Bhattacharya, 2009)

This was also a strong political protest during those times against the colonial attitude towards native Indian languages and literature, such as Lord Macaulay’s ill- famous racist statements in the “Minutes on Indian Education” (1935) where he asserted that: ‘‘a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.’’ Though Macaulay stated that he read English translations of literature written in Indian languages and consulted experts, his statements reveal gross ignorance and cultural misunderstandings as he did not even consider the intellectual work of indigenous intellectuals and scholars such as Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, who, Spivak (2004) argues, “fashioned pedagogic instruments for Sanskrit and Bengali that could, if used right (the question of teaching, again), suture the ‘‘native’’ old with Macaulay’s new rather than reject the old and commence its stagnation with that famous and horrible sentence” (p. 551-552)

Macaulay’s (1935)13 vision of Indian education was to reproduce “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Indeed, Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh (2010) argue that, “Colonial education did in fact produce a class of surrogates who helped the colonial administration in running India ‘with only a handful of colonial officers’.” Afro-French postcolonial thinker, Frantz Fannon’s (1967) work is particularly useful here in understanding how a native class of “ruling elite” were reproduced in the colonies through education for governing the socially marginalized masses of population in the colonies. As Ashis Nandy (1983) had argued, the dilemma of the post-colonial condition is that, “colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all. In

12 See: http://www.tagoreweb.in/Render/ShowContent.aspx?ct=Stories&bi=4A57AB73-A4A0-40D5- 551D-9502E9CD11FD&ti=4A57AB73-A4A0-4FB5-251D-9502E9CD11FD 13 See: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.ht ml

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the process, it helps generalize the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside, in structures and in minds.” (p. xi)

Though, Allender (2006, p.283) argues that, “education was not deliberately organized as a means of control” by the colonial rulers based on evidence gathered through historical research, particularly in the Punjab province (not Bengal) of colonial India; colonial subjectivity of the native elites cannot be denied. Collins (2007) argues that much of Tagore’s theoretical ideas germinated out of this colonial relationship of domination as a colonial subject. However, according to Tagore relationships of domination were harmful for both the oppressor and the oppressed. “It is this theoretical position, as well as Tagore’s personal involvement in realising such goals, that makes him such a significant figure; both in terms of the intellectual history of colonialism and for the purposes of thinking about the relationship between East and West in the contemporary postcolonial period” (Collins 2007, p. 80).

As a visionary philosopher, Tagore was deeply concerned not just about increasing economic inequality but also cultural distance enhancing social inequality among the native Indian population during colonial India. Tagore’s inclusive educational experiments at his school in rural Shantiniketan in the tribal district of Bolepur, was thus an attempt to bridge rising socioeconomic inequality within the native Indian society during colonial India, as expressed in many of his writings. Hence, located within the vicinity of his school in rural tribal, Shantiniketan, Tagore built another school, Sriniketan to promote and sustain tribal handicrafts, art and music education for the local tribal agrarian community, seeking to bridge the rural- urban and tribal-civilized divides (Dasgupta 1998; Ghosh, Naseem, Vijh 2010).

Moreover, despite the rising anti-colonial sentiments against western nations, western education and the colonial government decision of dividing Bengal along religious lines to disperse the freedom movement, Tagore expressed hope of reconciliation while delivering a talk to teachers, “In the East there is great deal of bitterness against other races, and in our own homes we are often brought up with feelings of hatred….We are building our institution upon the ideal of the spiritual unity of all races.” (Dasgupta 2009, p. 111) Instead of rejecting everything western,

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as protest against the policy of divide and rule along religious lines in colonial Bengal, Tagore organized mass Raksha Bandhan14 ceremony among Hindus and Muslims in his school. He would also invite western friends and scholars from around the world to live and teach in his school at Shantiniketan. His inclusive ideal of education was thus all-encompassing. He sought to bridge not just the increasing socioeconomic distance among the native rural and urban population along caste, class, tribal and religious lines, but also racial disharmony through his inclusive model of schooling at Shantiniketan. Needless to say that these ideas are considered extremely relevant even in the contemporary world as argued by O’Connell (2003, 2010), Nussbaum (2006, 2010), Bhattacharya (2009), Ghosh, Naseem, Vijh, (2010) Collins (2011), Guha (2013) and Mukherjee (2013).

As a poet, philosopher and visionary, Tagore envisioned the ultimate goal of education to be intrinsic; in terms of the liberation of the mind of the individuals drawing on spiritual gnostic definition of education embedded in old Sanskrit saying

- सा �व饍या या �वमु啍तये (Sa Vidya Ya Vimuktaye) – education is that which liberates the mind. (Ghosh and Naseem 2003) He sought to re-instate pride among indigenous Indian population about their languages, cultures and heritage by reviving spiritual philosophical aspects through education marginalized under colonial subjectivity and domination. His primary aim of education was to free their minds from all kinds of parochial thinking. As Tagore wrote in one of his famous oft-quoted poems, which was also quoted by South African freedom icon, Nelson Mandela in a letter he had written from Robben Island on 3rd August 1980 to the secretary of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations thanking for the honour of "Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding":

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee

14 traditional Hindu ceremony for tying sacred thread of protection on the wrist a brother by a sister

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Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake Collins (2013) argues that Tagore’s theoretical ideas were born out of his experience as an indigenous intellectual within the colonial Indian context and also from native Upanishadic15 ideals of “unity in diversity”. While, Kathleen O’Connell (2010) argues that Tagore drew much of his educational ideas from early Buddhist centres of learning at Nalanda, Taxila and Vikramshila, the indigenous idealized models back in the early 3rd-4th Century BC which created a broader educational paradigm emphasizing scholarship, hospitality, cosmopolitanism and a harmonious relationship with the local community. Scholars from around the world would come to study in these ancient Buddhist Universities. However, over the years through waves of military invasions and colonial experiences this development was disrupted. For the first time in early 20th Century, Tagore sought to revive this Buddhist tradition in his school and in the University which he established i.e Viswa Bharati University (literally meaning the Global Indian University).

Bhattacharya (2009) argued that Tagore’s opposition for the practice of rote- learning in formal schools, his ideas of early education in mother tongue, ideas of education for children and adults of both sexes, ideas of a modern Indian university as a place for higher learning, his views on course structure, certification and even distance learning were extremely innovative and way ahead of his times during colonial India. Drawing on Tagore’s notion of Freedom in education, Guha (2013) argued that within this technologically mediated rapidly changing world, Tagore’s notion of child-centric education encouraging their natural curiosity, close relationship with the natural environment, creativity and imagination can foster innovative thinking and prepare them for the challenges of the changing environmental condition around them. It also offers the possibility of an inclusive pedagogy to meet the learning needs of all children.

15 The Upanishads are ancient Indian transcendentalist texts. There were more than 200 Upanishads orally composed and later written down at around 6th C BC. They present a unifying cosmology behind the apparent diversity of not just life on earth but the universe. Tagore adapted those ideas to suit the needs of his contemporary times during colonial India as he was deeply concerned with increasing socioeconomic inequality, environmental degradation and disharmony related to racial, religious and gender divides within the colonial Indian context.

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Tagore also sought to bridge gender gap within Indian society through education. In several of his operatic dance dramas16 and literary writings Tagore gave life to strong women characters and encouraged women to pursue knowledge equally as men in his school. In a 1915 essay titled ি�িশ�뷍া (Strisiksa meaning Woman’s Education), Tagore wrote, “Whatever is worth knowing is knowledge. It should be known equally by men and women, not for the sake of practical utility but for the sake of knowing.” (Tagore as cited in Jalan 1976, p. 13) It was quite a radical progressive decision during early 20th century to set up his school as a co-educational gender inclusive institution. While exploring various progressive ideas of Tagore at length by quoting from his satirical short story “The Parrot’s Training”, his use of arts in education; Nussbaum (2006, 2010) especially emphasize how Tagore used dance forms for women’s liberation and democratic participation during a time when women from “genteel” families would not be allowed to participate in public life. Singing and dancing were the arts practiced by বাজােরর েমেয়েছেল (bajaarer meyechele) or বাইিজ (Baaiji meaning woman of the “bajaar” or market i.e. courtesans, similar to the Japanese “Geisha”). However, Nussbaum (2006, p. 8) writes:

When I talked to late Amita Sen who danced in Rabindranath Tagore’s dance dramas, first in his progressive school in Shantiniketan and then to the Kolkata stage, I see the revolutionary nature of what Tagore had done for young women in particular, urging themselves to express themselves freely through their bodies and to join with them in a profoundly egalitarian play. The scandal of this freedom, as young women of good family suddenly turned up on the Kolkata stage, shook convention and tradition to their foundations. Nussbaum (2006, 2010) not only argues about the revolutionary nature of Tagore’s educational ideas for women within its historical context during colonial India, but also argues about the relevance of Tagore’s educational ideas alongside John Dewey’s ideas for contemporary concerns about education and democratic citizenship within the United States and around the world. Especially since neoliberal policy imperatives are privileging certain kinds of technical education for nation’s

16 These dance dramas drew stories from ancient mythologies and rural folk traditions of “Jatra” (travelling dramatic performance team, also known as “nautanki” in Hindi)

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financial success and marginalizing humanistic education, which in effect is creating barriers for social inclusion of the marginalized in schools and in the larger society.

Contemporary Relevance of Tagore

Based on her research in development studies and observing the predicament of increasing inequality within contemporary India after economic liberalization in the 1990s, Mukherjee (2011) emphasized in a recent news article that, over a century ago during colonial British India, Tagore warned against this rising inequality within Indian society. She writes that:

Nearly eight decades ago, Rabindranath Tagore worried about the growing concentration of economic power and the coming destruction of rural India... In a compelling set of essays written between 1915 and 1940, Rabindranath Tagore articulated a social vision where exploitation would give way to a just, humane, collectively owned economy. At the core of his thought was the cooperative principle.....There is little understanding, much less acceptance, of the cooperative principle and its potential. It is yet to enter the core of our social vision, leave alone public policy. Those spaces are dominated, ever more aggressively, by the competitive principle, the sceptre of ‘efficiency' and private gain. This is why India can emerge as one of the top wealth-generators even as 93 per cent of its working citizens toil in the informal sector. That 93 per cent contributes almost half of India's fast-growing GDP. But it has no say over the way that growth is generated — or any voice to claim a fairer distribution of the wealth it produces. The same goes for the majority that survives on the agrarian economy. The reference to Rabindranath Tagore in the above quote emphasize the relevance of Tagore’s ideas even for postcolonial India, especially within the context of increasing inequality and uneven development. Dreze and Sen (2013) begin their discussion of the “uncertain glory of India” with a caveat that there are multiple factors contributing to the economic underdevelopment of India in spite of recent excitement about macro-economic growth in the middle of global recession. Among several factors, they also highlight the centrality of education hindering development by quoting from Rabindranath Tagore, who said: “in my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education” (p. 107)

Despite India’s long tradition of education, for Tagore this absence of education was the absence of socially inclusive education fostering principles of cooperation and care for the “other”, which Hogan (2003) refers to as the “politics of

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Otherness” based on the values of सदय / সদয় (sahrdaya means a person with compassionate heart in Sanskrit and Bengali). Though Hogan (2003) and Radice’s (2010) reading of Tagore is quite critical as they discusss ambiguities in his ideas and his own privielged positioning with regards to certain issues, yet both of them agree that Tagore was on principle opposed to any kind of segregation based on nationality, class, caste, race, religion, ethnicity and gender. He viewed education as the only means through which segragation, discrimination and prejudice can be eliminated. For him the ultimate goal of education was freedom- liberation of the mind from all kinds of parochial thinking for, inclusivity, equality and reciprocity. Even his creative writings had a pedagogic purpose, as Radice (2010) argues that Tagore was “never not an educator”.

Hence, Tagore’s philosophical vision of education also aimed for reconciliation across colonial racial and cultural barriers through education. His relational model of schooling based on principles of cooperation thus involved building a strong meaningful relationship between the teacher, student, peers and the environment. Though Tagore strongly critiqued British Imperialism and capitalist colonial exploitation of India, he appreciated literatures and cultures of the west and it’s tradition of liberal humanism. Hence, in his essay “A Poet’s School” (1926) Tagore wrote:

The minds of the children today are almost deliberately made incapable of understanding other people with different languages and customs. The result is that, later, they hurt one another out of ignorance and suffer from the worst form of the blindness of the age....I have tried to save our children from such aberrations, and here the help of friends from the West, with their sympathetic hearts, has been of the greatest service. (Tagore 1926 as cited in Dasgupta 2009, p. 83) The above words of Tagore appear to be poignant in light of recent events around the world. The Gharwapsi incidents in India, the Peshawar tragedy, the Sydney Seige, the Charlie Hebdo killings, Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria, Ferguson and Baltimore riots in the US and protests on the streets of Melbourne against foreclosure of remote indegenous communities- they all show how the colonial relationships of domination are still operating in different ways in this world and how the world today needs inclusive humanistic education.

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However, as noted earlier in this chapter Tagore’s philosophy of education and inclusive model of schooling has been by and large neglected in postcolonial India and the colonial structures are still dominant within the education system. Though Tagore is much workshipped as the কিব গ‍র‍ “Kabi Guru” (Poet Teacher), most of the Indian schools still follow a colonial model of “parrot’s training” kind of rigid curriculum and pedagogy, which is detrimental for the free development of a child’s mind and inclusive education for all children with diverse learning needs. As Sriprakash (2010) argues based on her research in rural India- “learning (is) largely understood as knowledge assimilation (the acquisition of the syllabus) rather than knowledge construction….The strong classification of the syllabus, as a significant aspect of the performance-based system which remained in place, did not support a more democratic approach to knowledge acquisition.” (p. 303)

Moreover, far from Tagore’s child-centric relational model of education and socially inclusive internationalist approach; postcolonial parochial nationalist ideology has become rooted within the mainstream system. Kamat’s (2004) critical analysis of the “exclusive” Hindu Nationalist education agenda as expressed through the “National Curriculum Framework 2000” tempered through moderate language because of secularist oppositions is particularly noteworthy in this context. It shows how such a curriculum framework reverts to orientalist stereotypes about India in their anti-colonial stance and how they also exclude the diverse groups of indigenous minority from its framework while upholding the dominant Hindu Brahminical ideas. Though anti-colonial freedom struggle brought the diverse Indian population together, in many ways at the historic crossroads of postcoloniality and neoliberal globalization, it appears that a certain Hindu Brahminical cultural nationalism is emerging as the dominant norm subalternizing the voices and histories of the diverse groups of people living across the Indian subcontinent.

Within this context, reflections on Tagore’s critical ideas on education are particularly useful to conceptualize alternative possibilities for thinking about inclusive education within the Indian context. Tagore (1924) wrote, “Indian education must be a collective of the Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist, Jain and the Islamic minds to fill the Indian heart. We must find out how the Indian mind has flown along these different streams from the past. That is the only way India shall realize its unity

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within its diversity”. It is to be noted here that, even as he offered sharp critique of colonialism through his writings and work, Tagore was far from being an orientalist and he equally critiqued various indigenous inequities and dogmas including religious ones. As Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh (2010) write:

Freire was a Christian socialist and as a liberation theologist. He was preoccupied with bringing justice to the poor, oppressed and vulnerable. Tagore was a staunch believer in keeping religious dogma out of the schools and an equally staunch opposer of moral instruction being imparted by teachers. To him religion was to be lived not taught. His school at Shantinekatan was a reflection of this line of thinking. It was more than a school. It was a place of learning that was universal and international in spirit. As a philosopher Tagore’s educational ideas were onotological. However, as an educator he laid more emphasis on “Praxis” or just ethical action, rather than preaching. Tagore’s humanist philosophy of education and his efforts to institutionalize it in his school at Shantiniketan back in the early 20thCentury context of colonial British India, therefore demonstrate an alternative historical trajectory of child-centric socially inclusive education within early 20thCentury colonial India. His philosophical model of inclusive education for the development of the whole child is therefore very useful in enhancing Southern theoretical understanding of Inclusive Education. Chakrabarty (2007) discussed at length the somewhat artificial divide between the analytic and hermeneutic traditions “central to modern European social thought” (p. 18). However, I argue here that engaging with Tagore’s educational ideas allows for both analytic (ideological) as well as hermeneutic (affective historical) engagement with issues of inclusive education, particularly within the Indian context.

His model of education for the whole child did not just involve consciousness raising of the child for becoming aware of various existing inequalities of the world (both global and local), but Tagore believed that the pedagogic process should also liberate the learner from the shackles which binds the mind. “Education is that which liberates” was Tagore’s ideal. As Edward Said (1993) and particularly Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh (2010) have argued, much like French-Algerian postcolonial theorist, Franz Fanon, Tagore was much occupied with the thought of the colonization of the mind. In his essay “The Call of Truth” Tagore wrote in 1921, “I have said repeatedly and I must repeat once more that we cannot afford to lose our

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mind for the sake of any external gain....we must refuse to accept our ally the illusion-haunted magic-ridden slave mentality that is at the root of all poverty and insult under which our country groans.” (Bhattacharya 2001, p. 84) Therefore, he took utmost care in creating inclusive learning spaces within his school at Shantiniketan, where spiritual, artistic and creative wealth was given more importance than material wealth within the colonial context of extreme economic deprivation, especially in rural India. This is also evident from the memory of a rainy day and leaky roofs narrated by resident painter, Benodbehari Mukhopadhyay at Tagore’s school, which Chakrabarty (2007, p. 171-172) recounted in his book “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference”.

Moreover, believing in the philosophy of cultural confluence and syncretism, Tagore was against any rigid definition of culture with a capital C. “What is needed is eagerness of heart for a fruitful communication between different cultures. Anything that prevents this is barbarism.” (Tagore as quoted by Collins 2008, p. 1) According to the creative artist in Tagore, getting stuck in the “dreary desert sand of dead habits” was perhaps the worst way to look at culture and tradition. Hence, he was also a major critic of Gandhian nationalist idealization of Indian society and Orientalist cultural stereotypes of the noble savage, which ignored indigenous inequities of patriarchy, caste and class. Ghosh and Naseem (2003) have argued quoting from Narvane (1977, p. 5), “To him the modern person was not one who turns one’s back upon tradition but rather one ‘who interprets it creatively and rationally’”. Therefore, his ideas about culture and tradition were dynamic and fluid, which demanded constant reflection and change to meet the needs of time. As a visionary philosopher, Tagore pondered upon the dangers of cultural nationalism as a tool to counter the colonial imagery of backward India. Hence, “[Tagore’s] dream school was the one that aimed to eradicate poverty of mind and soul apart from material poverty.” (Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh 2010) It is to be also noted here that unlike Gandhi, Tagore was not opposed to science and technical education, but he was critical of the excesses of mechanisation and scientific progress for development, especially because the devastation it caused during the World Wars. As Hogan (2003) states, his ideas were “born out of the unprecedented terror of the twentieth century”. Though he was initially optimistic about western scientific education and also promoted such education in his school, he

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was deeply moved by the devastation of the World Wars and in his essay “Crisis of Civilization” conveyed that the most necessary aspect of any civilization is not just scientific industrial progress but self-reflexivity, criticality and above all sympathy, which are aspects developed through more humanistic education. We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it. We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy. The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed...Thus the greatest of educations for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead. (Tagore 1917) Within the context of “postcolonial aporias” in a country like India, as Kamat (2004) argues, where increasing capitalist expansion of material wealth is happening at the cost of rising economic inequality coupled with exclusionary ideology of cultural nationalism; Tagore’s socially inclusive educational ideas are therefore useful theoretical resource. Engaging theoretically with Tagore is very helpful to move beyond the postcolonial theoretical dilemma with inclusive education and also gain historical perspective of the problems of inclusive education within the Indian context. Collins (2007, p. 82) argues, “A Tagorean Universalist humanism could not flourish in the era of nationalism and decolonisation, but neither has Tagore as thinker and activist been fully recognised and explored in the context of postcolonialism. My suggestion is that in the present era humanism, cosmopolitanism and internationalism may yet have some mileage, and perhaps prove more useful to our needs than the rigid divisions wrought by poststructuralism. If that is so, then it may be that Tagore’s life and thought are worth re-examination.”

I argue here that, engaging with Tagore’s work provides a critical alternative for postcolonial scholars, rather than being trapped in orientalist cultural nationalism as Kamat (2004) argues by citing Leela Gandhi’s critical review of postcolonial literature. This is particularly true of the postcolonial critical literature on inclusive education within the Indian context reviewed by Johansson (2014). As argued earlier in this thesis, these scholars do not take into account the historical trajectory of the theoretical idea of inclusive education in the west and within their own contexts. They do not look for and reflect on indigenous philosophical traditions or experiments of inclusive education. Based on empirical evidence of the challenges of

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implementing inclusive education within schools and classrooms, these scholars argue that inclusive education does not work within the Southern contexts and that it is once again a neocolonial hegemonic imposition of Western/Northern ideas on the global South through policy documents.

Therefore, drawing on Mignolo (2000) and Connell (2007) I would argue that, critical scholarly engagement with the “subaltern knowledge” of Tagore’s humanist philosophy of education and experiments during colonial India provide a fertile ground for extending Southern Theoretical understanding of inclusive education for both analytic and hermeneutic engagement with empirical data. It also provides an opportunity for enhancing broader theoretical understanding of the democratic underpinnings of inclusive education, rather than its narrow definition transferred through policy documents. Collins (2011) argued that, Tagore’s “philosophy of education may yet come to be seen as one of his most significant contributions.” Here I have argued that, bringing Tagore’s philosophy of education into dialogue with theoretical debates on inclusive education offers new possibilities for conceptual understanding of the democratic underpinnings of inclusive education across cultural and historical difference. Engaging with the “subaltern knowledge” embedded in Tagore’s “southern theory” of inclusive education might help postcolonial scholars to look for solutions to the problems of inclusive education within the Indian context, rather than ideological critique of the concept itself as hegemonic western imposition.

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Chapter 3

Accounting for Success

Introduction

In the previous Chapter, based on the review of recent literature on inclusive education I argued that the idea of inclusive education has become part of a globally converging discourse. It is now widely used to justify programs of school reform, designed to make inclusive school experiences for students from a variety of different backgrounds, needs and abilities. In this sense, the idea of inclusive education is more broadly linked to a number of related concepts such as social inclusion, social development and social justice. However, the concept of inclusive education, I have argued, does not admit a uniform and universal definition. It has been interpreted and implemented in a wide variety of different ways. I have suggested furthermore that even as its meaning, located in Western philosophical and educational traditions, has become globally dominant, other ways of interpreting the concept of inclusive education are possible.

In India, for example, there exists a powerful tradition of thinking about inclusive education, encapsulated not only in India’s constitution but also in the writings of modern Indian intellectuals, such as Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Azad and Tagore. Following recent calls from scholars such as Connell (2007) and Mignolo (2000), I have argued particularly about the relevance of Tagore’s “Southern Theory” in understanding the cotemporary challenges facing inclusive education within the Indian system. Tagore’s theory, I have argued, provides an analytical framework that is more culturally and politically appropriate for examining the ways in which some Indian schools have sought to interpret and enact the principles of inclusive education, with a varying degree of success and longevity.

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Of the many schools in India that have sought to reform their work in line with the principles of inclusive education, the case of Delphine Hart School stands out. Delphine Hart School has been widely recognized, indeed celebrated, both within India and abroad, as exceptionally successful in promoting inclusive education. It is a school that has been marked out by governments, researchers, educational activists and a diverse array of global development agencies as an outstanding example of educational reform. The language of ‘best practice’ has often been used to characterize its various reform initiatives. The research reported in the thesis seeks to understand the ways in which Delphine Hart School has interpreted the notion of inclusive education, how it has promoted its work nationally and globally, what is it about its innovations that have attracted such admiration, and to what extent is the School’s model of reform sustainable in the longer term and generalizable to other schools and systems.

In this chapter, I will discuss the broader historical and political context within which Delphine Hart School --established as a Christian missionary school in the 19th Century but now operating within broader secular conditions -- is located, and conducts its work. This discussion is meant to contribute to an ethnographic case study of the school, drawing upon both the existing literature on Indian education and on the work of historians who have adopted a transnational approach to study multipolarity of connections shaping history, especially within complex postcolonial contexts like South Asia. More specifically, this chapter reflects on the diversity of Christian missionary activity within colonial and postcolonial India. It analyses how the hegemonic influence of Christianity was ‘de-hegemonized’ in many ways within the historic context in South Asia, in ways that are very similar to liberation theology in Latin America in the 1950s-1960s (Berryman 1987, Brown 1993, Clarke 1998). Thereafter, the chapter will explore briefly the institutional history of the particular Jesuitess order under which Delphine Hart School was established during the mid- 19th Century in India, and is now part of a large global network of schools operating in twenty-four countries and six continents.

The second half of the chapter explores how in the middle of recent debates about the poor quality of Indian school education, across both public and private sectors, the case of Delphine Hart School emerges and is portrayed as enormously

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successful by a number of studies. In a sense, the questions that this narrative of success raises are the guiding questions for this thesis, as indicated in Chapter 1. Therefore, this chapter analyses the existing literature on the work of Delphine Hart School, as it has been studied by global development agencies, and also by academic researchers. It identifies gaps, silences and hidden tensions within these studies and reflects upon the broader questions they raise about the conditions under which genuine and sustainable reform guided by the principles of inclusive education are possible in India.

Missionaries and Progressive School Reform

Colonialism and missionary education in the third world developing countries are often conflated in the popular social imaginary, and are assumed to pursue similar political interests (Carnoy 1974). However, a number of historians of South Asia have found enough archival evidence to argue that the missionaries were often supportive of Indian nationalism and fought against colonialism and for self-rule or “swaraj”. Bellenoit’s (2014) historical research problematizes the simplistic notion of looking at colonialism and missionary education through the same ontological and ideological lens by providing evidence of the diversity of missionary activities within India between 1880 and1920. For example, while the Anglican missionary groups were involved with educating the elites of the Indian society who would go on to lead the Indian Nationalist movement, the American missionaries by contrast worked mostly with the subaltern communities and were much less involved in higher education.

Indeed, it could be argued that missionary education in English provided the native elites and intellectuals the necessary linguistic and intercultural resources they needed to be able to deliberate with the British over the pressing issues of social reform within Indian society and later rose against colonial rule within India, even before Gandhi entered the scenario of nationalist freedom movement. Since the missionaries interacted with students directly in the classrooms, their interpretations of Indian society were also different from the dominant narrative and ideologies of the British Raj. Quite contrary to popular beliefs, these missionaries were also quite critical of many of the colonial policies of the British Raj. Some of them were openly

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supportive of Indian nationalism and fight for freedom from colonial rule. (Rao, 2014) In fact, the Jesuitess order in India had to struggle quite hard to establish their credibility even during colonial India, so that the “nuns were no longer strangers to be watched with suspicion or hostility by European circles in India” (Colmcille 1968, p. 144).

The colonial government was often suspicious of the work of the Nuns because of colonial political relationships between England and Ireland, as well as sectarianism among the Anglican Protestant and Catholic Christian communities. Moreover, historians have also found evidence to argue that Christian missionaries became a kind of conduit for channeling progressive educational ideas from Europe and the United States to their own educational institutions in India. Progressive education for social justice, human rights and equity within the Indian context thus has a long history associated with the work of the Christian missionaries (Bara 2000, Belleniot 2014). O’Connell (2003) argues that, though Tagore was a school-drop-out misfit during colonial India in both English and Bengali medium schools, he had a somewhat better experience while studying briefly in a Jesuit school, where a Jesuit teacher recognized his literary creativity and even inspired him to translate parts of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into Bengali.

In the post-independence era, while often these missionary English medium schools continued to educate the elites of Indian society, they also became the champions of human rights education, calling for social justice and equality within Indian society, where all kinds of discriminations based on gender, religion, race and caste still prevail. These injustices are of course historically deeply rooted as education in India, was the sole privilege of males belonging to upper-castes and ‘high-born’ families. Spivak (2004), who is herself a product of middle class Bengali medium primary school, English medium Christian missionary school in Calcutta and later American higher education; writes:

Colonialism was committed to the education of a certain class. It was interested in the seemingly permanent operation of an altered normality. Paradoxically, human rights and ‘‘development’’ work today cannot claim this self-empowerment that high colonialism could. Yet, some of the best products of high colonialism, descendants of the colonial middle class, become human rights advocates in the countries of the South. (Spivak 2004, p. 524)

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The complex relationship between Christian missionary activity and social class stratification in India is further emphasized as Spivak (1994) states in an interview with Alfred Arteaga that, “A convent is upper class and fashionable stuff. Mine was a cheap school, very good academic quality. By the time I was going, most of the teachers were tribal Christians, this is to say, Indian subalterns, lower than rural underclass by origin, neither Hindus nor Muslims, not even Hindu untouchables, but tribals- so called aboriginals- who had been converted by missionaries.” (Spivak 1994, p. 274) Though the work of Christian missionaries has been much feared and critiqued within the colonial and postcolonial Indian contexts for their role in such religious conversion of native people, it is also the case that masses of socially marginalised lower caste and tribal Indian populations and even some educated elites were inspired by Christian missionaries and embraced Christianity. (Oddie 2013)

Within the popular social imaginary during the colonial times, the position of women teachers among the missionaries was rather ambiguous. These foreign women were either seen as “Goddess” or “Devil”. Such representations were common in much literature and also popular media. However, Jayawardane (1995) particularly takes an interesting global feminist approach in studying the role of diverse groups of women missionaries, theosophists, social reformers and orientalists, in search of “black gods” during colonial India (p. 174). She portrays these diverse women as early feminists driven by their sense of “global sisterhood” towards Indian women. As education was a taboo for women, even in Europe until the enlightenment era, these women were bearers of a legacy of long struggle for women’s education in Europe. Hence, they viewed education as key for the emancipation of women within India.

One can find examples of highly educated women scholars in ancient India and there are also illustrious examples of women actively taking part in public and political life during colonial India (Sen 2005). However, within South Asia there was no formal schooling system for girls until mid-19thCentury. Formal education within the Indian subcontinent historically was delivered through residential Brahminical Gurukuls and Islamic Madrasas to men belonging to certain privileged social class and caste of the Indian society. The British colonial government was also largely

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uninterested in girls’ education, since women’s education was not a high priority at that time even in Britain. Formal school education for girls in India thus developed during the colonial period through private initiative of individuals, who often were foreign missionaries. The first formal school for girls was not set up in India until 1848; and it was Savitribai Phule, the wife of Jyotirao Phule, a Hindu outcast social reformer, who set up the school greatly influenced by Christian missionaries (Wolf and Andrade 2008).

Indian Education and Development

By the time India gained its independence from the British, the idea of education for all was well entrenched in the Indian national imaginary. The Indian constitution upheld the promise of universal elementary education and set a deadline to achieve this high priority by 1960 (Constitution of India, Directive Principles, Article 45). However, the promise was deferred under successive governments as the country struggled to recover economically after the ravages of colonialism and the effect of the World Wars as a colony of imperial Britain. Jha et al. (2008) cite the works of leading scholars in the field, as well as an extensive range of data from various states of India, to argue how public investment in education in fact declined following the mandates of the structural adjustment policies and liberalization of the Indian economy during the 1990s. This decline in public investment in education was despite official Kothari Commission recommendations (1966), the Millennium Development Goals and the goals set by the National Common Minimum Programme (Bajpai and Sachs 2004) set public spending on education to be at least 6% of the GDP. However, Dreze and Sen (2002) note that, notwithstanding the rhetoric of “free-market” economy through the Reagan and Thacher era, many western countries continued to witness increase in public expenditure on “social services” including health, education and social security. Moreover, despite all the cut-backs in recent years, public expenditure for the social sector in these countries is still much higher than it is in India. This lack of public expenditure for education in India, where millions of children are still out of school and millions of adults illiterate, semi-literate and unskilled has undermined the possibilities of its social and economic development.

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Dreze and Sen (2013) further argue that: “Indian democracy is seriously compromised by the extent and form of social inequality in India, particularly since democracy stands not just for electoral politics and civil liberties but also for an equitable distribution of power.” (p. xi) The sudden growth that India experienced following the liberalization of its economy even at the macro-economic level until the mid- 2000s, is now staggering and slowing down. Globally, a major reason for slow-down of macro-economic growth has been identified as inequality (Stiglitz, 2013). Inequality within the Indian context is not just extreme with respect to unequal wealth redistribution, but also in the provision of education and healthcare for the poor. Though Dreze and Sen (2013) begin their discussion with a caveat that there are multiple factors contributing to the “uncertain glory of India”, they highlight the centrality of education among all these factors hindering development by quoting from Tagore, as referred to in the earlier chapter. In the neoliberal era, the importance of education has been defined mostly in economic terms, following the lead from global organizations such as the OECD. The Indian government documents now emphasize the need to improve education for enhancing human capital through education in order to enable Indians to compete in the global economy. However, Dreze and Sen (2013) list several ways in which basic education is critical for not only economic but also social progress, as education empowers people across gender and social class barriers to lead a better quality of life, gain freedom to participate in civic and political affairs. In a fully functioning democracy, citizens, they argue, need to have a better understanding of human rights, legal rights, health care and enjoy the many creative possibilities of learning and studying. Though it constitutes 17% of the world population, India accounts for more than 37% of the world’s illiterate adults (287 million illiterate adults), according to UNESCO 11th Education for All (EFA) global monitoring report. The UNESCO study also finds that in spite of recent increase in access to education in India, one- third of primary school age children reached fourth grade in school without learning the very basics they needed to know. This fact has also been testified by the Indian government’s DISE data and the annual ASER reports published by an independent NGO, Pratham. In spite of this abysmal state of education, Dreze and Sen (2013) cite the 1999 PROBE (Public Report on Basic Education) study and studies run by the

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Pratichi Trust to emphasize the fact that, in India, even the poorest of the poor parents consider education with high regard and think that education can help their children to progress in life. A number of Indian educational researchers (for example, Zaidi 2005 and reports produced by Pratichi Trust) have noted that girls are still held back from pursuing education due to safety concerns, especially when schools are located far away from where parents work. Often public schools do not have basic infrastructure like separate toilets for girls in school; and teacher absenteeism has become almost a cultural norm in most public schools. In this context, Dreze and Sen (2013) quote from classical liberal economist, Adam Smith, to emphasize the role of the state in the delivery of public services: For a very small expense the publick can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education. (Smith 1776 as cited by Dreze and Sen 2012, p. 110) However, the effectiveness of public provision of education by the state has been a contentious issue within the Indian context. Based on his research, Muralidharan (2013) argues that just increasing educational provisions or “school input” without much attention to improvement in pedagogy and school governance is not likely to yield better learning outcomes. Compared to the public schools, in India, governance and pedagogy in private schools are often considered more effective. It is argued, for example by Muralidharan (2013), that there is less teacher absenteeism in the private schools. A growing body of literature in recent years has looked at the role and effectiveness of low-cost private schools and public-private partnership in increasing educational provision in India (Srivastava 2007, 2013). However, though it appears that low-cost private schools have been helpful to increase access to education, Srivastava argues that such access is often gained at the cost of poor quality education and such expansion of low-cost private schools is further aggravating inequality, widening the social hierarchies within a system, where historically the schooling sector has been segregated according to social class. Chudgar and Quin’s (2012) large-scale study also questions the unequivocal effectiveness of private schools in India over public schools. They highlight the fact that the private sector is heterogeneous and that there is hardly much difference in learning outcomes and performance of children in

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private schools compared to public schools if the sample of students is taken from similar socioeconomic and family backgrounds. The reason why private schools appear to be performing better, Chudgar and Quin (2012) argues, is that majority of students in private schools comes from comparatively better socioeconomic background. Though teacher absenteeism might be less and there is greater student attendance in private schools in India, but this does not correlate with systematic benefit in terms of student achievement and student learning. Middleclass advantage in education, and factors involving exclusion of disadvantaged children, have been also studied by academic scholars, who argue for the need of greater equity within the system, not only in relation to access but also quality and equity of provision. (Nambissan 2010, Govinda 2011, Juneja 2014) In recent years academics working in education and development sector within India, have also highlighted the need for a cultural shift, since the modern Indian education system was established during colonial times to reproduce a class of elites, who worked for colonial governance.17

A Success Story in the Middle of Doom and Gloom

In the middle of these general discussions and debates on poor quality of Indian school education across the public and private sector, the success story of one school’s work in multiple studies appear quite significant. A number of academic studies and media reports show this 150 years old missionary school in India, Delphine Hart School established during British colonial times, to be immensely successful in not just increasing access to education for the marginalized children; but also establishing a model of peer-to-peer learning, community engagement and active citizenship education. This school which caught the attention of global development agencies and academic researchers is now part of a large global network of high status Catholic schools which operates around the world in 24 countries and 6 continents. As noted earlier the first school under this religious order was set up in the former colonial capital of British India, Calcutta by Irish missionary nuns

17 See: Abjijit Banerjee states: “I think this in some sense is a problem of our inherited educational culture. We have a culture that is inherited from a colonial education system, which was explicitly aimed at recruiting an elite class that was going to work for them...” http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/learnings-not-about-enrolment-latrines-in-school- were-failing-children-on-massive-scale/

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commissioned by a German Priest who settled in Australia after residing briefly in the Bengal Province of British India. Therefore, the school’s genesis embodies processes of early globalization because of the mobility of missionaries across continents back in the 17th and 18th Century.

The first school was opened on 10th January, 1842, with sixty pupils; a mix of day students and boarders in Calcutta. The superior was a Mother Mary Delphine Hart and she was assisted by two Catholic Sisters. When the nuns initially joined as novices they were trained as teachers who would impart a Victorian education to their students. Though Irish Catholic nuns were particularly brought to India by the initiative of the German Priest because of his concern for the poor illiterate Catholic girls in the region during British India (Nolan 2008); most missionary schools were expected by the colonial government to reproduce British upper-class education, in an atmosphere of strict discipline, catering “to the needs of resident Europeans, wealthier Anglo-Indians and Indians who wanted their daughters to be refined, well- educated, accomplished ladies who would make suitable wives for upwardly-mobile bourgeois men” (Jayawardena, 1995, p. 43). The Jesuitess nuns also struggled to fulfil their mission to educate the poor subaltern girls of the region because of “injustice in the educational policy”, since schools would be provided generous funds by the colonial government only if “they catered for a class whose standard of living was considerably higher than that of the average Indian family” (Colmcille 1968, p. 280).

In contemporary times, the Jesuitess schools in India operate by and large as secular institutions and they are part of a large global network of high status Catholic schools renowned for their high academic standards and scholastic rigour as schools. However, in recent years Delphine Hart School particularly appeared to be breaking out of the mould of just being known as an elite academic institution. The school became a national and global symbol for inclusivity. The school’s work was celebrated for developing a values-based curriculum, which was adopted as the national human rights education curriculum for developing a radical inclusive approach towards education. The school’s work was also celebrated for implementing several community outreach programs within the city and the

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neighbouring villages to promote education for the underprivileged and to empower them.

Over the past three decades the school has been implementing a range of progressive inclusive reforms following the model of a mix of 50% students coming from well-off backgrounds and 50% from disadvantaged backgrounds, including differently-abled children. Moreover, the school became a central hub coordinating several other community outreach programs like the spokes of a wheel in collaboration with donor agencies like the UNICEF, Human Rights Institute, Save the Children, Indian Government’s Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (Education for All) Office, Union Ministry of Women and Child Welfare and several other corporate beneficiaries. These programs include a residential night-shelter for homeless street girls (many of whom study in the English medium school with kids from regular middleclass background), a peer-to-peer learning program for children inside the school and also for children in some neighbouring village schools, a knowledge hub for publishing teachers’ training textbooks for Human Rights Education developed by the school, a barefoot teachers’ training program for teachers in rural areas, a program for Hidden Domestic Child labour, a vulnerable child rescue program called the Childline and satellite schools in brickfields and fishing villages.

The school’s work was cited as a successful case study in the Indian Government’s Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (Education for All) publication in 2011, as well as publications by international donor organizations. Delphine Hart School’s work appeared to have become well-known in the international development circle as a school engaged in designing and implementing inclusive pedagogic practices within the highly stratified hierarchical Indian society and schooling system for equity and social justice, especially with regards to the education of vulnerable girls. Hence, the school became a symbol of authentic indigenous attempt at school reform for donor agencies and academic researchers interested in studying education reform.

Celebratory evidence from the existing case studies by the global development agencies and individual academic researchers about Delphine Hart School showed a school in the process of change from being an exclusive to an inclusive institution without much reference to changes in its historical context. However, schools as social institutions are generally in a state of change “driven by

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social, cultural and economic shifts and policy agendas.” (Thomson, Lingard and Wrigley 2012) Yet, the literature celebrating the success of this school in promoting the millennium development goals through education for all do not pay much attention to the external sociological factors initiating and/or impacting internal changes within the school. The school is rather seen as a laboratory that can bring about changes in the society outside. The change in school policies and practices discussed in these studies therefore pay attention mostly to in-school factors, which will be analysed in the following sections.

From an Exclusive to an Inclusive “School for All”

Mother Dorothy Maher was a woman of vision, clear-sighted, strong willed, and utterly fearless....Probably the first thing that struck her was what seemed an injustice in the education policy. According to the code for Anglo-Indian schools, these were forbidden to accept more than twenty-five percent of Indian children.....That was in recognition of the fact that they catered for a class whose standard of living was considerably higher than that of average Indian family, and the salaries and equipment of these schools was a very expensive business. They were doing an excellent job, and deserved encouragement. However, that might be, Mother Dorothy decided: “I could not bear to close the doors of our schools to Indian children in their own country.” So she found a way to avoid this, without transgressing the letter of the Code. (Colmcille 1968; p. 280-281) As already referred to earlier, the Jesuitess schools were exclusive religious schools initially set up for poor Catholic girls in the region. (Nolan 2008, Colmcille 1968) However, the above quoted historical account of the schools in India from 1841-1962 by an Australian nun, who taught in various Indian Jesuitess school since 1929, is a testimony of the fact that the schools became quite exclusive in terms of their racial and social class demography of students during the years of war i.e 1938-1950. It also suggests that the Jesuitess schools went through waves of changes and became progressively inclusive in the post-war and postcolonial period as Colmcille (1968) writes, “For over a hundred year, they had adapted themselves to each generation of India’s children; they had marched in step with their students. “Bande Mataram!” Salute the Motherland! They were ready, with this new generation, to move confidently into Free India.” (p. 303)

In recent years a promotional book on the school’s work by an Australian school teacher, who has worked in the school as a volunteer for over 20 years, also

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asserts that the school has been “Meeting the Challenges of a Changing India”. (Flatt 2008) The last chapter of the book ends with a bold declaration about the popularity of the work of the school globally by stating that a google search on the school resulted in 3,330 hits, a search on the former school Principal results 292,000 sites and a search on the special residential home inside the school created for homeless children results 11,600 sources of information. Thereafter, the author urges the readers to visit the official school website to get authentic information about the school and to fill out volunteer forms online in case the reader of the book gets interested to visit the school in person. It appeared from reading this book that the school has been gathering resources globally to do a wide range of socially inclusive and community oriented work. Within a complex historical and hierarchical Indian context; it is intriguing to find multiple research reports by global development agencies like Oxfam, DFID, UNICEF, World Bank and academic researchers citing Delphine Hart School as a successful school furthering the cause of education and development empowering the most marginalized girls in one of the poorest cities of the world (Greeen 1995, Doggett 2005, Jessop 1998, Stephens 2003, Tembon and Fort 2008, Bajaj 2011, Dabir, Rego and Kapadia 2011, Chattopadhyay 2015).

School Success Promoting “Education for All”

Jessop’s (1998) study analysing the school’s work as a successful example of social inclusion to draw a model of best practices for other schools was funded by a major global development agency, such as UK government’s DFID. This report has been also cited in several other publications including the paper commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2003/4-“The Leap to Equality” by Stephens (2003) and report on Girls Education in the 21st C: Gender Equality, Empowerment and Economic Growth edited by Tembon and Fort (2008) and published by the World Bank. Another study by Doggett (2005) published by development NGO, Oxfam has also analysed the school’s transforming policies and practices for gender equality in education.

The first best practice that the DFID study draws from their case study of the school’s work is that of shared vision. Jessop writes, “A manifestation of best practice is the extent to which stakeholders within a school understand and share a

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common vision.” This common vision in the case of Delphine Hart School was engineered through values-education, not just for the students but also for the staff. Since the 1980s, the school’s former Principal and some of the teaching staff have been developing ten part series of child-centred inclusive values education curriculum published by a noted school textbook publisher within India. The school made visible the practice inside the school through these publications, its outreach programmes and engagement with the community. However, this undisputed acceptance of a shared vision is hard to believe. Someone who knows the hierarchical socioeconomic context of the city of Calcutta and India at large18 will harbour a willing suspension of disbelief while reading the report.

Moreover, the postcolonial social imaginary and sentiments of local people within the city of Calcutta (which indigenized its name in 2001 as Kolkata) and the country India in general is very strong. The English medium convent schools in the postcolonial era teaching “Queen’s English” became a social class symbol which the elites of the Indian society could only access initially (as it is also evident from Colmcille 1968 account) and slowly the upward mobile middle-classes started aspiring. However, the rest of the population considers the convent educated students as snobs with their polished upper-class Victorian English accent. A number of Indian film versions of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ became extremely popular within India during its early years of independence. Just as the Hollywood version of ‘My Fair Lady’ became very popular, several Indian film (Bengali, Hindi and other Indian languages) versions of the same story became very popular within the postcolonial Indian context, since the story of Professor Higgins engaged in a social experiment to transform a lower-class girl selling flowers into a polished upper-class society lady by changing her linguistic class, codes and control (Bernstein 1971) was not too foreign for an average Indian movie-watching public. Even a recent news report in the Indian Express on a Hindi movie “Queen” (2014) deals with this language issue to some extent and states that:

Among the many bases for social stratification that Indians have devised, the callous derision of the minority “native” English speakers for the majority

18 See: “In the middle class expectation of 21st century India, people on the socio-economic margins should stay there, because that’s their lot”: http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Forgotten- Brethren/293980

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“non-native” English speakers (derogatorily referred to as “vernaculars”) is perhaps the most insidious….. By treating the accent-based caste system imposed by India’s Westernised, convent-educated lot with the disdain it deserves, by recognising that to even dignify it with acknowledgement is unnecessary, the movie offers a refreshing new paradigm.19 Within such a stratified social context like this, where not just the English language vis-à-vis the vernaculars, but the accent with which it is spoken itself has created further social stratification, it is surprising to read that Jessop’s account of best practices takes a shared vision for granted based on just interviews with key informants inside the school and some school publications without investigating it further to assess whether the vision is actually shared and owned by the community or not.

Jessop discusses the second best practice in a curious way by stating in a footnote that the school was a recipient of UNESCO NOMA award in 1994 for spreading literacy and because of the school’s outstanding reputation; freedom and responsibility as powerful capacity building tools was a serendipitous outcome. Though the report mentions some criteria like critical thinking and initiative based on which the school Principal selected her staff in school, so that they understand the values of doing their work in the school with a great deal of freedom and responsibility even while she is away; it is not quite clear from Jessop’s account of best practice how it could be actually implemented and whether there has been any serious evaluation of their ability to act with freedom and responsibility or not. The long quotes in this section from Jessop’s research journal appear to be rather romantic in its observation of the school’s open-door policy and how everything is kept without lock and key and how even the lowest in the school hierarchy, the street-children living in the residential home inside the school act responsibly.

However, the very sentence used by Jessop to show the school’s remarkable achievement at egalitarianism probably highlights inner tension as she writes: “Perhaps, the most startling exercise of freedom and responsibility is granted to the least powerful group within the school hierarchy.” Despite the use of phrases such as, “least powerful” and “school hierarchy”, the notions of power and hierarchy within

19 See: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/queens-english/

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the Indian society (where the power distance between different social groups are often very hard to bridge) are not analysed by Jessop. However, it is an undeniable fact that social groups within the Indian society do not mix so easily in an environment of freedom and mutual responsibility as it has been shown in this study. Roy’s (2003) ethnographic study of the city of Calcutta (Kolkata) is a good example in this context.

The third best practice that Jessop describes based on her grounded theory approach of case study is the way in which the school was able to manage the constant tension between stability and change. Jessop assigns stability as a condition inherited by the school through its 150 year old tradition as part of a larger network of schools, a long-serving stable cohort of teaching staff and one of the longest serving Principals. The changes in terms of the school’s changing demographics due to changes in access policy and ever-expanding community outreach work were made acceptable according to Jessop because of this pre-condition of foundational stability of the school. Though in this section of the case study report, Jessop raises several caveats about the expectations of middleclass parents and the general culture of competition, ambition, academic prowess and individualism prevailing within the society and the fact that “seeming chaos and disorder of the change process may be disturbing for participants”, they eventually seem to get submerged by the optimistic voice of the key respondents for the research and Jessop (1998) writes: “as a result, people most affected by change have gradually come to terms with the implications of the shifts the school has undergone, and resistance to change has been minimized” (p. 18).

However, quite interestingly the voices of those affected by the changes are not heard in this report, though the author reflects on the dangers and risks that could be involved in exposing the children from well-off middleclass families to the “dangerous” elements in the city and the fact that the attitudes of some of these kids in school might actually negatively impact the homeless street-children. These doubts are soon phased out by the author by talking about collaborative reflection, a strategy which was used to revise the barefoot teachers training program, a para-teacher training for suburban and rural area developed by the school, when they realized that urban strategies for developing teaching aid was inappropriate for rural schools. Yet,

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it is not clear from the report how issues arising out of concerns for student safety and self-image could be handled utilizing this collaborative reflection method. Rather this section of the case study report uses a long quote about the idealism of the key research respondent, the former school Principal, Sister Valentine who talks about her vision of helping to build a relationship between the rich and the poor within the school premises as a laboratory to create ripple effect outside in the community and the society at large.

The fourth best practice that Jessop discuss as manifested by the school is a sense of wonder which contains the idea of creativity, imagination, curiosity and excitement. The Catholic sense of religiosity becomes quite predominant in the discussion in this section as the author writes: “It is also about a quality of grace that pervades the school. It is as though rubbing shoulders with the poor, the homeless; the disabled and marginalized has influenced the members of the school community to look further than the narrow confines of their own class, religion and culture and to see a world beyond.” (Jessop 1998, p. 20) This section of the report also dwells upon the meaning of education as the author quotes mocking statements made by a student in a school newsletter about the school leaving public exam and then a quote from the school newsletter again to state how the Principal would lay stress on more ‘life-oriented’ education to the parents through the school newsletter: “Education should be more life-oriented than book-oriented. We need to develop the intellectual capacity of our children by helping them to learn how to think, rather than make parrots out of them by forcing them to memorise without understanding” (Jessop 1998, p. 22). Quite interestingly it highlights the tension between the changing educational priorities of the school while being still embedded within a largely competitive Indian system which prioritized an industrial “one-size-fit-all” model of education. This section also talks about the school’s innovative activity-based peer- to-peer learning program, whereby academically more advanced children at the school tutor children who are falling behind.

The fifth best practice derived by Jessop is setting of meaningful and challenging goals. She sets this as the central focus for the student and staff at the school as all the other aspects of best practices i.e. shared vision, freedom and responsibility, change and stability and sense of wonder acquire their value from this

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notion of meaningful and challenging goals. This section of the report highlights the school’s philosophy of social justice and its aims of creating a new society through the value of service, sharing and caring. The author also cites quotes from the school Principal, Sister Valentine’s keynote address at the “Education for All” conference held in Calcutta in 1995 and quotes from her letters to parents through the school newsletter to highlight the fact that though the philosophical priority of the school was more holistic to create relationships among children across socioeconomic, religious and caste barriers; it did not mean cutting back on the study habits of students in the school.

Interestingly, in spite of the high notes of celebration about the school, its philosophy and work, which could be adopted as best practices by other schools; this section also ends with a realistic note that it would be too naïve to accept that all students and staff were galvanized by the higher goals and aspirations of the school. She writes, “For some, school remains a place of dusty books, boring lessons, tiffin tins, and hours of sitting in uncomfortable wooden desks in the sweltering heat of a Calcutta summer. There is apathy and an almost feigned boredom with the school’s outreach programme among a sector of the pupil population. No doubt, this is reflected throughout the system” (Jessop 1998, p. 23). Yet, the author concludes that the model of best practices she drafted from studying Delphine Hart School’s work could be replicated elsewhere. She negates the criticisms that might arise about the school’s work based on the leadership model of its long serving school Principal, which could be described as a personality cult. According to Jessop’s assessment, a large section of the staff and students in the school “owned” the various changes that were gradually implemented in the school. However, her assessment seems to be solely based on the affirmations she heard from the school Principal and some staff members while she was at the school doing research. It was not quite clear what strong evidence she found to make such an assessment, despite her observation of apathy among a section of the school population.

Though at one stage in the report she acknowledges that “a certain baseline of resourcing ...keeps the school functioning” (Jessop 1998, p. 16), in conclusion she negates the possibility that such work needed large financial resources. She rather asserts that such work was dependent on certain kind of value orientation rather than

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financial resources, since several other schools with much more resources have not done what this school had done. Thereafter, she challenges the theories of conformity and highly trained staff to implement these best practices by making statements that “leadership is both an important and a transferable commodity in the production of best practices” and the fact this school has been recruiting staff beyond the particular order of Jesuitess is a proof that in order to implement these best practices it was not required to be part of any particular religious order or academic tradition, since the focus was more on creative thinkers and not “teachers whose qualifications give them set of certainties which may, in fact, prevent learning.” (Jessop 1998, p. 26)

However, someone who knows well the Indian context and the poor state of teacher education within the existing teachers training colleges in India can easily understand the limitation of such understanding of trained professionals. It was clear to a native reader that Tansy Jessop did not have contextual understanding of the Indian education system, including teacher education. Universal generalization of best practices to promote “education for all” based on these observations could go very wrong. Therefore, though this study ends emphatically with a list of “Common Myths that Delphine Hart School Challenges”, it would be important to further research to find out if these bold claims about the school is true or not and if the inclusive reforms are truly sustainable, especially since this DFID case study is now being oft-quoted and treated as a major piece of evidence by global donor organizations like UNESCO and the World Bank as a success story for further promotion of “Education for All”.

Evidence of School Success from Academic Research

Five academic research projects have studied the school’s success from different angles in recent years. Bajaj (2012) analyzes the work of Delphine Hart School from the perspective of its work in promoting Human Rights Education within the school and training teachers and staff of other schools within India as the North East regional coordinating center of the Institute of Human Rights Education, responsible for conducting outreach to 70 schools in the region, involving 15000 children and 71 teachers (Bajaj 2012, p. 163). Analyzing the school’s work in promoting Human Rights Education in India, Bajaj (2012) also celebrates its successful work not just within the school itself but also in its ability to influence

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other elite schools in Kolkata to begin offering HRE program in their school. Data from her research reveal the positive impact it had on the lives of children coming from elite families of Kolkata, some of whom talked about keeping packets of biscuits in their car to give to beggars on their way to school and taking time out of personal entertainment to teach English to house-maids. However, within her book length study on Human Rights Education in India, her study of Delphine Hart School is just a small part to assess how the school is working as the Eastern Regional State Partner of IHRE to spread Human Rights Education to other schools. Also, while analyzing how the global script of HRE diverges and decouples within the Indian context, she highlights the fact that some schools in the state of Tamilnadu and particularly Delphine Hart School in West Bengal takes a Christian perspective of interpreting Human Rights Education. According to Bajaj (2012, p. 139), their adoption of the program and teacher’s training emphasized Biblical origins of concepts related to Human Rights such as social equality and service for the poor. However, Bajaj (2012) is not judgmental in her analysis about this particular Christian interpretation of HRE by some of the schools and organization in India, including Delphine Hart School. Rather she shares a poster released by Institute of Human Rights Education (IHRE) as part of her data with a quote from Paulo Freire in Hindi on the same page (p. 139), while analysing the Christian interpretation of Human Rights Education showing how Freire’s thoughts on education for empowering the marginalized is very relevant within the Indian context. Bajaj also applied Freire’s work as the main theoretical lens to analyze her data emphasizing the relevance of Freirean critical consciousness raising pedagogy for the hierarchical India context, where the social distance between the privileged and the marginalized is huge, unlike many other countries as observed by critical observer and global thinkers, such as Noam Chomsky20 in recent years. The other major academic study on the school’s work published recently was conducted by a group of Indian researchers Dabir, Rego and Kapadia (2011), published by Tata Institute of Social Sciences. They chose to study the residential rainbow home for street girls set up by Delphine Hart School as a pioneer in

20 See: http://www.tehelka.com/what-is-striking-in-india-is-the-indifference-of-the-privileged/

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collaboration with a Netherland based partnership foundation, initiated by a group of Dutch businessmen. This model of residential home and schooling for street girls was later replicated in the other schools within the same missionary order and also in some other schools across the country. According to the 2001 Census of India estimate which they quoted in the study, India has a population of 427 million children, out of them 44 million are destitute and 12.44 million orphans in the country. They chose to study 18 of these residential homes and schooling of street children in Kolkata, Delhi and Hyderabad; which were started following the model set by the residential home at Delphine Hart School. They discuss several standards of care for vulnerable children. This includes the UNCRC (1989) principles of care, the UN alternate care guidelines, the standards of care set by the council of Australian governments (2010) and standards set by Save the Children UK (2005). However, they chose to adopt a Standard of Care Assessment framework based on the framework most suitable for the Indian context and this was the framework provided by United Nations Alternate Care guidelines and Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children Act 2000 amended in 2006).

Figure 3: UN Quality standards in Care (Source: Dabir, Rego and Kapadia 2011, p. 124)

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Once Delphine Hart school is celebrated as a success not just for its work, but also a pioneer in providing a model of care and social inclusion for other schools. The study begins with a deep engagement with the problems that street girls face and the various methods of interventions that were developed at Delphine Hart School and adopted at other sister schools within the same Jesuitess order. It also highlights the fact that the Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (SSA) framework for implementing “Education for All” recommends these residential homes at Delphine Hart School, kolkata and at Aman Vedika, Hyderabad for educating street girls in urban areas in their February 2011 publication. They further quote from the SSA publication which shows how this model of residential homes in school buildings is a viable solution for taking care of street girls utilising existing public building and infrstructure, since the government is practically out of capacity to provide shelter for tens of thousands of street children in every city. The study also states that all the programs also aligned with the humanistic approach of care for girls set by Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act (2000, amended in 2006). Based on this book length study the authors compiled a set of guidelines for further management and scaling up of these residential homes by setting up core standards for quality of care as shown in the figure 3 above. The study by Doggett (2005) is little less optimistic about the school’s work for social inclusion and transformation. The study was conducted by an experienced teacher in Ireland, UK and New Zealand; and it takes a gender lens to study the work of Delphine Hart School. This article along with several other articles in a book was published by a major global development NGO, Oxfam and edited by Sheila Aikman and Elaine Unterhalter of Institute of Education, University of London. This study is also much cited in several other studies, especially with regards to transforming policies and practices for gender equality. Since single sex schools are declining in the West but girls’ schools still account for one third of school enrolments in India, Doggett (2005) began with the research question to find out if a single-sex school is enabling for girls’ education and empowerment within a developing world context like India. The study shows how through its value education curriculum, non- conventional pedagogy and school environment, Delphine Hart School was challenging girls in the schools to think beyond traditional roles of women in society.

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However, student surveys especially in higher sections of the school shows increasing awareness among girls about the prevailing inequality outside the school in the labour market. For many wealthier students getting an education and degree was just for maintaining social class status and not necessarily for a career, while for girls from working class backgrounds and some from homeless destitute backgrounds were aspiring to be in socially safe professions within the Indian context like a teacher, which can provide them with upward social mobility as well as some economic stability. Doggett (2005) concludes her study by stating that the education at Delphine Hart School was designed to provide female students with the opportunities and abilities to challenge gendered identities that limit and constrain the ways in which girls can respond to their education. The schooling provides girls from all socioeconomic backgrounds in urban India equal opportunity for education to achieve greater equality as women outside in the society. But, the study also highlights the complexity and interrelatedness of internal and external expectations and social pressures on girls in their ability to maximize these benefits which depends on their gendered identities, which are formed both inside and outside the school. According to the evidence from her data gathered from students, it appeared that in spite of the school’s empowering curriculum and pedagogy, a large section of the girls actually think they are powerless or in a position of less power in the world outside the school, which is dominated by men.

The study by Greene (1995) takes a Deweyian as well as Catholic theological approach in studying and celebrating Delphine Hart School’s work. The study begins with a poem by Rabindranath Tagore- “The Gift” and the third chapter of the study is titled “The East can teach the West”. The question in the chapter is- “What can we learn in Ireland from Delphine Hart in Kolkata?” resonates with the classic address in comparative education by Sir Michael Sadler on October 20, 1900 at the Guildford Educational Conference, Christ Church, Oxford, 'How far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education?21 Thereafter, the author makes comparative reflections of the applicability of some of Delphine Hart’s approach to education in Irish schools and religion classes. Greene (1995) refers to the Irish Government Education Commission’s Green paper on Education and states

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that it understands the importance of education only for the economic needs of the society driven by human capital theory. While both the Irish schools and DHS are embedded in this overarching emphasis of economic ends to education in contemporary times, Greene suggests that the Delphine Hart approach to pedagogy placed importance on gaining academic qualification for advancement of society, training for citizenship and social solidarity. She suggests that DHS could provide a great working model for Irish schools and concludes her study highlighting the three- fold emphasis in education observed at Delphine Hart School and reminding the words from Tagore’s poem “The Gift” that “we must take what is given as gift and shape it from our own experience to give it meaning- a meaning that can transform from dirty street to rainbow”. She concludes by highlighting that DHS represents a three-fold emphasis on inclusive education:

Education is open to all, regardless of class, creed, income or even talent. Education is a liberating influence, and Education has the potential to challenge social equations. (Green 1995, p. 39) The most recent study on Delphine Hart School’s work is by Chattopadhyay (2015), a native of Kolkata and academic in the United States. Chattopadhyay conducted his study while bringing students from a reputed American Catholic University to this school for a few years as part of their study abroad service learning program. He has been also conducting research to assess the success of the inclusive schooling culture of Delphine Hart School. He conducted a massive survey of student attitudes in the school from class six upwards in 2009 and gathered data from 362 student surveys. It shows that a majority of the students from the sample survey express pro-social attitudes across the socioeconomic divide within this “purposive inclusive” model of schooling. However, his paper also raises an important issue of resistance against such inclusion from the external society where the school is embedded. The following excerpts from the paper highlights both the success of the school in social inclusion as per evidence from Chattopadhyay’s research and also highlights the tensions when it comes to the issues of sustainability in the middle of strong resistance from middleclass parents.

21 See: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/sadlere.pdf

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In a society with deep historical roots of class and caste divisions, and enduring cultural and social stigmas associated therewith, the notion of middle class and street children interacting and studying together within an English medium private school is nothing short of a challenge to the status quo. Resistance was formidable at the beginning from many middle class parents who did not want their children to socialize with children “from the streets.” However, three decades later, the Rainbow program – founded on the belief that “everyone receives to give” – has transformed [DHS] into a unique experiment of purposive social inclusion…… ……………………………… While the current study focussed on the middle class children of [DHS], a future research agenda should include the evolving opinions and attitudes of the middle class parents toward their children participating in such a culturally radical program. In other words, whether and to what extent cross- class socialization of children has cross-generational implications would also be an important research agenda for India’s traditionally class-conscious society. The sustainability of the Rainbow model within [DHS], and its possible replications in other schools should also constitute an important future research agenda. (Chattopadhyay 2015, p. 224- 235)

As explored in this section of the chapter, the exiting research on the school therefore shows from various perspectives the success of the school’s work in establishing an inclusive education system, which brought the school national and global recognition. In a world driven by conflict, inequality and all kinds of discrimination; in spite of all the challenges as it has been observed by some of the studies, Delphine Hart School appears to be doing exemplary work for inclusive education across social divide. However, several unanswered questions arise from these studies of the school about the particular conception of education, its strategies of promotion and how sustainable is this “extraordinary social experiment.”

These questions will be explored through this case study in order to form deeper understanding of what this school’s success story means for its different stake-holders and also to assess the sustainability of this model. It is important to understand this model of education and issues of sustainability well, since global development agencies have been formulating best practices studying the work of this school and even academic researchers are suggesting education departments in other countries to learn from the DHS model of schooling in the middle of global push for human capital formation through education and public-private partnership in education. It is further important to study the work of this school and its sustainability in the light of the new policy context in India following the Clause 12

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of Right to Education Act since 2010, which mandates private un-aided non-minority schools to educated 25% children coming from low SES backgrounds. Much can be learnt from the DHS experiment, though it is a minority religious community run not- for-profit private school, especially since several court cases against violation of RTE has been reported across the country22 as the middleclass resist the inclusion of poor children under the clause 12 of the act seeking to establish public-private partnership in the delivery of education.

22 See: http://right-to-education-india.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/right-to-education-in-delhi-being.html http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/sc-seeks-response-of-centre-states/ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kochi/RTE-Act-violation-rampant-in- schools/articleshow/36020635.cms

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Chapter 4

Research Design and Methods

Introduction

Amid the doom and gloom relating to the parlous state of the Indian system of education, and amid the disappointments concerning the nation’s failure to live up to its ideals of social justice and inclusive education, the case of Delphine Hart School stands out. It is a school that has been widely celebrated, both within India and abroad, for its attempts to establish a range of educational initiatives that have provided the most marginalized within its community a chance of socially inclusive lives that they might otherwise not have. Development agencies have highlighted these initiatives in the cotemporary reform language of ‘best practice’. In the previous chapter, I have noted a number of gaps and silences in this understanding of the work of the school. This thesis constitutes a case study of the Delphine Hart School. The traditions of case study research do not however admit a uniform understanding. In this chapter, I will provide my distinctively postcolonial interpretation of the notion of a case study, as a way of elaborating the design of the research and the various approaches I have adopted to gather and analyse data.

Following Vavrus and Bartlett (2006, 2009), I regard my approach to research as involving ‘qualitative vertical case study’ with methods selected to provide an “ethnographically informed study that compares across time and space” (p. 3) by paying detailed attention to “flows of people, actions, ideas, texts, and discourses” (p. 2) that shape the work of Delphine Hart School. Data collection and analysis has thus taken into account local understanding, philosophy, language, culture and ‘subaltern’ indigenous knowledge, as well as transnational processes to generate understanding about “the ways in which historical trends, social structures, and national and international forces shape local processes at this site.” (Vavrus and Bartlett, 2006, p. 96)

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In this way, my research design was adopted to not just value cultural context, local indigenous knowledge and complexity of local understandings, but also to provide the contextual limits of knowledge by paying attention to larger global processes. In this sense, my approach to case study moves beyond the traditional model of qualitative case study as outlined by Stake (1995), where the case is “an integrated system” that has “boundary and working parts” (p. 2). Nonetheless, my research draws on Stake’s definition of the case as “a specific, a complex, functioning thing”, as well as humanist processes of case study research that seek to be “non-interventive and empathetic”. Though, I go beyond Stake (1995) in that I critically examine issues of inclusive education within the postcolonial Indian context incorporating “some hidden mix of personal experience, scholarship, and assertion of other researchers” (p. 12).

Research Methods

This research was designed in order to develop both depth and breadth of understanding about the school’s ‘work’ and the ‘social relations’ (Smith, 2005) facilitating its work. To complement the vertical case study research design with “concomitant commitment to micro-level understanding and to macro-level analysis” (Vavrus and Bartlett 2006, p. 96), this research draws on Dorothy Smith’s (2005) institutional ethnography to generate experiential micro-level understanding as well as to “study-up” in order to investigate the “macrosocial ethnographically” (p. 200).

Moreover, because of the historic colonial origin of the school and its global network of connections in contemporary times, this research also draws on the notions of “global forces, global connections and global imaginaries” from Burawoy et al.’s (2000) ethnographic work to ask questions about how translocal/transnational “forces, connections and imaginaries”, affect various actors both inside the school and outside the school differently, either helping to further or hinder the work and social relations within and outside the school.

It is to be noted here that these forces, connections and imaginaries are “themselves “congeries” of local-global interactions” as Vavrus and Bartlett (2009, p. 10) argued, because of the school and its context’s unique colonial history and hybridized postcolonial subjectivity. The case stresses “the importance of thinking

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historically in ways that were at once local and global” (p. 113) as Rizvi (2008) argued referring to Edward Said’s work.

Vertical Case Study Design

Vavrus and Bartlett (2006, p. 96) argue:

The vertical case should be grounded in a principal site—e.g., a school, a community, an institution, or a government ministry—and should fully attend to the ways in which historical trends, social structures, and national and international forces shape local processes at this site. In other words, local understandings and social interactions should not be considered demographically or geographically bounded. Instead, in a vertical case study, understanding of the micro-level is viewed as part and parcel of larger structures, forces, and policies about which the researcher must also develop a full and thorough knowledge.

Colonial & Postcolonial History, Global Jesuitess Institutional History and Contemporary Global Political Economy

History of Indian School Education & Jesuitess History in India

Cultural History of Bengal

Calcutta/ Kolkata I am here

The Delphine Hart School

Figure: 4: Multi-level Vertical Case Study Design

As the figure 4 above shows, this case study was designed as a multi-level case study following the model of vertical spatial comparison across levels, such as the local, national and international as well as historical comparison across time developed by Vavrus and Bartlett (2006, 2009) to address the flow of action across levels as influenced by political, social, economic, and cultural forces. The case study was

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grounded at the site of the school and principal actors at the school were interviewed during field research. Interviews were also conducted with actors outside the school, such as retired school teachers, retired Principal, alums and members of global donor agencies, school volunteers from abroad, the director of the Institute for Human Rights Education in India and staff members of Indian Government’s State Project directorate office for Sarva Shikshya Abhiyan (Education for All). This approach to case study brings ethnographic approaches in the field of comparative education (Masemann 1982, Marcus 1989) into dialogue with the concept of “flows” by globalization theorists, such as Arjun Appadurai (1996).

Vavrus and Bartlett’s (2009) method of research design thus moves beyond the methodological nationalism which has been the characteristic of both nomothetic and idiographic studies within the field of comparative and international education. Referring to Bray and Thomas (1995) they emphasize the fact that, “Instead of comparison across nation- states, Bray and Thomas exhort scholars to compare different dimensions and, specifically, to compare geographic/locational levels to avoid “incomplete and unbalanced perspectives on educational studies” (Vavrus and Bartlett 2009, p. 10). They argue that based on these insights contemporary studies in comparative and international education should examine how the global and the local mutually shape one another.

Therefore, this research has taken into account historical trends, social structures, national and international forces, connections and imaginaries facilitating the work of Delphine Hart school and how the work of the school in turn helped to shape the national and global discourse on the best practices for inclusive education and development within the Indian context. Moreover, by the time the fieldwork for this research began, there was a major leadership transition in the school and follow- up structural changes within the organization of the school. Hence, I have also added a historic dimension to my study for comparing how the school’s work changed over time. As McLeod and Thomson (2009) discuss by citing the work of Davis (2008), this research took a historical approach in seeking to understand the ethnographic present “with regard to the past and situates both subjects and ethnographer in time and space”. It also gave “attention to the likely future that is being produced” (p. 86).

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The research conducted a series of 11 life-history interviews with former school Principal, individual interviews with snowball sample of school staff, alums and school community members along with extended site observation and ethnographic field- notes. Several interviews involved remembrance of the past by research participants in order to investigate the research questions and to generate understanding about the social, cultural and historical forces, connections and imaginaries which facilitated the school’s attempt to pursue a series of reforms to become progressively inclusive.

The research involved ethnographic fieldwork at the site where the case study school is located in India. Data was gathered over a period of 10 months from the school and its local Indian and global connections. From October 2012- March 2013, six months were spent in gathering data from the school and the city where the school is located. Data was also gathered by interviewing various stakeholders outside the school and international connections of the school in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Canada and the US during this period of time.

The various stake-holders include former school leadership (retired), current leadership, teachers, official staff, students, alums, parents, international beneficiaries and volunteer staff, liaisons of partner organizations like UNICEF, Human Rights Institute, Save the Children and Indian Government’s Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (SSA) office. Data was gathered from most of these international contacts of the school (except the ones in Australia) and from international donor organizations partnering with the school during the first six months period of fieldwork. In total sixty three individual interviews and focus group interviews were conducted with research participants as it is shown in the Table below. Archival historical data in the form of school publications was also gathered during this time.

Interviews Informants 16 Students (8 fee-paying and 8 scholarship students) 1 Focus group interview with 12 students participating in 1 billion Rising Campaign on 14th Feb 2013 4 Parents 8 Teachers 1 School social worker 1 Alumni and retired teacher 1 Alumni and parent of current student

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3 Alumni and community outreach staff 3 Current School Administrators 11 Former School Principal (biographical interviews conducted in 11 separate sessions) 1 UNICEF education specialist Kolkata, India 1 Director of Human Rights Institute, Madurai, India 1 regional director of Save the Children Kolkata, India 1 West Bengal State project director and deputy director of Indian Government’s “Sarva Sikshya Mission” (Education For All) 1 Canadian researcher of indigenous education studying the Barefoot Teacher’s Training Program of the School 1 US academic, who has researched on the school’s inclusive school culture 1 Focus group interview with 4 service learning students from American University 1 Group interview with Brisbane High school Principal, 2 teachers and 20 students for service learning 1 Melbourne math teacher and School fundraiser 1 Sydney volunteer and School fundraiser 1 New York school teacher and DHS school volunteer 1 Fulbright English teacher at DHS school 1 Irish School volunteer 1 German high school English teacher and Scholarship sponsor

Table 2: List of Interviews with local and global Research Participants

Field visits and ethnographic observations were conducted in some satellite schools run by the school in nearby brickfields for migrant children and several other community outreach projects. These satellite schools are now not run by the school as a central hub according to information gathered from existing literature, but they are now run by a Social Welfare Centre established by the global Jesuitess order in the name of the English nun, who established the English-Irish religious order for education of girls back in the early 17thCentury Europe. Thereafter, during April-May 2013 a second phase of data was gathered by conducting interviews with the school’s contacts in Australia and follow-up interviews with some international contacts were conducted via skype. A final site visit of the school was conducted during December 2013-January 2014 for follow-up conversations with some research participants. Only interviews with some Australian participants were conducted in Australia, facilitated by the fact that the researcher is located within an Australian University. Moreover, data was also gathered from

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continuing e.mail communications and newsletters sent by the school and the new school website. The research process traced the historical and contemporary global connections of the school, since a German Priest settled in Bendigo, Australia initiated the process of bringing nuns from Ireland to the Bengal Province of British India to set up the school for vulnerable poor Catholic girls and in recent times this school has also set-up satellite schools for migrant child labour working in neighbouring brickfield. The transnational connections of the school now also extend to North America and some of the research participants for this study also came from the US and Canada. The school historically originated responding to the needs of the “subalterns” in the region and when this research began the institution appeared to be responding to some of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups of children within the contemporary Indian context (Glind 2010), i.e. homeless street children, children of prostitutes, refugees, child labour working in middleclass Indian homes and children of migrant labourers working in brickfields.

Micro-Level Understanding

To look at anything, If you would know that thing, You must look at it long: To look at this green and say, “I have seen spring in these Woods,” will not do – you must Be the thing you see: You must be the dark snakes of Stems and ferny plumes of leaves, You must enter in To the small silences between The leaves, You must take your time And touch the very peace They issue from. ~ John Moffitt ~

The text of the poem above is suggestive of an empathic understanding of the “other” by putting oneself is another person’s shoes. As the above poem and particularly this phrase - “you must Be the thing you see” suggests, “embodied” knowledge and subjectivity has played a key role in this research investigation. In Dorothy Smith’s (2005) sociology for people generation of knowledge is not

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objective like traditional sociology. However, in Smith’s ontology of institutional ethnography generation of Knowledge is also not completely relative. Rather, knowledge is “embodied” and generation of knowledge about the work of social institutions takes into account “social relations” and “subjectivities” of the “knower” as well as the subjectivities of people involved as research participants, in the sense in which Foucault (1970) had conceptualised subjectivities. As Simth (1990) writes, “Concepts, ideology, and ideological practices are integral parts of socio-historical processes. Through them people grasp in abstraction the real relations of their own lives. Yet while they express and reflect actual social relations, ideological practices render invisible the actualities of people’s activities in which those relations arise and by which they are ordered.” (p. 36-37) Smith (2005) also problematised the very process of generation of knowledge by raising questions about the “knowers doing knowing”. As Besley and Peters (2007) have argued, “relations of power inhere in the human sciences for they cannot meet the objectivity criterion and ‘scientists’ are as much a product of the cultural practices that they investigate as their subjects. It is these power relations, which sustain and regulate the procedures by which statements in the discourses of the human sciences are regulated. In other words, ‘regimes of truth’ are the discursive productions of the human sciences.” (p. 91) Therefore, perhaps no knowledge, not even scientific knowledge can be totally objective. The evidence from a recent study shows that scientists carry their socially learnt biases into their research23. Therefore, this research began with the “embodied” experience of the “knower” doing “knowing” as Smith (2005) argued. However, being an alumna of one of the schools run by the Jesuitess order in the city of Kolkata and being a native of India living abroad for many years now, posed unique subjective and ethical challenges for the “knower” in this research. As a researcher, I had to be constantly critically reflexive about my epistemic bias as an alumna of another school within the same Jesuitess institutional order. As a “knower”, I also had to be constantly reflexive about my own native subjectivity and relational aspect with the city of Kolkata and regional history not to fall into the trap of “armchair nostalgia” (Appadurai 1996 as cited by

23 see: http://news.yale.edu/2012/09/24/scientists-not-immune-gender-bias-yale-study-shows

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Berliner 2014, p. 21) and yet engage with indigenous history, philosophy and local understandings for data interpretation. The following section of this chapter will therefore, discuss the relational aspect of the researcher as a “knower” in this study as “the researcher and the researched are located together within a hermeneutic circle” (McLeod and Thomson, 2009, p. 7). From the ‘actuality’ of the experience of the researcher this research studies up to explore the ‘actualities’ of people’s activities and social relations within Delphine Hart School and ‘actualities’ of people’s activities outside the school within the community. This critical “subaltern” people’s perspective has guided both analytic and hermeneutic engagement with data following Dorothy Smith’s sociology for people.

Subaltern Reason and Embodied Knowing

Geo-politics of knowledge goes hand in hand with geo-politics of knowing. Who and when, why and where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like cars or cell phones)? Asking these questions means to shift the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation. And by so doing, turning Descartes’s dictum inside out: rather than assuming that thinking comes before being, one assumes instead that it is a racially marked body in a geo-historical marked space that feels the urge or get the call to speak, to articulate, in whatever semiotic system, the urge that makes of living organisms ‘human’ beings. (Mignolo 2009, p. 2)

Human beings are both emotional and intellectual selves, constantly constructing the world around us. The categories we use in the complex process of self-construction are embedded in standpoints derived from our social memberships and identities. The world is thus socially constructed by language, and language is constituted by cultural meanings negotiated by persons with identities shaped by their historical experiences and social location. Knowledge is historically contingent and shaped by human interests and social values, rather than external to us, completely objective, and eternal, as extreme positivists view would have it.

(Alford 1998, p. 2-3) As the above quotes suggest and as it suggested in the earlier section of this chapter, the researcher’s “embodied” experience has played a key role in designing this research. My personal experience of negotiating with very different “life worlds” at home and school, later college and University during 80s and 90s Calcutta and then abroad has also shaped the “embodied knowing” or inquiry of this research. Simth (1987) reflects about her experience of negotiating with “everyday world as problematic” because of the “actuality” of her life experience as a single mother within

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“ruling relations” of patriarchal family as a norm of society and the school system during the first wave of the women’s movement in North America. Similarly, within a very different context, the researcher for this case study had to learn to negotiate with unusual intersectionality of religion, caste, class, language, race and “ruling relations” associated with each of these categories while studying in an English medium missionary school within the postcolonial Indian context and in universities abroad, especially since she was the first person to do so within the extended family. Though literally not “out of place” (Said 1999), the place within a socially elite English medium missionary school was not an easy one to negotiate at the beginning coming from a very Bengali home. With a family history of a widowed great- grandmother, on the paternal side, who had to leave her rural home with four teenage children to escape the notorious Bengal famine during World War II24 to live in the city of Calcutta as part of the ever increasing landless working class in the city, and a maternal grandfather, who was jailed for leaving Zamindari25 to join the nonviolent Gandhian freedom movement; made the place within an English medium school “out of place” indeed! If we would take into account the Heideggerian notion that, “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (1978, p. 217); this researcher thus learnt at an early age to live in a bi-cultural and tri-lingual space while negotiating two very different spaces of being- an upper-class English medium school and a very Bengali Brahmin family living with other North Indian Hindi speaking migrant neighbours in a working-class North Calcutta tenement. From the perspective of linguistic “class, codes and control” to borrow the concept from Basil Bernstein (1974), the researcher came from a privileged social class within the Indian context with Bengali medium educated Mukherjee Brahmin parents. However, within the postcolonial Indian context, as it has been argued earlier in this thesis, knowledge of English brought additional privilege which the native language speaking population missed in terms of jobs in the government and other high places in society. Much like the last name Smith within the North-American context, a Mukherjee last name in Bengali or any Hindu Brahmin last name in India is stereotypically associated with family tradition of scholarship, erudition and with hegemonic power

24 In recent times Indian scholars have debated over the exact cause of the famine, though Joseph Lelyveld quotes economist Amartya Sen’s (2010) reply to the editorial debate in The New York Review of Books to suggest: “British imperial policy of confusion and callousness, which had disastrous consequences” See: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/24/bengal-famine/

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according to Western epistemological understanding of traditional Indian Hindu society. However, Bernstein’s theory of “class, code and control” does not always apply within the postcolonial Indian context, since English – the language of the colonial “ruling” class and English educated postcolonial native “ruling class” created new “elaborated code”, hierarchies and layers of subalternity among the indigenous vernacular language speaking population. Within the colonial and postcolonial Indian context, irrespective of their indigenous social class location, the native population, who were literate and spoke in indigenous languages, embodied a “restricted code” within the colonial and postcolonial society. In most cases, non-English speaking Indians neither have the economic capital, nor the cultural and symbolic capital of (English) language education, which the “ruling” local English speaking elites inherited from the British, as they transferred power during independence. The correlation between “elaborated code” of the English language and upper social class affiliation vis-a-vis the “restricted code” of vernacular languages within the postcolonial Indian context is hinted at even in the reviews of two recent Bollywood movies- “Queen”26 and “English Vinglish”27. Bourdieu (1986) writes, that “The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent thus depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected.” However, as argued above, the hegemonic power-knowledge relationship between higher caste and socioeconomic class based on inherited economic, cultural or symbolic capital and network of connections do not always work within the postcolonial context, since indigenous hierarchies were often subverted and new layers of hierarchies were created during the process of colonialism.

25 Feudal land ownership 26 See: “Among the many bases for social stratification that Indians have devised, the callous derision of the minority “native” English speakers for the majority “non-native” English speakers (derogatorily referred to as “vernaculars”) is perhaps the most insidious.” - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/queens-english/99/#sthash.M7T6of2s.dpuf

27 See: “Because English-Vinglish, despite its name, is not just about English. English here is a placeholder. Being fluent in English, in the sadly skewed universe of contemporary India, automatically codes you as modern, fashionable, worthy of respect. Not being fluent in it relegates you to the backroom, a second-class citizen, unworthy of display.”- See more at: http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/movie-review-english-vinglish-is-really-about-how-we-treat-our- mothers-481768.html

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It cannot be denied that strong statistical correlation between caste, class, gender, religion and exclusion from access to basic needs like education, healthcare and housing still continues within the larger Indian context according to evidence from the recently released first India Exclusion Report 2013-2014 (Centre for Equity Studies, 2014). However, it should be taken into consideration that the dominant analytic framework about the correlation between caste and class, and hegemonic oppression within the postcolonial Indian context probably overlooks the “actualities” of some people’s lives and work of some institutions as Smith (1990) would argue. This is evident from sensitive ethnographic depiction of subaltern poor rural and urban working class characters with middleclass sensibilities by noted Bengali neorealist film-maker Satyajit Ray in his films like “Pather Panchali”28 , Aparajita29, and Mahanagar30. These films depict the struggles of poor rural families and lower middle-class/working class families (mostly belonging to Brahmin and other higher castes of the indigenous Hindu society) within the immediate postcolonial economy and society following the twin ravages of colonialism and the World Wars. This is also evident from rich volumes of Bengali literature with sensitive depiction of “subaltern” lives of people (including women) for raising consciousness about social injustice by some male authors like Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay31, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay32 and Rabindranath Tagore33 during late 19th and early 20thC colonial India. The creative writings of these indigenous intellectuals and authors belonging to Hindu Brahmin background reveal a strong “subaltern consciousness”, as it is also evident from this poem below by Tagore from his Nobel winning collection- Gitanjali:- Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom do you worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open your eyes and see your God is not before you! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the

28 See: http://theseventhart.info/tag/durga/ http://www.satyajitray.org/films/pather.htm 29 See: http://www.satyajitray.org/films/aparaji.htm 30 See: http://www.satyajitray.org/films/mahanag.htm 31 See: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6093739.Bibhutibhushan_Bandyopadhyay 32 See: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1181319.Sarat_Chandra_Chattopadhyay 33 See: Nussbaum (2006)

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path maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. -Tagore as translated from Bengali by Sen (2011) 34

Through their writing, these intellectuals offered a strong critique of various social evils within the indigenous society during colonial times. Though according to dominant colonial epistemology, the Hindu Brahmins are still considered stereotypically as hegemonic oppressors. In a recent interview given to a Pakistani academic, noted Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy calls for a need to “start afresh in vernacular languages, in vernacular theoretical formations and formulations,” while highlighting the limitation of his own “writings because [his] work, to a large extent, is related to the colonial experience. [His] writings, partly, are a reaction to it” and post-colonial studies is a “by-product of Western intellectual effort” (Bilal 2014, p. 726). Much of Mignolo’s intellectual work, Alcoff (2007) argues has been also invested to “a reconstructive project [which] demands not only a new sociology of knowledge but also a new normative epistemology that can correct and improve upon the colonial worldview.” (p. 83) Chen (2010) also argues for a similar project when he writes, “our research and discursive practices can become critical forces pushing the incomplete project of decolonization forward. At the very least we must strive to decolonize ourselves.” (p. 113) In this context, as argued in chapter 2 primarily drawing on Mignolo’s (2000) notion of “subaltern knowledge” and Connell’s (2007) “South Theory”, as a native “embodied knower” (inheriting both a hybrid subjectivity and postcolonial “subaltern reason”), I have brought Tagore’s humanist philosophy of education and practice into dialogue with mainstream global debates on inclusive education, which is conceptually understood has a Northern/western theoretical construct. By theoretically engaging with Tagore’s humanist philosophy of education i.e. “philosophy of context” (Peters 2012); I have suggested an alternative social epistemology and thinking about inclusivity within the Indian context. It was also helpful in both analytic (ideological) and hermeneutic (affective historical) engagement with data gathered from the field.

34 See: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books/magazine/89649/rabindranath-tagore

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Double Consciousness and Intercultural Dialogue

The “double consciousness” (in the sense W.E.B. Du Bois used the term in the Souls of Black Folks in 1903) of the researcher as a native-alien knower belonging to a “third space” (Bhabha, 1994) acculturated within western social and academic environment posed unique subjective challenges of engaging and disengaging with the research subjects. Du Bois (1903) used the term “double consciousness” as a psychological, political and philosophical category to analyse the black experience in the United States torn between two conflicting sense of identity as an American and a Negro during the era of Jim Crow laws of racial segregation. However, here I borrow the term “double consciousness” from Du Bois to highlight the dilemmas of a native- alien acculturated within western social and academic environment during fieldwork for this research. I suggest that being in a “third space” with regards to my own sense of identity was also useful in epistemic reflexivity to reconcile the “double consciousness” of being a Bengali-Indian and a researcher from a western university. It was useful in establishing intercultural dialogue for generating meaningful data from the field and also for data interpretation drawing on indigenous philosophical traditions and complexity of local understandings, as well as mainstream academic debates and discourse on inclusive education and neoliberal globalisation.

This aspect of dialogue was not just a solitary task of the transnational researcher with a “double consciousness” and her own research practice. But, this element of dialogue has permeated throughout the research process between the researcher and informants, between researcher with the texts produced through the primary dialogue with informants, with field notes and with archival publications of the school, and between researcher and research supervisors. Based on the premise that knowledge is socially organised, the knowledge generated in this thesis about the school’s work has been therefore organised by the polyphonic voices of various stake-holders of the school in the Bakhtinian sense as Smith (1990, p. 127) argued. Though the subaltern reason and double-consciousness of the native-alien researcher as an embodied knower has been useful in establishing intercultural dialogue in research and to seek out subaltern voices during fieldwork; the researcher has been consciously reflexive in not privileging any particular voice and not according any overpowering role to a dominant discourse in writing the thesis. The aim of this research project was to understand the school’s conception of inclusive education, its strategies for promotion and issues of

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sustaining inclusive reforms. In order to gain depth of understanding about all these three areas of the school’s work, data has been analysed taking into account local understanding, philosophy, language, culture and indigenous knowledge, as well as transnational processes which entwine the global and the local historically.

However, it was not an easy task to seek out subaltern voices identifying gaps and silences in the existing research on the school’s work. Within a complex postcolonial context like Calcutta, as a researcher I was conscious of the power- knowledge relationship at play whenever anybody arrives from a western university to do research. The postcolonial social imaginary especially among the elites working within social institutions like the case study school is very strong. A mixture of a very Indian sense of hospitality towards a guest along with a sense of postcolonial defensiveness among research participants made it initially challenging to derive any meaningful critical data from the field. Research participants were only too keen on speaking a scripted institutional language to show the good work that the school has been doing in a promotional way, though certain obvious structural reorganization of the institution was quite obviously visible to me when the fieldwork for this study began.

Volunteer Work as Research Practice

This section of the chapter will discuss how the dominant social and cultural norms as well as the identity of the knower as a native-alien researcher initially posed challenges in “making the everyday world [of the school] a problematic of inquiry” (Smith 1987, p. 364). However, it will also discuss how the native-alien double consciousness of the researcher was also useful in dealing with these challenges in a culturally sensitive way. As Smith (1990) argued “institutional ethnography relies on people’s capacity to tell their experience. It is the essential resource for a project that proposes to return inquiry to the everyday world that is shared both by the researcher and by the informants she or he consults, and it preserves in its data the diversity of perspectives from which they came” (p. 123). The biggest challenge in the field was that, some research participants (i.e. staff and school administration) were too keen on pleasing me as a researcher. To quote one of the teachers in the school during an early interview, “what can I say to make

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you happy?” As a native-alien knower it was not too difficult to understand that this was because of the dominant local social norms of gender (since this was a girls’ school and most of the staff members were women), and general social norms of keeping face in front of guests and outsiders. Moreover, the Jesuitess institutions have goodwill all over India as it is evident even in the way the name of the institution is used as a higher social class symbol in popular recent Hindi and Bengali movies like “Mardaani” (2014) and “Laptop” (2012). One of the school administrators also stated during an early meeting: “See in Calcutta when anybody talks about a [Jesuitess] school...it means something big or something great about it. ...See [DHS] has a name.” This consciousness of the institutions name and goodwill initially posed some methodological barriers in exploring ethnographic inquiry. As a researcher, I was put in a position of major ethical dilemma during fieldwork because of the above mentioned cultural barriers. Moreover, since the official data collection for this research began immediately following a major leadership transition after almost 30 years under former leadership during which the school received much acclaim for its inclusive educational work both nationally and internationally, a great deal of anxiety was observable not just among the school staff but also among new school leadership. Riessman (2005) argued that moral principles of research ethics constructed in one context are not always useful in the field. This was particularly true for the context of this research as the University research ethics protocol and all the paperwork for anonymity was meaningless for the local research participants at the school to establish confidence about the research process and to open up for good qualitative interviews.

Particularly the school staff and current administration were quite reluctant for any interviews at the beginning of fieldwork. One would assume that the school community was familiar with research ethics protocols about privacy and confidentiality in Universities abroad; since some research studies have been already conducted on the school’s work. However, it appeared that the legal protocols for confidentiality were not useful to generate trust among research participants. They appeared defensive and a sense of fear of being judged for inadequacy prevailed among them as one staff humbly stated during a lunch-time conversation, “even in the best teacher’s training colleges here, we do not get the practical training we need.” Another teacher at the school working with “differently-abled” children with

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special needs also stated defensively during a classroom observation, “See I love working with children. I am trying my best almost like a mother to help them learn some basics, but I am really not trained in special education”. Such discomfort and also a sense of defensiveness among the school teaching staff made it very difficult to probe questions. Though I was a native born in the city and an alumna of a sister- school, the fact that I was visiting from the University of Melbourne for research introduced a power differential in the relationship.

Hence, for this case study I spent a lot of time to engage in a local cultural mode of establishing informal dialogue আ�া35 (adda in Bengali) with school staff to first build a sense of camaraderie and friendship. Formal consent was sought much later during fieldwork for formal interview. Adda is a Bengali social practice. There are different kinds of “adda-s” among different groups and social classes of people. Traditionally adda would be also strictly gender divided. Chakrabarty (2007) offers an extended historical analysis of this cultural practice in the chapter “Adda: A

History of Sociality” in his book. The word adda (pronounced उ蕍डा ‘uddah’ in

Hindi) is translated by the Bengali linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as “a place” for “careless talk with boon companions” or “the chats of intimate friends”. Roughly speaking, it is the practice of friends getting together for long, informal, and unrigorous conversations.” (Chakrabarty 2007, p. 180-181) The practice of adda and volunteer work for the school throughout the first six months of data collection, except school holidays and participation in school functions, sports, picnic etc. was very useful in gaining trust and confidence of the research participants to open up for good interviews later during fieldwork, which helped to gain insights into some of the challenges the institution has been facing for a while in sustaining its inclusive work. Even for those staff members who are not culturally ethnic Bengalees, but were from other states and ethnic communities36 within India, volunteer work at the

35 “adda” is a Bengali word. It is a culturally embedded social practice among young people in the Bengal region of India and Bangladesh. 36 Each State within India has its own State language and a dominant linguistic-ethnic community. Bengali is the language of the State of West Bengal where the school is located. But, there were staff in the school from other states of India, like the Northern Indian State, Uttar Pradesh and the Southern- most Indian State, Kerala.

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37 school and regular presence in the school, उ蕍डा (uddah) / गपशप (gupshup )and sharing lunch in the staff-room helped to build familiarity and a sense of community with the staff members. Here it must be noted that the researcher did not take any particular essentialist view of culture with capital C, as most of these school staff (along with the native-alien researcher) in a way belonged to a hybrid third space in terms of their identity as postcolonial Bengalee-Indian, Malayalee-Indian or Bihari- Indian citizens. (Bhaba 1994, 1996) However, trust and confidence is generated more through social interaction within that context, than through any written legal paperwork. As part of the colonial legacy, law is understood more as a punitive measure used by the powerful to punish, rather than a tool for individual self- protection in case of breach of trust.

Hence, working as a volunteer at the social centre located within the school premises which coordinates the school community outreach projects was helpful in building confidence and trust among local research participants to open up and share their experience and the challenges the institution is facing now to continue their work according to the best practices for inclusive schooling and community engagement, which were once compiled observing the work of this school back in 1998. This was also useful in gaining first-hand work knowledge about the work of the institution. However, this was ethically a difficult position to negotiate personally as the very concept of volunteering is associated with selfless action, though the school authority and the staff knew that I was there at the school primarily as a researcher.

A Relational Approach

The mode of adda as described above was also used to research with and for vulnerable children in the school. Adapting Dorothy Smith’s (2005) relational approach in conducting institutional ethnography to the local cultural context, this research utilized story-telling adda methodologically to bond with the vulnerable children at the school to learn about their experience of “inclusion” in the school. These vulnerable children were homeless street children from poor urban and refugee

37 “gupshup” is also Hindi-Urdu word meaning casual conversation.

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background living at the night-shelter within the school premises and also children of prostitutes. Some of these children also study in the English medium school, while others in neighbouring Bengali medium government-run schools. These children are particularly vulnerable to discrimination and abuse not just inside schools, but within the larger Indian society. Children of prostitutes do not get admission even in government run schools without identity cards issued to them by the Principal of the Jesuitess school as guardian, which gives them a more respectable identity within the local Indian society. Children from homeless and refugee backgrounds are also extremely vulnerable within this context. According to the West Bengal Development Report, “The population of West Bengal practically doubled between 1971 and 2001, in spite of the fact that the fertility rate in West Bengal has declined fast. Urban population has been growing at a faster rate than the rural population....One major contributory factor in this development has been immigration from the neighbouring Indian states and also from Bangladesh and Nepal” (Planning Commission 2010, p. 25). Moreover, by quoting from Bagchi (2004), this Planning Commission report also states that much like in many other countries around the world, one of the most negative effects of economic liberalization within India since the 1990s, is that it has been accompanied with much lower growth in employment and zero or negative growth in terms of “decent work” according to ILO. Within India, West Bengal also ranks 9th among 15 major states in India in terms of Human Poverty index (HPI) measured by National Family Health survey. The general population is severely deprived of public provisioning in education and healthcare. Hence, refugees and migrants (including children) are particularly vulnerable and local residents of the region are apathetic towards them, since they are considered as additional burden on the already strained and starved economy. Hence, they are always at great risk of discrimination and exclusion. (Roy 2013, Gatrell 2013, Bandopadhyay 2013, Kumar 2015) The vulnerable homeless children living at the school are generally used to seeing international visitors and volunteers from abroad dropping-in at their roof-top home at the school to spend time with them and to teach. Unlike other visitors from abroad, I did not look unfamiliar to these children. So, there was no apparent barrier in establishing trust with them compared to the school administrators or teachers.

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But, it was quite clear from the first meeting that story-telling adda would be the best method to establish an empathic relationship with these children to narrate their stories to me. This process rather happened in an unconscious organic way. This was facilitated by the fact that the first thing the children asked me during the first visit to see them was- “Didi ekta galpo bolo” (Elder sister, please tell us a story). I was also driven by an empathic urge to bond with these children and to learn about their experiences at the school. The goal was to generate a dialogue between me and the vulnerable homeless children to give voice to their experiences through research and move beyond methodological individualism for which qualitative inquiry has been often critiqued. As Gergen and Gergen (2000) writes, “As our methodologies become increasingly sensitive to the relationship of researchers to their subjects as dialogical and co- constructive, the relationship of researchers to their audiences as interdependent, and the negotiation of meaning within any relationship as potentially ramifying outward into the society, individual agency ceases to be our major concern. We effectively create the reality of relational process.” (p. 1042) The result of this dyadic story-telling adda approach was spectacular in terms of giving voice to these children’s hopes, desires, dreams and fears. It also helped me as a researcher to understand the magnitude of the problems the institution as a whole is handling to provide education, pastoral care and social inclusion for these children, not just inside the school but out in the society when they finish school. It also helped to get in-depth understanding of the unmet needs of these children for probable future intervention to address them. Above all it gave an insight into the beautiful grateful minds of these children as they presented me with an emotive moving hand-made card while I was leaving the institution after fieldwork along with warm hugs and eyes full of tears saying “Didi we will miss you”. The quote below with original spelling errors is from the handmade card the girls gave me. Mountain can break, river can dry if you forget us- but how can we? We will all miss you. You came like spring and went like autumn. Living us all alone like water flows in stream… Save Journey. Take care of your self and be a light in a sky. Please remember us. And come again. Thank you for whatever you have done for us. Once again, ethically this was a difficult position as a researcher to negotiate as I realised that I had done precious little for these girls many of whom probably

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have very high-risk future ahead of them once they are out of the gates of the school. Since data from this study revealed that after 8-10 years of schooling and living in the protected environment of a Jesuitess school and after internalising the egalitarian values gained from the school’s particular holistic approach to education, often they find it hard to assimilate into the hierarchical society and life outside the gates of the school. This will be discussed and analysed at length in chapter 7 of this thesis.

Global-Local Forces, Connections and Imaginaries

Burawoy et al. (2000) utilize the terms “global forces”, “global connections” and “global imaginaries” to organize their research projects to study the way in which macro-economic forces, connections and imaginaries shapes and are shaped by local forces, connections and imaginaries. This research has also drawn on these three systemic aspects of global forces, global connections and global imaginaries from Burawoy et al. (2000). However, this research does not necessarily consider them in a position of domination for analytic purpose. Unlike Burawoy et al.’s (2000) work, “the focus of the ethnography is” NOT “on the way global domination is resisted, avoided, and negotiated” (p. 29). Rather, as an institutional ethnography this research is more committed to inquiry with the focus of the ethnography on the school’s work, the actuality of people’s work life i.e. “doings” and “social relations” (Smith 2005) within and outside the institution. This is because the school’s work has been historically mediated by “congeries of global-local forces, connections and imaginaries” as Vavrus and Bartlett (2009) as it has been already discussed in chapter of 3 of this thesis. The three systemic dimensions of “forces, connections and imaginaries” are therefore utilised in this research for affective historical interpretation of data gathered from the school to compare the changes of its work and social relations across time and space. Wrigley, Thomson and Lingard (2012) write that, schools as social institutions are generally in a state of change “driven by social, cultural and economic shifts and policy agendas.” (p. 1) However, within the hybridized postcolonial context where the school is located in Calcutta, social, cultural and economic shifts are rather complex- where colonial, postcolonial and neoliberal forces, connections and imaginaries overlap. A good example to explain this is the fact that the city of Calcutta changed its name to officially become postcolonial Kolkata (according to actual Bengali

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pronunciation of the name) on 1st January 2001 to reinforce postcolonial social imaginary 54 years after independence from colonial rule, while the liberalisation of the Indian political economy preceded this change of name in the 1990s following neoliberal reforms in UK and the US in the 1980s. Moreover, interviews with a section of school staff revealed a sense of covert criticism about foreign volunteers coming to the school for “poverty tourism or pilgrimage” coupled with visit to neighbouring Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, revealing a distinct postcolonial sensibility. At the same time, interviews with some old school alums and teachers from elite backgrounds also revealed a great deal of nostalgia for old colonial times. Therefore, it appeared that the colonial, postcolonial and neoliberal forces, connections and imaginaries are often working in a complex way like interconnected spinning wheels within the context of the school to either facilitate or hinder its work. Moreover, as the research engaged in dialogue with the informants (both local and global) and later with texts produced from primary dialogue and other textual documents, this research also investigated the “macrosocial ethnographically”. Especially since the texts about best practices formulated by national and international organizations after studying the work of the school have now become authoritative and are distributed globally through publications by international development organizations and academics committed to issues of human rights and social justice. As noted earlier, Bajaj (2011), has theorised “Human Rights Education for Transformative Action” with a “radical politics of inclusion and social justice” (p. 491) as the underlying ideology by studying the work of Delphine Hart School along with the work of some other small schools in India. The school’s work as a successful case study for social inclusion is still being cited in most recent publications on inclusive schooling practices by global agencies, such as the UNICEF38 as well as youth-led Indian civil society activist organization for social inclusion in schools, such as Indus Action39. Therefore, based on analysis of ethnographic data the following three analytical chapters of this thesis will provide an account of how the school

38 See: http://www.unicef.org/india/Child_Field_Story_22_Aug.pdf http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/Child_Friendly_Schools_Manual_EN_040809.pdf 39 See: http://www.indusaction.org/#!publications/c10vg

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conceptualised its model of inclusive education within particular historic, social, cultural, economic and political context. It will also provide an account of how the school promoted its conception of inclusive education and what historic, social, cultural and political forces; connections and imaginaries facilitated its work. Finally, the thesis will provide an account of the kind of sustainability issues the school is experiencing now to sustain its commitment for social inclusion of marginalized children and inclusive education. The concluding chapter of the thesis draws on these three main chapters to suggest the need for further research in the area of school leadership development, teacher education and pedagogic reform to implement inclusive education as necessary public good within the Indian context for sustainable development.

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Chapter 5

Conceptualizing Inclusive Education

Introduction

This chapter will analyse the hybrid formation of the school’s distinct conceptualization of inclusive education. It will analyse the various local and global intellectual traditions shaping the school’s understanding of inclusive education. Based on data gathered from biographical interviews with the school’s long-serving former Principal (since late 1970s-2011), old school teachers, old staff, alumnae and various other sources of data including school publications, newsletters, newspaper articles, and historical account of the work of Jesuitess schools in India; this chapter will situate the conceptualization of inclusive reforms within their historical political and socioeconomic context in the 1970s and 1980s Calcutta.

It analyses how the school leadership interpreted changing political and socioeconomic needs of the local community to establish a more inclusive education system. Utilizing Tagore’s humanist philosophy of education theoretically, the chapter analyses the school’s distinct holistic definition of education, which involved both social and emotional learning along with academic learning for all students following both western and eastern spiritual traditions. It also analyses the key role of teachers in implementing these inclusive reforms and the kind of teachers training that was designed by the school leadership to train teachers in the school. Finally, it discusses the policies and practices that were put in place at the school to make the school an inclusive learning space for all children.

Interpreting Local Needs

Baker (2012) writes: In the present era of increasing global interconnectedness and intercivilizational contacts and conflicts, western education can no longer be delimited within a naturalized or taken-for-granted Eurocentric cosmology

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(Des Jarlais, 2008). In the twenty-first century, the purposes of formal education should include the capacities for critical self-reflection on one’s own civilizational consciousness and inter- and intra-civilizational dialogue. ‘Dialogue can only take place once “modernity” is decolonized and dispossessed of its mythical march toward the future. Dialogue can only take place when the monologue of one civilization (Western) is no longer enforced’ (Mignolo, 2005, p. xix). The above quote from Baker is particularly relevant in the light of the discussion on how strategically the Delphine Hart School leadership has been conducting this inter- and intra-civilizational dialogue since the late 1970s and the Jesuitess order in general since the mid-19thCentury in India. As T.S. Eliot (1921) once wrote, “No poet, no artist of any art, has [her] complete meaning alone”40. The set of reforms which developed to address indigenous needs in and around Calcutta follows a long tradition of missionaries acting as conduits between the East and the West to educate and empower the marginalized subalterns within respective societies in South Asia. The distinct conceptualization of inclusive education at Delphine Hart School for which its work was celebrated both nationally and globally was very much driven by local needs following the turbulent geopolitical history of the region since independence in 1947 and partition of South Asia, culminating in politically turbulent events of 1970s Calcutta. It also followed the inclusive constitutional ideal of postcolonial India and inclusive ideals of major Indian educational thinkers, who considered education for all as a necessity for development. These sentiments were also reflected in the 1971 constitutions of the Jesuitess schools in India: Our goals is to form women alive to the needs of our world, with the knowledge which gives them power to act, and motivated by the love which gives them purpose and wisdom in their action. The education of girls from every social background has to be undertaken so that there can be produced not only women of refined talents but those great souled persons who are so desperately needed by our times. (p. 29) The 1970s Calcutta was particularly volatile politically because of the grassroots Naxalite movement41 for social justice among dispossessed rural tribal community in Naxalbari, West Bengal, which also received support from some young intellectual college-going students in the city of Calcutta. However, like most revolutionary

40 See: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” : http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html 41 Arundhati Roy in ‘The God of Small Things’ (1997) and most recently, Jhumpa Lahiri in ‘The Lowland’ (2013) examined the personal and political aspect of the movement through characters in their novels.

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social movements against socioeconomic injustice around the world, the movement was disorganized, led by youth activism and idealism to see a more equal and just world. It was also a violent movement against the socioeconomic elites of postcolonial Indian society and the Indian State in turn took violent measures to repress the movement. Though the participation of young urban college-going intellectuals of Calcutta receded following State repression, the movement still persists in different parts of the country among disposed groups of tribal rural people (Dasgupta 1974, Banerjee 2010, Mohanty 2006, Kujjur 2008). However, this movement was referred to in an unsympathetic way by a very old alumna of Delphine Hart School, Mrs. Bose during our interview, as revealed in the quote below:

You know during those days there were shut down and strike and all those….some local people said that if you don’t close down the school, we will throw bombs and things like that. So, we teachers came down and said that on no account we are going to close the school like that…. Then, these people you know these local anti-socials some of them climbed the gate and they came in. The teachers rushed away. Sister alone went over there, caught hold the collar from the back… you know like the scruff of his neck. We couldn’t believe she lifted one of them up and she walked all the way and threw him out of the gate. All scampered away, police was called and no one came after that. This was during the Naxal movement. Mrs. Bose apparently belonged to a local Indian elite family as she informed with great pride in her voice during the interview that she used to come to the school in horse-carriages, while her father would go shooting with various British Governors. She took particular pride is her father’s progressiveness about her education in a convent school and later on also encouraging her to work in the school as a teacher.

The lack of empathy and understanding about socioeconomic injustices within their own society as revealed from Mrs. Bose’s quote above was not just a result of indigenous hierarchies and social distance among native population, in many ways they were also part of the colonial legacy. As it has been already noted in chapter 3, even the Jesuitess nuns struggled for a long time because of sectarianism among various European communities in India, colonial governance and unjust policies. The struggles of the Nuns of the Jesuitess order from 1841-1962 to follow their mission of educating girls from all social backgrounds during colonial India, has been chronicled by an Australian nun, Colmcille (1968), who worked as a teacher in both English medium Jesuitess schools and Bengali medium high schools in Calcutta

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for twenty one years since 1926. The Irish Jesuitess Nuns were particularly looked at with great suspicion by the Europeans (i.e. Anglican English) at that time in the region. This was because of colonial relations between England and Ireland, as well as sectarianism between the Catholics and Protestants.

This suspicion was also mixed with racial prejudice as the Nuns were serving the poor Eurasian Catholics, who were the offspring of prior occupation in the region by Portuguese and the French, and they were pushed towards the “Indian and Portuguese parts of the city, into "Black Calcutta" as it was called” (Colmcille 1968, p. 4) when the British established power over the region. Even as the Nuns eventually gained trust among their contemporary ruling European power over the region, they did not have particularly cordial relations with the British colonial government in India because of the inequitable education policy of the colonial government as noted earlier in p. 70 of this thesis. They were not allowed to admit more than twenty-five percent of Indian girls and government grants for these schools would be generous “and the salaries of these schools was a very expensive business” (Colmcille 1968, p. 280), only if they served the upper class of Indian society. Hence, driven by their institutional ideals for social justice some Jesuitess Nuns found ways to circumvent this policy by running segregated “out-schools” and orphanages for poor Indian girls during colonial times (Colmcille 1968, p. 146-147).

Similar unjust and racial colonial policies prevented Indian women to enter the novitiate of the Jesuitess order to become teachers. Once again the Nuns found a way to circumvent this policy by setting up a separate Indian order and these Indian nuns would mostly staff the “out-schools” and funnelled the money gathered from affluent Eurasian students in other schools to support these outreach activities for poor Indian girls. (Colmcille 1968, Allender 2014) This socially segregated practice of schooling based on socioeconomic class and race as a result of colonial policy and racism became institutionalised social norm overtime, and this norm continued even post- independence. Though more Indian girls42 got access to these Jesuitess schools during the first couple of decades following independence from colonial rule, these Indian girls did not belong to the class of poor Indian girls for whom the then Mother

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Superior of the Jesuitess order wrote during the years of second World War: “I could not bear to close the doors of our schools to Indian children in their own country” (Colmcille 1968, p. 281). Because of this legacy of racial and class apartheid perpetuated through colonial government policies; the main Jesuitess schools, where mostly European, Eurasian and elite Indian girls studied became a symbol of higher social class among the larger native population, though the Nuns initially came to teach the poor Catholic girls in the region. (Colmcille 1968, Nolan 2008)

However, the Freedom movement within India and independence from colonialism brought a new sense of idealism about social inclusion and the emancipatory role of education for the masses of poor oppressed people within India. The freedom movement saw several elites of the Indian society educated to serve colonial interests also rise against colonial power moved by empathy for the plight of the masses of poor Indians. Most notable example of these British educated elites was Gandhi, belonging to an upper-caste Hindu Vaishya background, as well B.R. Ambedkar, a scholar coming from a low-caste dalit background, who became the chief architect of the modern Indian constitution. Hence, despite colonial legacy of only socioeconomically elite Indian access to their schools, the Jesuitess order also sought to realize their mission for establishing socially inclusive education post- independence.

Driven by the spirit of freedom and inclusion the “out-schools” for poor Indian girls were closed and twenty percent poor children were admitted in the regular Jesuitess schools. These children would receive free education including school uniform, books, stationary and other support needed for them to succeed academically and they were also given equal treatment inside the school by teachers and peers. This policy was driven by the values embedded in the independent Indian constitution and the inclusive ideals of freedom fighters and modern Indian educational thinkers. However, these poor girls were mostly poor Christians by default, since Christians were a small minority of Indian population and the independence from colonial rule also saw steady exodus of Europeans and even wealthier Anglo-Indians from the city of Calcutta “discerning in the future of their

42 mostly upper class Hindu and Muslim girls from well-off families, since Christians are just 2.3% of

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birthplace less hope of profitable employment” post-independence. (Colmcille 1968, p. 308)

It was not just anxiety over economic prospect, but also anxiety over identity which drove many of the Anglo-Indians out of Calcutta. Suraiya (2011) writes in her novel “Calcutta Exile” that the Anglo-Indians would always dream “to ‘go home’ to an England they had never seen” (p. 2). In this context, Indian journalist M. J. Akbar’s comment on Suraiya’s sensitive portrayal of the Anglo-Indian community printed on the back-cover of the novel is noteworthy: “The transition of empire is often a journey of refugees searching for home. Homes emerge in the mind; geography comes later, or may not come at all.” The plight of this minority hybrid cultural community which grew out of the colonial encounter with India was also brilliantly depicted in ethnographic film portrayal of an Anglo-Indian teacher, Violet Stoneham in Aparna Sen’s film- “36 Chowinghee Lane” and the character of door-to- door Anglo-Indian sales girl, Edith in Satyajit Ray’s film- “Mahanagar”. Record of Anglo-Indian exodus out of India post-independence can be also found in the Australian National Archives in Canberra.

On 15 August 1947, the date of Indian Independence, HMAS Manoora reached Western Australia with more than 700 Anglo-Indians and 20 Polish refugees on board. In the first year that Australia began to admit post-war refugees from Europe, the troopship Manoora had been refitted to evacuate Australians and Europeans from India. Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration, had been advised six months earlier by the Australian High Commissioner in New Delhi that ‘although no actual immediate crisis has yet developed in India, a state of emergency actually exists right now,’ and that ‘should anything adverse happen it will happen quickly and there will be no opportunity then to evacuate the women and children’ (NAA: A1068/7, IC47/46/1 as cited by Blunt 2000). However, the Jesuitess order of Nuns and their schools were well accepted by the native population because of their interpretation of the needs of the local community and postcolonial social imaginary of establishing a sense of pride in an Indian national cultural identity: “Calcutta citizens noted with delight how well the convent schools interpreted the national culture, when a cast of seven hundred children, drawn from seven [Jesuitess] schools, combined to present a comprehensive “Pageant of India”” (Colmcille 1968, p. 304). The Nuns also exhibited their

Indian population

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knowledge of the best of Indian historical traditions as Colmcille (1968, p. 321) writes: “A thousand years before Christ, Rishis, in their forest schools, gathered their students together to instruct them in the sacred Vedas. Eight hundred years passed, and saffron-robed scholars trooped from the lecture halls of Nalanda University to the court of the great Ashoka. The King himself, having studied in the School of Experience, was to teach them a greater lesson, the Gospel of Compassion. Centuries passed....men of many creeds debated at the Moghul Court.... The names of Tagore, Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu flashed on the screen of History, spoke of the Victories of Peace....so sang the choir.... “Where the mind is without fear, where knowledge is free....Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!”

According to Colmcille’s (1968) account, the Nuns of the Jesuitess order were also inspired by the ideals of Indian freedom movement and particularly by Tagore, who sought true freedom of the country’s people by uplifting the poor and marginalized through education following the tradition of his ancestors, who were involved in the Bengal Renaissance movement. Colmcille, who was also a deep admirer of Tagore and produced many of his Bengali dance-dramas during Jesuitess school social and cultural events, writes: “No concert was complete without Classical Indian Dance items, and each year saw the performance of some Dance Drama, that genuine Indian Ballet which the genius of Tagore developed round epic or historic themes” (Colmcille 1968, p. 304).

Thereafter, the Jesuitess nuns started taking active role in public educational forums as “the voice of [Jesuitess] was being heard” (p. 304) unlike during the British colonial era. Within couple of decades as referred to earlier the Jesuitess order re-affirmed through their 1971 Constitution that they were committed to “education of girls from every social background”. The Foreword in a booklet “Nurturing to Freedom”, published after an Educational Meeting at Dhyan Ashram (Meditation Retreat) in 1991, further states that, “In particular, during the years ’88-’90, our Education Commission has animated the Province to review its educational efforts in the light of current needs in India, and in 1986 Chapter Mandate, which urges us on to a ‘preferential love of the poor’”. It is to be noted here that, this preference was not just responding to the needs of the large masses of poor Indian girls post- independence, but it was also following closely the vision of the foundress of the

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Jeusitess order as stated in her epitaph: “To love the poor, persevere in the same, live, die, and rise with them.”

It has been noted earlier in this thesis that, the establishment of the Jesuitess order for women was led by an internal freedom movement within the Catholic religious society seeking social inclusion of religious and lay women in public life through education, so that they can come out of the cloisters inside the Church and inside people’s home. However, it must be also noted that the Foundress was also committed to love and upliftment of the poor through education and she “saw her order as open, not cloistered, and wished it not to be controlled by men, specifically the bishops” (Allender 2014, p. 228). This led the Vatican to imprison her and suppress her “Jesuitess” order in 1639. Hence the Jesuitess order also carried with them a long tradition of advocacy for freedom and education of women as subalterns from all social background.

Within India the Jesuitess order of Nuns have been also engaging with the philosophical Sadhana-Dharma (meditative religious) order of the Hindu religion since the nineteenth century (Allender 2014, p. 238). This philosophical meditative spiritual Hindu tradition devoid of discriminatory social practices of caste, class and gender was also espoused by a number of modern Indian educational thinkers like Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, J Krishnamurti and Tagore. Post-independence from colonial rule, the spirit of social inclusion was also reflected in the inclusion of more Indian women in the novitiate and the teaching community within the Jesuitess order. This is also evident from an interview with a Delphine Hart school teacher, Ms Chatterjee, who comes from a working class family but higher caste Brahmin family background. She played a crucial role during the years of inclusive school reforms particularly at Delphine Hart School along with former school Principal, Sister Valentine. She said during an interview that: “For me you see right from childhood the image of the Jesuitess schools I had was elitist for richer people and all that you know…so the changing ideology of the school under former leadership, the dreams and vision of a new world order was very attractive to me to join this school as a teacher.” This teacher like some other staff in the school also brought a different tradition of indigenous social and inclusive educational reform to the school in the 1980s following the turbulent political era of the 1970s.

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Ms. Chatterjee’s father worked in a Jute Mill along the river Ganges near the city. She grew up as a child in an environment of social and racial segregation within the compound of a Jute Mill run by English people, as she states: “There was separate housing for everybody based on position and social class- Indians on one side and the whites on the other side. Housing facilities would be based on the position and social class of the people. There were only two Indians who had better housing facility. They were the boss over the workers.” Hence, she studied in a Bengali medium ‘Brahmo School’, which grew out of the Bengal Renaissance movement in the 18th and 19th Century colonial Bengal (Poddāra 1970, Dasgupta 2007, Vasunia 2013), where members of the Tagore family and many other noted Bengali intellectuals were involved. They fought for the emancipation of women and other oppressed indigenous groups through education by setting up schools. Hence, Ms. Chatterjee was actively involved in many of the school’s work to design teacher training modules and to implement inclusive educational reforms. Her knowledge of the local Bengali language and progressive local tradition of social and educational reform was a key resource for the Delphine Hart School’s long-serving Irish-born leadership, Sister Valentine. However, it must be noted here that the Jesuitess Nuns had long engaged with the local community both the elites and the subalterns and a “multi-purpose and multi-lingual” (Colmcille 1968, p. 305) model organically evolved within the larger Jesuitess order in India since the colonial times.

Therefore, the conceptualization of Delphine Hart School’s distinct model of inclusive education was a hybrid formation driven by local community needs following the turbulent 1970s Calcutta. It evolved out of the Jesuitess tradition in India drawing on both local indigenous educational reform traditions and the knowledge brought from their respective countries to establish more inclusive schooling systems for the local population within the colonial Indian context. Several incidents post-independence especially during the 1970s Calcutta led the Jesuitess order at large to conceptualize a more inclusive model of education that they could not implement during colonial times due to government policy restrictions. It must be noted here that the political turbulence in the 1970s was not just a fall-out of the Naxal movement and youth activism as discussed above; it also involved the Bangladesh liberation war from East Pakistan and huge influx of refugees on the streets of Calcutta. According to one estimate as cited by Kumar (2009); 250,000

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Hindus and as many Muslims migrated to India every year from Bangladesh (earlier East Pakistan) since 1951. This compounded the problem of poor homeless children on the streets of Calcutta, which had already witnessed large masses of poor people from rural areas dying on the streets because of the colonially engineered Bengal famine during the World War II and mass migration of people during the violent partition following independence from colonial rule. (Mukherjee 2011, Sen 1999, Uppal 1984)

Role of School Leadership

Despite the long Jesuitess tradition progressively seeking to expand their educational mission to educate the poor and the marginalized since colonial times, both Allender’s (2014) historical research and Bajaj’s (2011) ethnographic research shows that among all Jesuitess schools, Delphine Hart School’s work for social justice through inclusive education since the 1980s stands out. The school particularly sought to create an inclusive education system by not just giving access to 50% poor disadvantaged children into their regular English medium school, but also sought to create an inclusive educational environment within the school. The work of the school followed more closely the 1971 Constitution of the Jesuitess schools and also the priorities of the postcolonial Indian constitution. The role of particular school leadership was key in this regard as she interpreted the changing needs of the local community and garnered range of resources (financial, intellectual, symbolic and also humans) from various places- both from local community and around the world through the global Jesuitess institutional network to meet the needs of the most underserved students within the local community and to also make comparatively privileged students key stake-holders for the education and welfare of the poor underserved children. (Chattopadhyay 2015)

During my own fieldwork, I conducted a series of biographical interviews to understand how the long serving former school Principal, Sister Valentine interpreted the needs of the community and what led her to imagine an inclusive education system for “radical social inclusion and transformation” as Bajaj (2011) has theorised. These interviews and the way she communicated with the local community personally and through school newsletter reveals a kind of “pragmatic persuasive

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approach” (Bajaj 2011) in engaging with the local community. There was also an urge to channelize youth agency and activism towards more creative and constructive work, especially after the violent youth led activism during the 1970s. As Sister Valentine reported during an interview:

You see one day some of these boys came to me and said that we have to shut down the school as one of their communist leaders died. Some of the teachers were quite agitated about this. So, I spoke to them and asked the reason why they want us to shut down the school. They said that they are shutting down the entire city to pay respect to their leader. I said to them that we will also pay respect to their leader by observing one minute silence during Morning Prayer and assembly in the name of their leader and asked them to also join us for prayer. They stayed back for the assembly. But then I said that the school cannot be closed as their leader would actually want to see children studying in schools. They understood and went away. If we compare this quote from Sister Valentine with the earlier quote in this chapter from Mrs. Bose (see: p. 113) referring to a similar incident of youth activism reported earlier in this chapter, the contradictory tone is quite striking here. While a missionary urge to transform violent youth activism towards constructive youth social action is noted in the above quote from Sister Valentine, the quote from Mrs Bose reveal an urge to shut out such activism as anti-social. Though Sister Valentine was Irish-born, it can be argued here that her response appeared more sensitive to the needs of the local context, while Mrs. Bose’s attitude towards such youth activism reveals the kind of native elite colonial psyche that Fanon (1967) critiqued.

This urge to channelize youth energy and activism for constructive youth social action also followed progressive inclusive work of the Jesuitess order during the immediate years post-independence back in the 1950s. Sister Valentine informed during an interview that the Mother Superior of the Jeuistess order in Lucknow (a Northern Indian city in the State of Uttar Pradesh) decided to set-up a sodality for regular Jesuitess school girls to go out into the slums outside the gates of the school once a week to teach poor slum children. This model of outreach involving young girls of the regular school into the slums and nearby villages was also transferred to another Jesuitess school in Calcutta in the 1970s after Sister Valentine, who was assigned to coordinate this work in Lucknow was transferred to Calcutta. Finally, when Sister Valentine was transferred from that school to Delphine Hart School, she began implementing the same slum outreach program again in this school and also extended it to include neighbouring villages. By this time she was also developing

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her own philosophy of education drawing on the spiritual traditions of the Jesuitess order and the intercultural dialogue it had already established since the nineteenth century with various indigenous native spiritual traditions.

This philosophy was also built on her close observation of the deep social divisions within the postcolonial Indian society and her interpretation of the need for a more inclusive education for inclusive society and development. During our very first meeting, the first sentence she uttered is that, “India is not developing yet”. Her understanding of the key role of inclusive education for inclusive development within the Indian context was also acknowledged by a local staff of UNICEF during our interview as she stated the fact that Sister Valentine approached education more as a “development professional” rather than a regular convent school teacher. It is to be noted once again that the school partnered with UNICEF to publish several books on inclusive educational practices and teachers training modules based on the daily practice at the school, particularly during Sister Valentine’s leadership. The Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (Education for All) State Project Directorate officers, also reported during our interview, “You see it is hard to replace her selfless missionary zeal to work for the upliftment of the poor. We are sitting here in public office. But, though she was the Principal of a private missionary school, she has been really doing public service for all these years.”

In this regard, once again it is important to reflect on the socioeconomic situation of contemporary India. Despite independence from colonial rule and recent mainstream media cheer about rising shinning India as an emerging economic powerhouse being part of the BRICS nation, Drèze and Sen (2013, p. vii argue in their latest publication titled “An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions”: This abundance of questioning and arguing, facilitated by a vibrant media and robust democratic institutions, can be great strength for the country. It is compromised, however, by a powerful bias in public discussions towards focusing mainly on the lives and concerns of the relatively privileged, including not only the very privileged but also others who are not right at the top but are certainly much more privileged – in affluence, education, healthcare, cultural opportunities and social standing- than the bulk of the Indian people. The issues that affect the lives, and even survival, of those who have been comprehensively left behind tend to receive remarkably little attention. India is still home to the largest number of poorest people in the world. (Sumner, 2012) The recent increase in GDP has further widened socioeconomic inequality as

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this growth has benefitted only a small minority of Indian population. Several academic scholars have argued with evidence how even access to basic human needs of good schooling and healthcare have not been met for the masses of the poor people within India and how they are correlated to historic trends of exclusion based on gender, class, caste, tribe and religion. (Mukherjee-Reed 2008, Nambissan 2010, Govinda 2011, Dreze and Sen 2013, Centre for Equity Studies 2014) Working within this postcolonial Indian context of extreme inequality, Sister Valentine, as an educator and practitioner also realized this serious problem of social class-divide (which Spivak 2002 referred to as “class-apartheid”) and particularly the silence of the relatively privileged within the Indian context to speak for and work for the benefit of the large masses of underprivileged public. This is evident from the fact that postcolonial India is besought with the problem of large-scale corruption in the public sector offices and in government. Hence, as a self-described “opportunist” school leader committed to her vocation as an educator and religious mission to empower the poor through education, Sister Valentine eagerly grabbed every opportunity that came to make the school progressively a more inclusive space for all children from diverse backgrounds.

Image 1: Delphine Hart School’s Inclusive Approach

Slowly she designed a more holistic education program to make middleclass girls (ripples) active stake-holders for the welfare of the poor and the underprivileged

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(rainbows) inside the school and later outside in the society as the school’s Ripples and Rainbow booklet states: “Started in 1979 at [Delphine Hart School], a school already in existence since 1857, this experiment was born of a certain uneasiness felt at being part of a formal school system imparting ‘quality education’ to a privileged few, while millions of their less fortunate peer group get virtually nothing at all”. The aim of this educational and social experiment was that the “ripples” will create ripple-effect of change out in the society when they finish their education in school to make the world a more equal, just and better place, so that the joys that the sudden appearance of rainbows bring to us would be also part of the lives of millions of dispossessed rainbow children.

Hence, progressively the percentage of poor students studying on scholarships was raised from 20% to 50% and the roof-top of the school was converted into a night-shelter for homeless girls. The most striking aspect of this model of radical inclusive reform was that the proposal to throw open the school gates to allow poor homeless girls inside the school to sleep at night came from some of the school girls who were horrified while coming to school one morning, as they saw a little homeless 4 years old girl lying outside the gates of the school in dire condition after she was raped the night before. The vulnerability of particularly homeless street girls became evident to the middleclass girls coming from well-off families to the school.

However, as a school Principal Sister Valentine’s acceptance of the school girls’ proposal was crucial in beginning a very radical inclusive reform not just at Delphine Hart School, but also in the other Jesuitess schools. They began converting their roof-top into night-shelter for poor homeless girls and also making necessary arrangements for their education. Later the model was also replicated in other schools across India, as already referred to earlier in chapter 3 of this thesis while discussing the existing research literature on the school’s work. The next section of this chapter will therefore analyse Sister Valentine’s philosophy of education as it is evident from the values-education curriculum and teachers training program she developed with the help of few other teachers while working in various Jesuitess schools in India, which has now been adopted as the official Human Rights education curriculum by the Institute of Human Rights Education in India.

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Educating the Heart and the Mind

We realized that the first thing we have to tackle is competition. Many of the schools are rife with competition. Competition means that the child who gets the highest marks gets the best price every year. This makes the parents also rabid. Now they want their children to get the first prize. So, the first thing I have to tackle is this children being pitted against each other for competition. Now when you get rid of that and bring in the idea of community values, not competitive values, then you have already practically won the battle. Because if you have these competitive values when people are competing for half a mark, they are not going to stay back in the afternoon to help a poor child. They want to get their marks. They want tuition. But, when you remove that, then you compete with yourself. You strive for excellence at the level of your own potential, not someone else’s....this relieves the children of a lot of pressure because they don’t have to measure up to come first. They can all get the prize if they work hard enough. You will find a year after that the children will be willing to work for other children because the pressure is off their shoulders. - Sister Valentine The concerns expressed above by Sister Valentine about the mainstream competitive Indian education system as a barrier for inclusive education, is in many ways similar to the concerns expressed by Tagore in his series of essays written in Bengali from 1892 about the way in which the mainstream “factory-model” of education system was divorced from the needs of the society. The above quote also reflected the values and philosophy of the Jesuitess schools at large committed to create “a school atmosphere where the values of love, freedom, sincerity and justice are experienced and lived out by all and where striving for excellence at the level of one’s potential is an essential element” ( School Constitution, p. 8).

Giving access to the rainbows in the school was not enough, it was important to create inclusive schooling culture. Embedded within the highly competitive postcolonial Indian context which evolved during the British colonial times, Sister Valentine realized she needed to design a proper values-education curriculum, teacher’s training program and also actively engage with parents and local community to promote community values and not just competitive values, in order to successfully establish an inclusive education system within the school. It is to be noted here that her work followed long tradition of the Jesuitess order engaging in intercultural dialogue with the local population and their religions. The image of the golden rule hanging from the peg of a wall inside the school is emblematic of this intercultural dialogue.

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Image 2: A Poster of the Golden Rule at the school

Hence, Sister Valentine developed a distinct values-based approach to education drawing on the thoughts of Indian leaders during the freedom movement and golden rule of the diverse Indian religious traditions, where emphasis was given on balancing community-oriented ‘heart values’ with competitive ‘head values’, as it is shown in image 3 on the next page, taken from a teachers’ training hand-out. Here again I argue that this model of education reflects a strong resemblance with Tagore’s ideas on education as he wrote- “If we at all understand the needs of the present day, we must see that any new schools founded by us fulfill the following conditions: that their courses are both lively and varied, and nourish the heart as well as the intellect; that no disunity or discord disrupts the minds of our young; and that education does not become something for those few hours when they are at school” (Tagore quote from Dasgupta 2009, p. 114). The social consciousness raising values-education curriculum “We are the World” and teachers’ training materials designed by Sister Valentine to train teachers for implementing inclusive education in the school are, therefore, very reflective of Tagore’s holistic theoretical ideas on education, which was both community-oriented and also cosmopolitan. This will be further analysed in the next section.

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Image 3: Teachers Training Hand-out on Head and Heart Values

Though, from a western secular perspective one can object to the underlying religious theme to this pedagogic approach and object to the use of the word “God” in the image above. However, Indian secularism enshrined in the constitution long reconciled with a more plural understanding of secularism in terms of co-existence of different religious groups and their rights to run schools, even though it is a secular state and affirms separation of religion and State power. It must be also noted here that most Indians are culturally very religious people and the religious theme and reference to God in the teachers’ training hand-outs (as in the image 3 above) is not necessarily a Christian God. The training module was developed keeping in mind that culturally most Indians are God-believing and the reference to God in the training modules is as secular as Tagore’s use of the word God in many of his writings, though he was a champion of secular education (Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh 2010). In a world with rising “geographies of anger” (Appadurai 2006), increasing

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intolerance and radicalism among various religious communities43, such initiatives following a long tradition of inter-faith and intercultural dialogue seeking happiness as a pedagogic goal is perhaps more useful for society, though it can be criticized as utopic. However, once again it is to be noted here that this pedagogic approach was also driven by long Jesuitess tradition and philosophy of social inclusion for long- term benefit of society, rather than short-term cost-benefit analysis. The school’s holistic philosophical approach to education could be also interpreted as resonating in many ways with Aristotelian emphasis on social and emotional learning (Kristjánsson 2006). However, I would argue here that the strong focus on a spiritual relationship with others in the community in the school’s model of education, along with its strong focus on freedom resonates lot more with early 20th Century indigenous native education reformer Tagore’s socially inclusive relational philosophy of education, as it has been argued in chapter 2 of this thesis. In recent years, some scholars have also compared Tagore’s theoretical ideas on education with progressive ideas of John Dewey and Paulo Freire (Samuel 2011; Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh 2010). These scholars argue that within the colonial Indian context, Tagore’s child-centric community oriented theoretical ideas on education in many ways extended Deweyian ideas for democratic education and Freirean ideas of critical consciousness raising emancipatory education as a “rooted cosmopolitan”44. I argue here that, it is therefore not a surprise why earlier researchers from Europe and the US (such as, Greene 1995 and Bajaj 2011), who have studied the work of Delphine Hart School; found the theoretical lens of “indigenous foreigners” (Popkewitz 2000) Dewey and Freire most suitable to analyse the work of the school. Apparently these scholars could see reflection of Deweyian and Freirean pedagogical ideas in the work of the school since “indigenous native” reform traditions established by Tagore during colonial times also reflected similar democratic and emancipatory ideals of education.

43 See: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Christian-school-vandalized-in-south- Delhi/articleshow/46227841.cms http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/11400824/Church-accused-of-lacking-flexibility-after-it- bans-yoga-class-for-being-too-spiritual.html 44 Purakayastha (2003) referring to Tagore citing the phrase from Kwame Anthony Appiah

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Figure 5: Tagore’s Holistic model of Education

While analysing the problems of Indian education Tagore wrote: “When there came the separation of the intellect from the spiritual and the physical, the school education put entire emphasis on the intellect and the physical side of man. We devote our sole attention to giving children information, not knowing that by this emphasis we are accentuating a break between the intellectual, physical and the spiritual life” (Tagore quote from Dasgupta 2009, p. 96). According to Tagore, the entire educational process was relational (see figure 5 above). This relational process was as much important for the child’s individual development- intellectual, physical and spiritual –as for community development- facilitated by the child’s social relationship with teachers, peers and the environment. Hence, Tagore also made his school socially inclusive of students and teachers from diverse gender, ethnicity, racial, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. Therefore, I argue here that Tagore’s theoretical ideas are even more contextually relevant to analyse the socially inclusive conception of education at DHS. Especially since the Nuns of the Jesuitess order have historically engaged with his work and some of the non-religious teachers in the school also came from alternative indigenous tradition of schooling growing out of the Bengal Renaissance movement in the nineteenth century.

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Values Education Curriculum

Since the 1980s, the Delphine Hart School Principal, Sister Valentine along with some of the teaching staff, who were also either her students in another Jesuitess school or came from an alternative indigenous tradition of Brahmo school developed a 10 part series of child-centred experience-based values education curriculum, as it is shown in the image below. This series of textbooks were published and distributed by Orient Longman (now Orient Blackswan), a renowned school textbook and academic publisher in India and were already in circulation widely among the English medium schools by the 1990s. The 10 parts series of “We are the World” (classes 1–10) textbooks provide values-based active citizenship education for school children. The series of books were published for the first time in 1989 and revised in 2005 as the third edition.

Image 4: Front Cover of Book on Values Education Curriculum

The books help children to reflect on their personal growth; see beyond themselves in the context of society; explore their inner spirituality; and contribute their share to society. The series of books begins with a preface from the authors affirming the rights of every child as well as values of social responsibility, as it is shown in the image 5 on the next page. The books also include illustrations and quotes from great social, political and educational leaders, such as Gandhi and Tagore among many other modern Indian thinkers.

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Image 5: Declaration of Child Rights in “We are the World”

This practice oriented values education curriculum and critical consciousness raising pedagogy honouring the rights of every child while also instilling community values for just social action actually builds on the Jesuitess school philosophy of education explicitly stated in their 1971 Constitution, quoted earlier in this thesis. They also resonate particularly with indigenous education reformer Tagore’s philosophy and practice of education in his school in Shantiniketan, where he sought to build a model of indigenous holistic education for every child according to their needs and abilities. Education in Tagore’s school in rural tribal Shantiniketan with students from diverse backgrounds also involved social and emotional learning within the natural environment for ecological consciousness of the child and not just academic learning. (Dasgupta 2009, O’Connell 2003, 2010 and Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh 2010) Tagore wrote, “...our education should be in full touch with our complete life, economical, intellectual, aesthetic, social, and spiritual; and our educational institutions should be in the very heart of our society, connected with it by the living bonds of varied co-operations. For true education is to realize at every step how our

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training and knowledge have organic connection with our surroundings.” (Dasgupta 2009, p.148) In his talks to the teachers, Tagore strongly critiqued the fact that “the child’s life is subjected to the education factory, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context” (Dasgupta 2009, p. 108) during his times. However, unlike the school Tagore built in rural tribal Shantiniketan, located in the heart of a busy over-crowded congested city, children of Delphine Hart School had little opportunity of any contact with Nature and greenery. The school therefore designed a program to make the school students take responsibility to keep the environment of their own school clean by declaring domestic cleaning staff holiday once a month and getting the school children engaged to keep their school and surrounding neighbourhood clean. Within the Indian context, where the social norm is that the children of Bhadrolok (genteel) family study in neat and clean English medium schools to do white-collar jobs and they hire uneducated Chotolok (“literally small people” see: Bandopadhyay 2004, p. 129) to do cleaning work for them, this was indeed a radical approach of environmental education to teach children to clean up after themselves and also the values of equality. Bhadro in Bengali and Hindi literally means civilized and lok is a person. Cultural sociologists claim that the Bhadrolok is “a Bengali urban intelligentsia that emerged in the crucible of colonialism” (Roy 2003, p. 8). However, within DHS just as the rainbow children would keep their roof top home and bathing rooms clean, the ripples from middleclass families would also clean their classrooms, school toilet and paint the walls of the school building. Not just to keep the school environment clean, but also give expression to their artistic self by drawing images of flowers, trees and greenery on the walls of the school, even as it located in the middle of a concrete jungle! Needless to say that within the decades since the 1990 following the first World Conference on “Education for All” (EFA) in Jomtien and the establishment of the Indian country office of Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan; the work of this school became an attractive indigenous model of inclusive school reform to both the global development agencies and the Indian government. The values education curriculum was also adapted as the official Human Rights Education curriculum and was translated into other local Indian languages for dissemination in the eastern region of the country, when the Institute for Human Rights Education (IHRE) chose to partner with Delphine Hart School as their Eastern regional centre. The following sections

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will discuss and analyse at length the teachers’ training program developed by the school for inclusive education.

Teachers’ Training

Image 6: Teachers Training on Human Rights

Sister Valentine realized that the role of teachers was crucial inside the school to implement such an inclusive education program with a diverse mix of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the classroom. She had a core group of Jesuitess school teachers, some of whom were her students in the other Jesuitess school, where she taught and some from indigenous progressive traditions like the Brahmo School. Yet, in order to successfully institute an inclusive system, special teachers’ training for all teachers was considered as important. Hence, Sister Valentine designed particularly a critically self-reflective model of teachers’ training program to successfully implements inclusive model of schooling at DHS. This is evident from the teachers’ training hand-outs, which are now being also circulated outside the premises of Delphine Hart School to government schools in local languages, as it was observed by me during a teachers; training session at the Sarva Shikshya Mission (Education for All) State Project Directorate’s office in Kolkata during the first phase of my fieldwork. The training session was conducted by Sister

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Valentine and some of the DHS school staff, though she had already retired as the Principal of the school. The English content were all translated into Hindi and Bengali for local vernacular medium government school teachers and the teachers’ training was conducted in bi-lingual mode by Sister Valentine and her Hindi and Bengali speaking Anglo-Indian and Bengali staff members.

Image 7: A Teachers’ Training Hand-out on Freedom

Looking at the image above, the obvious similarity between the teachers’ training hand-out designed by Sister Valentine and Tagore’s ideas on Freedom of the mind as the ultimate pedagogic goal is quite striking. Tagore affirmed: “I believe that the object of education is the freedom of mind which can only be achieved through the path of freedom” (Dasgupta 2009, p. 87). If the teachers are not driven by the intrinsic values of education as freedom of the mind, freedom to think logically and freedom to do one’s work without externally imposed bureaucratic supervision, then how can they instill these values of freedom in the minds of students? The teachers’ training modules, therefore, reflected this spirit of freedom. I argue here that it followed both the Jesuitess tradition of Liberation theology and the indigenous Sanskrit tradition of “Education is that which Liberates” (Sa Vidyta Ya Vimuktaya), as espoused by Tagore. (Ghosh and Naseem, 2003) However, in his famous poem “Where the Mind is Without Fear” from Nobel Prize winning collection- Gitanjali,

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Tagore (1910) also critiqued out-dated indigenous cultural practices as “dead habit” and also sought education to free the minds of people from the out-dated dead habits. These “dead habits” which got institutionalized as cultural practices within schools during the colonial period also included the mechanical pedagogic practices of teachers in classrooms. Hence Tagore wrote: “The duties performed by the schoolmaster today do not call for more than a very small part of his mind and spirit and they can be performed almost as well by a gramophone with a bit of brain and a cane tied to it” (Dasgupta 2009, p. 121). Within a context of wide-spread corruption and teacher absenteeism among government school teachers and corporeal punishments in contemporary India, these insights from Tagore’s observation of the mechanization process of teaching and pedagogic approach during colonial India is very insightful to gain understanding about the problems of inclusive education even in contemporary times. Similar need for change in pedagogic approach to free the minds of teachers and students from externally imposed fear was also felt by Sister Valentine, as it is revealed from this quote from an old alumna of the school: Now let me tell you during [Sister Mary’s] time before Sister Valentine…You couldn’t hear any sound…pin drop silence. It was so silent. Not a word was spoken. We used to walk very softly with rubber soles and all that. Then when Sister Valentine came in she said: “This is like a graveyard. There is no soul. Everyone is like a dead man. The children…where are the spirit gone. They are like walking machine!”…So, then she launched this freedom you know and the children became like little birds chirping on and we also became very free. We can tell what we think and this and that. There was no strict discipline as such. The discipline must come from within you. Hence, beginning with self-reflective exercises and reflection on responsible use of Freedom with responsibility, the teachers training program developed by Delphine Hart School focused on the ultimate pedagogic goal as Happiness (as shown in image 3, p.127) and the need to balance community oriented “heart-values” with competitive “head-values”. Since the mainstream modern education system institutionalized during colonial India has been very focused on just competitive “head-values”, as it was also critiqued by Tagore during colonial India. The day-long teachers training also incorporated sessions during the second half of the day to make teachers aware of international conventions on Human Rights and Child Rights and how education for every child is essential to the collective progress of society. However, this model of teachers training for inclusive education and public

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accountability in the name of God balancing community oriented “heart-values” as against just competitive “head-values” can be critiqued as too idealistic and impractical to sustain in the real world, as Tagore’s model was also critiqued by some according to Mukherjee (2013). This will be discussed further while analysing some of the sustainability issues of the DHS model of school reform and inclusive education system in chapter 7. The next section of this chapter will discuss some of the policies and practices that were put in place by Sister Valentine as a school Principal to make the school an inclusive learning space for all children.

Policies and Practices

Much though it was necessary to instill the intrinsic heart-values of education among children from well-off backgrounds, i.e. the “ripples” for inspiring them to take social responsibility for the marginalized, i.e the “rainbows”; the instrumental head-values of education were also important both for children from privileged background and those from subaltern backgrounds. While discussing equity and quality issues in contemporary times within the Australian context of expansion of mass education Teese and Polesel (2003, p. 2) states that: Today success is based on the exercise of institutional power…as the relationship between employment and qualifications tighten, schools grow in importance, both for the weakest students- whose economic vulnerability can only be offset by success in school- and also for the strongest, whose economic claims must be asserted through high standards of achievement. Back in the 1980s Calcutta as a school Principal, Sister Valentine at DHS realized a similar need for equity based school policy to achieve equality within the deeply layered hierarchical Indian society. Especially since children were coming from all kinds of backgrounds of inequality based on class, caste, religion, disability (or different-ability) and experience of trauma as a refugee or homeless child rescued from the streets, slums and prostitute quarters because of the school’s open-door admission policy. Therefore, the reforms were guided by the principles of equity and the school instituted several reform policies within the school to implement this, such as: • Teachers were given staggered work hours to help students in need.

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• Students were allowed to come to school late if they have to commute long distance as parents would be busy working as house-maid or selling vegetables in local market. • No fines would be imposed on children for using vernacular languages inside the school premises. The entire system was made more flexible to accommodate the 50% children (including day scholars and residential children) coming from disadvantaged background. The children coming from low SES backgrounds do not just miss the economic capital, but also the social and the cultural capital (such as English language speaking parents within the postcolonial Indian context) unlike their privileged peers from well-off backgrounds. However, often these barriers are unrecognised within the school systems and children from disadvantaged backgrounds are stereotyped with a “deficit ideology” when they fall behind to perform within standardized competitive systems of education. This issue has been much discussed by academic scholars even in economically developed world contexts, such as the US and Australia (Darder 2012, Ahlquist et al. 2011, Teese and Polesel 2003). Teese and Polesel (2003) writes: “School systems have evolved to ensure that the socially most advantaged children compete as a group, while the least advantaged children enjoy the fewest collective protections and compete most often as individuals” (p. 12). Realizing the disadvantage that children from vulnerable and marginalized backgrounds face within schools, school policies were designed by Sister Valentine to create inclusive learning spaces for all children and to make the school more democratic and inclusive. These policies are as follows: • Big classrooms of 50-60 children at Delphine Hart School were divided into small groups of 10. Children with mixed ability and socioeconomic background were placed in each group, so that the smarter children or children coming from well-off background could support children coming from poor or any kind of disadvantaged background. • A model of peer-to-peer learning was thus set up which connected children within the school and also outside the school, when they went out to teach children in the government-run poorly resourced village schools.

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• Teachers got promoted every year with their group of students to another class in the primary and middle-school sections of the school, so that teachers could form long-term relationships with them and be able to help them according to their needs. This was done particularly to provide additional pastoral care that children coming from disadvantaged background needed, since they missed the kind of parental mentoring and support children from well-off background got at home from their parents. “Like a nice dinner-table cultured conversation”, as Sister Valentine stated during an interview. • National Institute of Open Schooling45 (NIOS) curriculum was introduced to stop school drop-outs of disadvantaged children lagging behind in academic learning at any cost. The NIOS is an autonomous body set up by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD) in 1989 to provide students with a flexible mode of curriculum for vocational, life enrichment and community oriented courses, besides general academic courses with a vision for sustainable inclusive learning for all through open and distance learning. During interviews with teachers, I found out that the policy of teacher promotion along with students was also welcomed by most teachers. It also provided them room for growing professionally, rather than the monotony of teaching the same syllabus of a subject every year in the same classroom. They rather preferred to be with the same group of students with whom they have already built a relationship as a teacher, rather than teach the same subject in the same class every year with new group of kids. Several teachers expressed this fact during our interviews. The small-group teaching and peer-to-peer learning model was particularly helpful for teachers, since the classroom sizes were very big with 50-60 children in a class. The introduction of NIOS was also helpful for some academically failing girls. However, one down side of NIOS was that only DHS girls studying in the English medium school as day scholars or staying at the school as resident scholars could apply for NIOS. The children in the residential home attending neighbouring Bengali or Hindi medium schools under the local State board of education could not apply for NIOS. Though the teachers were trained by Sister Valentine using her unique model of teachers training and they complied with these policies, interviews with staff revealed

45 See: http://www.nios.ac.in/

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that a section of the school staff thought that these 100% flexible reform policies were actually dragging down the standard of the school compared to other English medium convent schools. However, even those staff that did not like the school’s 100% flexible policies to facilitate the learning needs of poor disadvantaged children and offered some of the harshest criticisms during our interviews, acknowledged that the entire system within the school was being transformed to be more inclusive for the most disadvantaged children. This is evident from this quote from an interview with a teacher, Mrs Venaktesh: See I worked in another missionary school before coming here. I knew that this was a Jesuitess school. I had no idea about what was going on inside the school here….no discipline…no decorum… underprivileged children more welcomed more than any other missionary schools…many schools would give students TC if they fail for two consecutive years and so on. But, here Sister was applying for NIOS (National Institute Open Schooling) curriculum, so that disadvantaged girls can complete their schooling rather than dropping out. You know those kids who cannot cope with regular curriculum; we enroll them for NIOS after class 8, so that they can finish school with fewer subjects and more flexible time to get their school leaving certificate. We also have special regular tutors for these children, who come to teach them after school hours. Unlike other schools, Delphine Hart School did not set any standard benchmark for assessment and evaluation. Even those staff members, who were critical of the school’s policies during interviews, stated that unlike other schools no disciplinary actions against staff or students were taken by school management based on student results. Success was measured based on the progress made by the student over the academic year and based on their relative background of advantage or disadvantage rather than any standardized benchmark, as one of the teachers in the school, Ms Anupama reported: Success is when a first generation learner manages to clear her Madhyamik46, clear her higher secondary and take up a job which is not of an unskilled labourer. You can’t compare this child with another child whom you have screened by interviewing parents, conducting IQ test and then admitting the child to school. Any child (even after screening so much) if didn’t keep up the performance to a certain standards, other schools give transfer certificate to that child. So how can you compare their results with ours? If you would compare with the academic results of other schools, you would think results are poor here. But, I’ll say no excellent results because we teach first generation learners, who without this school would not have even got an English medium education. So I think our school has been very successful because we help the marginalized to become part of the society

46 Class 10 board exams

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inside and outside the school. If a child (whose father is a rickshaw puller), is today working in one of the shopping malls; I would say she is very successful. She might not be working as an IT engineer but she has got a better standard for herself, she has got a better lifestyle than her parents, she can give a better future to her children.

Conclusion

The quote above from Ms Anupama sums up well from a practitioner’s perspective the school’s distinct understanding of inclusive education within the local context of extreme inequality and exclusion of large masses of children from the formal schooling system and particularly the privilege and symbolic capital that is associated with schooling in a private English medium missionary school in Calcutta. However, the earlier quote from another teacher, Mrs. Venkatesh, suggests that some staff members were not quite convinced with the model of inclusive education. Despite hybrid conceptualization of inclusive education within the Jesuitess order led by youth social action among students and Sister Valentine’s attempts particularly at DHS to implement inclusive education by designing values-education curriculum, teachers’ training, policies and practices to create an inclusive school culture; there was also strong resistance from a section of school staff and parents. Opposition from middleclass Bhadrolok parents was particularly against the inclusion of daughters of the Chotolok background, as it will be discussed at length in the next chapter. However, Sister Valentine was able to circumvent these oppositions to promote the success of the school slowly when initial signs of success became evident after almost a decade of reforms during the 1980s. The 1990s was also the decade of the global promotion of “Education for All” and the establishment of the Indian office of Sarva Shikshya Abhiyan. Therefore, it became easier for Sister Valentine as an opportunist school leader to promote the work of the school nationally and globally to gain more resources and support. This strategic promotion of school reform for inclusive education will be analysed further in the following chapter.

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Chapter 6

Promoting Inclusive Education Reform

Introduction

The previous chapter analysed the philosophical conception of Delphine Hart School’s model of inclusive education through the theoretical lens of Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophy of education. This chapter will analyse some of the barriers the school had to overcome in order to promote its particular philosophical conception of inclusive education. Drawing on the concept of “prefigurative politics” coined by political theorist Carl Boggs (1977) and popularised by sociologist Wini Breines (1989), the chapter will argue how the hope of an egalitarian new world order inspired key-actors in the school to steer these changes addressing the needs of the most marginalised vulnerable children of the community, making children from well-off middleclass families and their parents active stake-holders for the welfare of underprivileged children.

This chapter also analyses how the inclusive education reforms already established by Delphine Hart School driven by local needs and actors were strategically promoted nationally and globally utilizing institutional global networks, following the emergence of national as well as global discourse on “Education for All”. Here again, this chapter analyses the role played by former school leadership in capitalizing on personal and institutional transnational networks to promote the school’s inclusive education reform agenda. It argues how with the changing political economy of the region, a complex network of global and local forces, connections and imaginaries (Vavrus and Bartlett 2006, Burawoy et al. 2000), including the Global Justice Movement (GJM) within the Catholic network facilitated the school’s work since the 1990s.

The chapter analyses the ideological assumptions and role played by international volunteers, donors and partner organizations, such as UNICEF, Human Rights Institute, Save the Children and Indian Government’s Sarva Shikshya Abhiyan (Education for All) office in helping Delphine Hart School to promote and sustain the work it had already begun for

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couple of decades. This chapter argues that the global network and transnational spatial location of the institution and also former school leadership was crucial in the school’s ability to mobilize resources globally utilizing the institutional and personal network to meet local needs. Finally, this chapter also argues with evidence about the risks associated with certain kinds of local indigenous cultural practice of “idolization” of individuals, as well as dominant neoliberal global cultural practice of emphasizing the role of one “social entrepreneur” for change in a de-historicised and de-contextualised way.

Bhadrolok Subculture and Resistance

Seeing me hang around at the staff-room this week, several teachers voluntarily opened up to express their concerns in an informal way. One of the senior teachers started to openly express her concern for the children coming from regular middle- class families (who are privileged) within the context of this school. She said that it is not fair for these children. We have to spend so much energy for the rainbows; we cannot give much time to our smart children. They are deprived. As a language teacher, she was also concerned about the vulgar unpolished language used by the rainbow children, which they had learnt while living on the streets or in slums. She was visibly quite puritanical and old school person coming from a traditional genteel Bengali Bhadrolok family background. [Nabanita] introduced me to her as their grand-ma, who brings lot of food for everybody in the staff-room every day. But, she seemed to be quite overwhelmed to break the social class barrier with the rainbow children. In her own polite and sweet way, she kept emphasizing the difficulties of having the rainbows in the classroom with regular kids though [Sister Valentine] believed in the philosophy of inclusive education. (Field notes 23rd November 2012)

As it has been already discussed earlier in this thesis, the Jesuitess schools have been strictly class segregated, though the Jesuitess order at large has been serving diverse cross- sections of hierarchical Indian society. This class segregation of schools is of course not a typical Indian phenomenon. It is a global phenomenon and is still distinct characteristic of Elite schools in many Euro-American countries and Australia. This is also true of Ireland, where the former Delphine Hart School Principal, Sister Valentine was born. While arguing for the problematic nature of elite Catholic schools in Ireland and their focus on moral character in order to reconcile notions of privilege and social justice, Courtois (2015, p. 67) writes, “While elite schools in France or the United Kingdom have to some extent opened their doors to ethnic and social diversity, thus adapting to the demands of meritocratic or inclusive ideals, there is limited evidence for this in Ireland, where resistance is more visible than adaptation to change. The recruitment methods of Irish elite schools remain based

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explicitly on economic and social capital, and overall their clientele is becoming wealthier rather than more socially diverse. While various types of scholarship schemes are in operation, atypical students are not selected according to objective criteria or meritocratic principles. Instead, they are selected on a discretionary basis with a focus on the potential benefits for mainstream students.” As already noted in the earlier chapter, cultural sociologists claim that within the postcolonial contexts, such as India the Bhadrolok (genteel people) subculture emerged as part of the colonial civilizing process of native population, apparently considered by the European settlers as savages (Mukherjee 1970, 1975; Roy 2003; Donner 2013). Within the social context of postcolonial Calcutta (Kolkata), regular Jesuitess schools mostly served the daughters of the Bengali middleclass popularly referred to as Bhadrolok (gentlemen) and Bhadromahila (gentlewomen). This urban liberal Bhadrolok group of people refers to “a subculture, a new way of life that emerged in the city” (Donner 2013, p. 312) as a by-product of the colonial encounter and indicated social status, replacing other markers of social distinction like caste and religion, particularly among educated urban liberal Bengali society. The influence of class-driven Victorian and Edwardian England during colonial times thus further reified the social hierarchies among the native feudal society. In contemporary times, Roy (2003) has observed citing Ong (1999, p. 81) and Dirlik’s (1997, p. 332) work, that power has been normalized within the native postcolonial Calcutta (Kolkata) society through some kind of “self-orientalism” of the city’s poverty and marginality of the poor, which could be interpreted as hegemonic construction of an “alternative capitalism” by the elites of the society. (p. 9) In recent years with rising wealth in the neoliberal economy; exclusive gated housing complexes, gated shopping malls and gated corporate schools are being built to cater to separate caste/class religious communities47, not just in high tech cities within India like Bangalore (Bengaluru), but also in Calcutta (Kolkata) in the new millennium (Roy 2003, 2011 and Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2008). Reflecting on her research data and the peculiar contradictions of deepening inequality in Calcutta under the rule of a liberalizing left-front government in the late 1990s, Roy (2003, p. 7-9) writes:

47See: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/now-bangalore-townships-sell-flats-only-to-brahmins- lingayat/433425-62-129.html

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Surely Calcutta was a great deal more than an aggregation of poverty. But could Calcutta be recuperated without taking note of this deprivation and exclusion? Would it not be equally complicit to perpetuate the Left front myth of a Sonar Bangla- a Bengal of the fields of gold? This is a trope with stubborn genealogy, what Greenough (1982, 12) calls a “cultural construct of prosperity” conferring moral legitimacy on social truths….The Bhadrolok, as Bengali urban intelligentsia that emerged in the crucible of colonialism, quite obviously looms large in the historical narrations…..Or, put another way, the bhadralok can emerge as a figure only in relation to the subaltern, speaking for those who cannot be represented. This is the “babu-coolie” relationship that the critical histories of subaltern studies have sought to uncover (Chakrabarty 1984, 146-48), the “double articulation of dominance” (Guha 1992) that greatly complicates questions of power in Calcutta. This “double articulation” of dominance and “babu-coolie” relationship is in many ways a vestige of European colonial legacy. Before the arrival of the British, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French had settled in the Bengal region of South Asia. With these settlers came the missionaries. Though as argued earlier in this thesis, missionary work within South Asia has been subversive in many ways in terms of educating the subalterns of the local indigenous society and recruiting them as teachers in schools to become social superiors as argued by Spivak (1994); the apparent religious and paternalistic civilizing mission of the Christian missionaries in India (not just educational) is evident also from some of the early statements Colmcille (1968) makes in her history book on the work of the Jesuitess order. The following quote from Colmcille (1968) referring to the German Priest who brought the Irish nuns to Calcutta to set up schools, is particularly significant in this respect: “To the Hindus and Mohammedans, thronging the slopes of the railway bridge, and perched on the top of the convent fence, it became apparent that the “Christian Mission” was a considerable section of Calcutta’s citizens, apparently oblivious of caste and race, and having an orderly and rather beautiful way of doing puja to their God” (p. 154). Though Colmcille’s (1968) historical account of the Jesuitess schools in India expressed great disdain for colonialism and colonial exploitation of India; her account also express a paternalistic sense of civilizing mission of the local population, which Allender (2014) also critiqued in his study of the Jesuitess order. However, as an effect of this civilizing mission “the benign nature of Bhadrolok domination” emerged within the native society as it has been also analysed in a recent news report: “Well heeled, middle-class Bengalis, who ineluctably locate themselves in the colonial field of power and privilege and thereby make the claim of being different and modern, continued to be Bengal's political and social elite, dominating the machinery of the political parties and state apparatus... Paradoxically, it is the benign nature of bhadralok domination, expressed in healthy political

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and social contestations between Derozians and high priests of the brahmanical order as far back as the mid-19th century, which is the source of Bengal's many troubles today."48 The Bhadrolok thus became a “considerable section of Calcutta’s citizen” post- independence, quite apart from the rest of the native population. They might become “apparently oblivious of caste and race” (Colmcille 1968, p. 154), however, it can be argued here that they became “a class of surrogates” (Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh 2010) through their schooling process as part of this civilizing mission. Hence, implementing socially inclusive school reforms to convert an exclusive Christian missionary school serving the children of Calcutta Bhadralok (gentleman) and Bhadromahila (gentlewoman) was a monumental task, especially since the admiration of the order, decorum and “social aesthetics” (Rizvi, 2015) of these schools was so admired by the local elite population, as it is evident from this quote below from an old alumna and retired school teacher: The school was prim and proper with all those English courtesy and all. Mother Levin was a dear (with great emphasis in voice) lovely Principal...we would walk softly with rubber soles and have our dresses made at “Style craft” in Park Street....Then in 1972 I walked through that same gate at Delphine Hart as a teacher. It is to be also noted here that these values of elite “social aesthetics” and thereby exclusion became part of the larger social structure of the Indian subcontinent and exclusion of large masses of underprivileged children from the schooling system based on socioeconomic and family background of disadvantage. It became a social characteristic nationally in postcolonial India, despite constitutional commitments (Govinda and Bandopadhyay 2010, Govinda 2011, Nambissan 2010). The promotion of inclusion within such complex postcolonial context like India, thus become even harder where social groups do not necessarily mix and mingle, though they co-habit side by side in one of the most densely populated regions of the world. During British colonial times the differences became more reified between the English educated cultured liberal Bhadrolok with the rest of the uneducated and vernacular language educated masses of the population. This phenomenon is not atypical of the Bengal region, but I argue here that this phenomenon can be also observed also in other parts of India. Following the recent Right to the Education Act’s (2010) provision for admitting 25% children from low SES backgrounds into private English medium schools, there has been

48 See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-01-27/news/46684777_1_west-bengal-bhadralok- marxists#

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more violation of the act and discrimination against marginalized children admitted under RTE in many parts of the country.49 In some places a pattern of separate but equal provision school is emerging, as some private schools are building separate schools for children from low SES backgrounds in the neighbourhood. Byker (2015) has studied one of this “Equal Opportunity School”, where underprivileged children are provided quality education but in separate and well-resourced school building in Bangalore. Byker (2015) conducted the case study of a Komu community school for the 21stCentury following the RTE provisions by the Indian Government in 2009, which had options about adherence of the law by building separate school infrastructure for the underprivileged. Though Byker’s (2015) account of this school is quite optimistic, yet this trend is worrying as it reinforces the existing pattern of segregation, exclusivity, social class division and hierarchies within Indian society. Delphine Hart School and its leadership also encountered several hurdles and resistance to promote inclusive school reforms during the decade of the 80s and 90s to institute inclusive educational reforms. The Bhadralok subculture of the local Bengali society became one of the major culturally entrenched barriers, even within the school community. This was quite evident from the interviews with two old school alums from the 80s when much of the changes were happening within the school to make the school environment more inclusive. One of the old school alumnae, Asha, who is a divorced single parent and works in the corporate sector said during our interview: We were doing all this community work on the streets and the villages as part of Leadership Training Service set up by Sister and that was ok. But, when the girls were brought inside the school it was really uncomfortable. They were so dirty and unclean you see….and we would say “now why is Sister doing this?”…when it came to my own daughter’s admission, frankly I was concerned as a parent for the academic side of her life… though I knew she would get more holistic education here than in other schools….and I can see that difference in behaviour myself as a parent compared to my son studying in [Garden High]. But, frankly I would choose another school if my daughter would have been selected there, thinking about her future career. - Asha, alumna

49 See: http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/04/22/india-marginalized-children-denied-education http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/04/22/qa-talking-discrimination-and-school-dropout-rates-india http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Children-admitted-in-schools-under-RTE-Act-branded-dirty-given- leftover-food-Report/articleshow/34080928.cms http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-maharashtra-to-get-3-layered-grievance-redressal-system-under-right- to-education-act-1980752

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Another old alumna of the school, Kiran, who is a queer businesswoman and sells health products to body builders and enjoys motorbike racing with her friends, said during our interview: Oh they were so filthy! We would come to school all nicely dressed and clean and they would come running and try to jump into our arms with their dirty clothes and smelly bodies screaming Didi1, didi! (Sister, sister).“Chotolok1, basti-party, shob ashobbho” (lowly people, slum party, all uncivilized). They were like tiny monsters jumping around! (Kiran, alumna) The above respondents Asha and Kiran are representatives of a growing number of independent single, divorcee and queer population of educated liberal urban India. Asha works for a multinational firm heading their “corporate social responsibility” unit. She openly declares how her own education at Delphine Hart School with active civic engagement in the “Leadership Training Institute” has influenced her and it is also helping her to work in the area of corporate social responsibility. Kiran, a businesswoman, who runs her own business selling American health supplements to body-builders and gym, expressed less enthusiasm about the school’s inclusive pedagogic model. These women are not the “colonialized women”, the traditional house-wife or the educated Bhadramahila wife of bourgeoisie Indian men (Chatterjee 1989). Neither are they stay-at-home mother of their children like the “Domestic Goddesses” studied by Donner (2008). They represent the contemporary educated Bengali bhadrolok (genteel person) of neoliberal times. Yet, as these educated women stand up for subaltern rights as divorcee single mother and queer person within the context of hetero-normative patriarchal Indian society, their response with regards to the girls from lower socioeconomic Chotolok background of their own society is quite striking. The response of these educated alums of the school highlighted the fact that within the larger umbrella of Indian feudal patriarchy and persisting colonial influence of hierarchical class-divided England, these independent educated middleclass women still find it hard to break out of the social class barrier to empathize with the plight of girls from lower socioeconomic class. Though Asha appeared more empathetic and is also assisting the work of the school and other NGOs in the region working for the poor and marginalised through her corporate connections, the class divide is too wide to bridge the gap as she acknowledged during the interview. This lack of empathy is perhaps related to the aspect of “social aesthetics” as analysed by several authors in the book edited by Fahey, Posser and Shaw (2015). The “class apartheid” in schooling as analysed by Spivak (2002), which perpetuates “economic apartheid” (Juneja 2014) therefore is quite strong.

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Moreover, Asha’s concern about her daughters’ academic training at Delphine Hart is particularly striking, especially since Asha openly acknowledges that her own studies at DHS have been helpful in her own career. As a mother who works in the corporate sector with a son studying in a corporate run school in the 21st Century, she appeared to be struggling to reconcile with the holistic education at Delphine Hart School and the competitive needs of the corporate employment sector within the globalizing Indian city. It appeared there is a binary perception about education among the social imaginary of the middleclass. Education is either perceived as holistic and spiritual or competitive and commercial- the instrumental purpose of education is perceived to be at odds with its intrinsic purpose. Educated middleclass parents appeared to be struggling to reconcile with both. Similar tensions were expressed by the businessman father of a school girl, who was transferred from Delphine Hart School to a corporate run international school. The father is himself engaged in running an NGO and is well known in the region as a social worker educated in a Hindu missionary school and received several international awards as a social entrepreneur in the region. But, he appeared worried about the future career of his own daughter, whom he wished to send abroad for higher studies. Therefore, he thought that the more competitive model of education in the expensive international school would provide better opportunities for her in the future. These interviews made the concerns expressed in series of essays by early 20th century native intellectual and education reformer, Tagore about increasing socioeconomic divide among the native population during colonial India appear very real even today. However, the fact that someone like Tagore as a philosopher had envisioned a third alternative reconciling both the intrinsic and instrumental goals of education almost a century ago during colonial India, did not appear to be alive in the cultural memory of these contemporary Indian middleclass women and men engaging with the global economy and preparing their children to be active participants in a global world. It was also obvious that these Indian parents were also not aware of the fact that such a holistic model of education was also the priority for the global capitalists now, as Carnoy (1998) in his foreword to Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Heart” suggests that: The basis for economic and social development in the new global economy is conscious critical thinking and knowledge networks. For more than thirty years, Paulo Freire thought about the revolutionary nature of knowledge. The needs of global capitalists have caught up with his conception of education.

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The Bengali Bhadrolok appeared to be oblivious of this fact that, progressive socially inclusive mode of education is also a necessity for the global economy and sustainability of the planet earth with climate change reaching the tipping point50. The entrenched beliefs of Bengali Bhadrolok subculture continue to pose huge barriers against social inclusion in the school. Signs of continuing Bengali Bhadrolok resistance against reforms for inclusive education were also expressed by some of the teaching staff. Referring to the school reform policy, one of the older Bhadramahila language teachers said during an interview: You see Sister Valentine really believed in this inclusive education thing…but you see these girls…it really does not work here. The “dirty” (vulgar) language in which they speak and what they learn on the streets and “bustees” (slums)…how can you teach them Tagore’s language…the beauty of the language is lost on them. I read the poems in class and they laugh! - A DHS School Teacher The above quote is particularly ironic in the Indian context, especially since Tagore devoted his life thinking about the problems of the subalterns of Indian society, writing about them through his creative writings and later devoted all his efforts in setting up a school for social inclusion and upliftment of the subalterns in rural tribal West Bengal. Though this teacher was teaching Tagore’s poems, quite obviously she missed the capacity of self- reflexivity to connect Tagore’s writings and pedagogic work on the problems of the everyday social world. However, perhaps this is a global phenomenon, since Shakespeare who was writing for both the groundlings seated at the “pit”, as well as the Queen during his times, has now become part of educated elite literary cannon. The working-class both in England and former colonies are distanced from both enlightenment and entertainment of Shakespeare’s production. The first and biggest hurdle to overcome was, therefore, internal resistance and tensions, once the school decided to allow homeless street children to live inside the school premises by transforming the roof-top of the school into a home for the underprivileged children.

Internal Resistance

“See within Calcutta our [Jesuitess] schools have a name” - A School Administrator

The quote above and the chapter on methodology already discussed some of the exclusive aspect of the Jesuitess schools in Calcutta (Kolkata) and convent schools in general within the Indian context. The very name of the institution within the local context and even

50 see: http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/06/inequality-and-climate-change/

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globally has become associated with privilege and exclusivity, despite the radical history of the founding of the religious order of schools in Europe and also within India. Recounting the early phases of inclusion of girls from Indian elite backgrounds, Colmcille (1968) writes, “Parents flocked to enrol their children, Europeans and Anglo-Indians, High Caste Hindus and Parsees alike. It was at this period that Hindus were beginning to send their sons abroad for education, though to do so was to risk loss of caste. The girls, however, were educated at home, many were still purdahed, and if they came to school at all, arrived in carriages with drawn blinds, and with veils drawn over their faces, lest a man-servant should behold them” (p. 23). Within the local Calcutta and larger Indian society, therefore, slowly these schools became an elite ruling class symbol. However, as discussed earlier the Jesuitess order also built a tradition of educational outreach for the subalterns following their Catholic ethics of charity and “preferential love for the poor” as espoused by the radical thoughts of the religious English woman51, who founded the institute back in the 17th Century. Her mission was to promote education for all women irrespective of their socioeconomic background and she would say: “Women in time to come will do much.” Once the European and the Eurasian communities began leaving the city of Calcutta post-independence, then more daughters of native elite and middleclass families, erstwhile part of “Black Calcutta” (Colmcille 1968, p. 4) got access to the schools located centrally in the city, which were primarily European neighbourhoods during colonial times. The local perception and acceptance of the convent schools as elite schools are thus rooted in the colonial racial and power-knowledge relationship that the city and the native elites formed with Europe in general. Moreover, the factors which led to the political turbulence of the early 1970s discussed in chapter 5 were still alive (though suppressed by the State) when the school began instituting inclusive reforms in the 1980s. As noted earlier, though this reform policy for inclusion was prompted by a group of students horrified by the brutal rape of a homeless little 4 years old girl outside the school gates, data gathered through this research suggests that perhaps not all students and staff were favourably disposed towards this policy of allowing access to the “dirty vulgar uncivilized”

51 It is to be noted here that she herself belonged to a politically active elite feudal family. However, she did not want to lead a cloistered private life, either as a housewife or as a religious nun following the tradition and custom for women during those times. She wanted women to lead more publicly engaged life by pursuing education and scholarship like the Jesuit men following the Society of Jesus during those times.

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children inside the prim and proper English medium convent school. As Asha, stated during interview that it was ok for them to go to the village or in the community to teach the poor children there. But, accepting the school to be turned into residential home for street children was not easy for many of them, though the proposal initially came from some of them. It took them some time to slowly learn to accept these poor children as part of the school community. This frank confession from a favourably disposed alumna and parent of a current student is good example to show how hard the oppositions must have been from other parents, students and staff members of the school during initial phase of inclusion. A current staff at the school, who has been working in the school since the radical inclusive reforms began in the 1980s, also expressed their discomfort and even exhaustion to empathize and provide pastoral care for these children. Professionally trained school counselling services are still rarely available in most schools in India. Most of the time, therefore, teachers have to take additional responsibilities of providing pastoral care for the children. Therefore, a diverse pool of students like in DHS makes the job of teachers harder. You see we have such big classes with 50-60 children to manage. Even kids coming from regular families have many learning difficulties. It’s not that who are economically more privileged, are privileged in every sense. We have kids coming from broken families. Right now I am working with a girl whose parents are going through a divorce and in the middle of all these family trouble the poor girl was also abused by an uncle. These are regular middle-class urban family. Now add to it a mix of children coming from various kinds of traumatic background because of poverty, homelessness, street violence. Really often it is quite exhausting. Sometimes we feel burnt-out. But, we try to do our best and we deeply believe in Sister’s philosophy and idealism and in fact joined this institution because of her. - A DHS School teacher The above quote highlights some of the challenges the school staff had to encounter daily at the school to promote and implement the school’s policy of inclusive education within such a complex context, where the very notion of determining “privilege” for equity and social justice demands individual attention to not just economic but social, cultural and emotional needs of the student. Analyzing the content of the above quote, it can be argued here that Bhadrolok subculture could be counter-productive even for the Bhadrolok. Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard (2013, p. 4) argues that: Unless economically privileged individuals are willing to examine their sense of entitlement and challenge their own privileged ways of knowing and doing, being in solidarity with less fortunate others will remain about improving themselves. At an institutional level, this means that schools like the Kent Academy would have to put their very reputations—along with their economic privilege—on the line by becoming not just more diverse, as Swalwell suggested, but by shifting the very fabric of privilege that clothes their elite reputations.

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However, within the Indian context at DHS assessing privilege to create an all- inclusive schooling environment was one of the primary internal challenges, not just because of the class, caste and religion divided Indian society which lives in separate pockets; but also because of the Bengali Bhadralok (genteel) subculture. As discussed already at the beginning of this chapter, many scholars have been very critical of the power Bengali Bhadralok of Calcutta wields which keeps the subalterns under their dominance. However, the following vignette, which tells the story of a student narrated by one of the teachers of DHS, highlights how the pride of comparatively affluent Bhadrolok as against the Chotolok can also act against their own welfare when the need arise. There was this child I had she is now working as a teacher herself. When she was in class 9, a bright child she suddenly started slipping, and she was a very nice child but she wasn’t performing and then few of the girls came and told me “Miss we need to talk to you” and they said that there is something wrong as “she is not eating”, I said “what do you mean she is not eating? Is she dieting?” they said “No Miss there is no food” then I said “how do you know that?” See the pride of the middle class Bengali its so difficult, the father had taken a VRS [voluntary retirement scheme] and invested all his money in some music deal, which went bust and from a respectable middle class family suddenly they were you know, they couldn’t beg and they couldn’t let others know there is no food and this kid was coming in with an empty Tiffin box. There was no way I would have found out had the other children not come and informed me and when I spoke to her she started crying. I had sent for her parents and Sister organized her meals here... organized a job for the father to take over. So it’s things like this which helps us to help them because unless the children let you in, you can’t and they will only do that if they love you and trust you, otherwise it’s not gonna happen. You know I think that relationship has been there, we are blessed in the sense that we do get to know and then we can step in and take whatever steps are required. – A DHS School Teacher From the above vignette it becomes evident that determining comparative privilege could be really a difficult task within a complex context of Calcutta (Kolkata) and a school like Delphine Hart, where children are coming from such diverse socioeconomic and family backgrounds particularly within the neoliberal economic environment of job-cuts in the public sector and volatile nature of small businesses in the global economy. Apparent privilege as social and cultural elite could be also a great handicap during times of such economic uncertainties, as it is evident from the vignette above. Moreover, some of the interviews with long serving teachers in the school revealed, sometimes the emotional needs of comparatively socioeconomically privileged children coming from broken families or even middle-class families experiencing economic hardships due to sudden misfortune could be equally demanding. Data from this research also revealed that comparatively economically

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underprivileged children are often more bonded emotionally to their poor parents, who sell fruits and vegetables in local markets or work as house-maids. During our interviews, teachers also informed they observed that comparatively underprivileged children are often more caring and sharing in their disposition than children coming from urban well-off families, who are experiencing emotional loss due to parents getting divorced or for some other reasons.

Community Resistance

A student from the 1980s, who came from a middle-class background with two educated parents working in the government sector, Sumita, further reported during our interview the tensions in the school and the community as these progressive strategies were being implemented. She stated that her parents were initially very concerned as her cousins and friends studying in other English medium convent schools would be more focused on just studies than other co-curricular activities like children in her school. They would be going for multiple after-school tuitions to get high scores in exams while she would stay back in school to teach junior children from poor background or for group study with less privileged classmates. She would be also engaged in several sporting activities like going for rock- climbing, playing basket-ball, learning karate and community outreach activities organized under Leadership Training service instituted in the school, whereby the children of the school would learn leadership skills and active civic engagement by cleaning their own school toilet, cleaning and painting walls in and around their school, engaging with street children and domestic child labour to admit them into neighbouring schools. However, Sumita, who is now a doctoral candidate at one of the top science research institutes of the country, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics stated that; once her parents realised that her co-curricular activities were not affecting her studies they stopped worrying about her results. Sumita further reported that these activities were rather useful for her. Her own learning improved and concepts clarified while preparing to teach other children in the school. Moreover, the valuable social skills she gained during her school days are still helping her in work life. Yet not all parents and people within the community were patient and understanding as Sumita’s parents. What Delphine Hart School was implementing was so radical at that time, that the school experienced much resistance, not just from parents but also from various other agencies. The social class biases of the urban Bengali “Bhadrolok” community, as well as fear of conversion among the rural village community initially posed

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many barriers for implementing the school’s inclusive program of education and various community outreach activities. Resistance against inclusive education reforms was, therefore, not just internal but also external. Several interviews with past students, teachers and their accounts of reform policies instituted by the school testify this fact. However, the school leadership would strategically overcome these barriers and be persuasive in following through with the inclusive reforms. It has been already argued in this thesis quoting from Seth’s (2007) historical research that, the missionaries often took charge of the education of the marginalized within the colonial Indian society, including women’s education, since the colonial government was least interested in this area and since women’s education was not high on their agenda even in England at the time. However, within the postcolonial Indian society, the popular social imaginary about the colonizers paralleled with the advent of the missionaries. Social imaginary about the missionaries were also replete with fears of conversion to spread Christianity and exploiting the native Indians as guinea pigs by colonizers for research, which is well portrayed in fiction by postcolonial writer Amitabh Ghosh in The Calcutta Chromosome (1995). It is also argued by critics, such as Chambers (2003), who affirmed that it was "common currency" among Bengali intellectuals that Ross exploited native workers in his quest to find the cause of malaria (p. 66). This is also evident from Bhattacharya’s (2011) research on medical history during colonial India. Based on evidence from her research, she claims that tropical medicine and the native population rarely benefitted from medical and scientific research practices during colonial times. Moreover, anthropological research often in the colonies created cultural stereotypes as critiqued by scholars, such as Edward Said (1993). The larger challenge within the community outside the school was, therefore, the fear of religious conversion which had grown over the years due to the paternalistic attitude of many early missionaries as it is evident from Colmcille’s (1968) historical writings and also Allender’s (2014) historical research. Multiple interviews with former school Principal, school outreach staff and community members verified this aspect of the challenge to promote especially community outreach programs in the villages collaborating with the then local West Bengal communist government to implement “Barefoot teacher’s training” and Shikshyala Prakalpa programs run by the school. Therefore, in order to manage oppositions from the community, the school and its leadership also adopted a model of active consultation

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with the local community by offering to be friends and then seeking to find out how they could collaborate together to solve problems. And the first thing the villagers, you know the masters of those schools asked me: “why have you come here?” “Why are you doing this? What is your motif? Do you want to convert us?” And I said: “I am here because I have a conscience. We are in the city. The government gives us funding. We are allowed to take fees from children. We run very good school and I come here and I find you in little hovels of schools that you wouldn’t put even cattle into, no fans, no lights and no facilities of any kind… Hundreds and hundreds of children to one master! And, I said that anybody with a conscience has to think about collaborating with you and offering you whatever assistance we can offer you to equalize the situation. So, that satisfied them and they were happy after they started seeing us doing the work and not just speak. - Sister Valentine Realizing that her presence as a Christian nun leading the students for teaching the village kids will not ease the environment, Sister Valentine chose an Indian Hindu teacher, who has been teaching in the school for 20 years as the team leader for the village project. Once the villagers came to know from the Indian Hindu teacher that Sister Valentine or the Jesuitess community did not try to convert her even after she has been teaching in the school for about 20 years since the 1960s, they became at ease and began trusting the social welfare and community outreach activities steered by the school. This kind of “pragmatic persuasive” (Bajaj 2011) approach of community outreach for education of especially vulnerable children is a long tradition of the Jesuitess order from British colonial times, as it has been studied by Allender (2014) and also documented by Jesuitess historian Colmcille (1968). The Catholic Jesuitess nuns in India have been negotiating with the apathy of colonial Protestant British Government and hostility of the local community ever since they came to India to educate the poor Catholic girls in the region. Hence, the work of Delphine Hart School since the 1980s under the leadership of Sister Valentine can be interpreted as following this long Jesuitess tradition in India.

Institutionalizing Inclusive School Culture

Despite all the resistance and barriers analysed above existing research on the school as it has been discussed in chapter 3, suggest that DHS was able to create an inclusive school culture and also promote Human Rights education for radical social inclusion and transformation within its own premises and also in other schools. Despite reluctance and opposition from a section of school staff and particularly the middle-class Bhadrolok parents and teachers, the school was able to establish its inclusive agenda because of a cohort of motivated school staff and former school Principal, who were simply committed to the cause

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of social inclusion and the philosophical mission of the larger Jesuitess order as stated in the 1971 constitution. The following quote from an interview with an old teacher, who worked under the leadership of Sister Valentine and is still working in the school under new leadership, is particularly relevant in understanding the kind of inclusive school culture and an ethic of care for the other, Delphine Hart School was able to establish. We have children from all kinds of backgrounds …yet when in the classroom there has been always a kind of acceptance for each other and I feel that has always given us a very good starting point as a teacher. So when there are problems…you may talk to the child and sometimes the child will and sometimes the child wont. But what you will have is, you will have other friends come in and say “miss you know this is the problem, she is being beaten up at home, or there is no tiffin and she is hungry” and it’s not done with any kind of maliciousness but there is that sense ‘we need to be there for her’ and that is there among our children and that makes our job easier. Even when there are emotional problems…, the children themselves allow us to help them and we have a very good bonding between children and teachers over here, it was cultivated and nurtured by our earlier principal to a great extent and that gives our children the trust that we can say and its safe. That trust is there and that makes our job much easier because if they don’t tell us beyond a point you can’t help, until you get to the root of the problem it’s very difficult to help. – A DHS School Teacher The positive affirmation about inclusivity in the above quote testifies the belief former school leadership expressed during an interview: “You put a bunch of children from different backgrounds in the nursery classroom, they become playmates. Children do not discriminate, adults do. It is a learnt behaviour.” In spite of such affirmations, there were also reported incidents of children discriminating against each other in the school. However, the school’s teaching and administrative staff always made such incident an opportunity for moral and ethical learning for the entire school community. One such incident was narrated by several school staff and students during research. The following vignette from an interview narrates this incident. Sister Valentine once came to know that some of the girls in the residential home were teased by a group of girls from well-off families. Next day morning during school assembly she asked everybody one question: “Who pays school fees in this school?” Quite naturally the troublemakers raised their hands. Then she asked them another question: “Where do you work and how much do you earn?” They were silent. Then she declared to the entire school that nobody in the school pays any school fees. Everybody is studying due to the graciousness of someone else. It might be a father, a mother, a guardian or a kind donor. It does not matter. Nobody earns to pay their school fees in this school and nobody has the right to tease another school- mate for not paying school fees. This was a good lesson for these girls and they were sincerely apologetic for their behaviour after that. They were actually quite a troublemaker in many ways. But, after this incident they became sober. – A DHS School Teacher

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“Prefigurative Politics”

As it is evident from the vignette above and several interviews with former school Principal and staff who worked closely with her, a sense of “prefigurative politics” (Boggs 177, Breines 1989) was driving some of the key-actors in the school to institutionalize inclusive school culture within the school for the promise of an inclusive society in the future. The notion of “prefigurative politics” came into academic vocabulary through political theorist Carl Boggs (1977) and sociologist Wini Breines (1982). It involves ‘prefiguring’ the vision of a socially just egalitarian democratic world. It involves taking direct action individually and as a community now to make it happen, rather than depending on the State or any political party. Thus participatory democracy is embedded within the very notion of “prefigurative politics”. Here, I would argue that the range of community engagement and inclusive programs involving youth social action exhibit this sense of “prefigurative politics”. The sorority established in the Jesuitess school in Lucknow post-independence from colonial rule and later expanded particularly in Delphine Hart School Calcutta (Kolkata) reflected a conscious pedagogic effort to embed values of participatory democracy. The pedagogic approach including peer-to-peer learning program was designed in a way so that the school girls from well-off families studying in the school would actually be facilitators in the learning process of children from disadvantaged background as peers, not as social superiors. In facilitating the learning of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, the girls were also “learning valuable social skills of relating to their peers from different socioeconomic background”, as reported by alumna, Sumita, who is now a doctoral candidate in Physics. The community engagement programs were also expanded as the girls from the school visited neighbouring village schools once a week to teach the poor rural children there using fun play-method of learning. The lesson plan for these classes were made in Bengali (local language) by one of the case study school teachers, who studied herself in a Bengali medium Brahmo52 school. Though this teacher was coming from a Hindu Brahmin53 family, as the

52 The Brahmo movement was an indigenous social reform movement for equality and social justice led by intellectual and cultural elite men in 19thC Bengali. Not necessarily economic elite, as one of the leaders, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasar came from a poor rural background. Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarakanath Tagore and his father, Debendranath Tagore were in the forefront of this movement, which was begun by Raja Rammohan Roy, who mediated with the British governors to pass laws to ban forced burning of widows; while Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a noted Sanskrit scholar and Brahmin pundit married his own son to a widow. Unlike landowning (Zamindar), Rammohan Roy and members of the Tagore family, Vidyasagar did not did have

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following quote from her interview suggests, she had a very racialized “subaltern” working- class experience as a child growing up in the compound of a colonial Jute Mill even after 20 years of territorial independence from colonial rule. For me you see right from childhood the image of the Jesuitess schools I had was elitist for richer people and all that you know…so the changing ideology of the school under former leadership, the dreams and vision of a new world order was very attractive to me to join this school as a teacher. You see I come from suburbs and my father used to work in a Jute Mill and growing up as a kid in those Jute mill community along the banks of Ganges I knew very well what hierarchy was…you know there used to be a huge compound there, we the coloured skin people…even as children were not even allowed to use the road there and this was post-independence. There was separate housing for everybody based on position and social class- Indians on one side and the whites on the other side. Housing facilities would be based on the position and social class of the people. There were only two Indians who had better housing facility. They were the boss over the workers and were constantly travelling to Europe and America….you know during Christmas so many things would come in the ship at the harbour from abroad and lot of parties and all those. But even as children we were not allowed to go there….and you know all the top-shot Indian elite people there…their daughters would study in the Jesuitess convent school and I would think oh, they belong to another planet! And, then when I came here as a teacher and saw how the school was trying to break the hierarchy under former leadership…you know what I said- ok, so now I can also work in a Jesuitess school! - A DHS School Teacher

It is evident from the above quote that the colonial experience created new layers of hierarchies within the indigenous society and the hegemony of Brahminism in some contexts was ‘dehegemonised’ as it is also evident from the stories of poor and working-class Brahmin families of Bengal during the World War and immediate post-independence era depicted by neorealist film-maker and alum of Tagore’s Shantiniketan, Satyajit Ray54. A sense of “prefigurative politics” of a new world order is very much evident from the quote of this teacher, who was schooled in the indigenous Bengali medium Brahmo model of schooling. Along with few other socially conscious teachers at the school both from outside and inside the Jesuitess order, she became one of the prime engineers promoting various school outreach programs promoting youth social action and inclusive school reforms under the leadership of the then school Principal, Sister Valentine.

any cultural exposure to the West. But as Chakrabarty (2007) refers in his book, probably these men had compassionate hearts. http://www.thebrahmosamaj.net/history/history.html 53 Brahmins are the upper-most caste of the Indian Hindu society and considered as ‘hegemonic oppressors’ within the Indian context, according to both popular Indian and western epistemological understanding. 54 See: http://www.satyajitray.org/about_ray/apu_trilogy.htm

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Despite differences in race, nationality and cultural background, similar experiences of exclusion as a child and a sense of “prefigurative politics” also guided the former school Principal, an Irish-born Nun in the class-divided Irish society. It inspired her to grab every opportunity to break the deeply entrenched hierarchies of the Indian society, as it is evident from the following quote during an interview: I grew up in Ireland during my very early years… the war in Europe was raging in the 1939-1940…. my early experience of inequality as I grew up in Ireland has surely made me a strong advocate of inclusive schooling…. All secondary schools of the time (1948-1953) were fee paying so I went up on a scholarship and was acceptable because of my academic prowess… in spite of our much higher academic level; we were never treated as the social equivalents of the fee paying children. I saw the Jewish children being smuggled out to Ireland. I saw the condition they were in. And, Ireland was not an affluent country. It was a very poor country. During the winter there in 1940s when there was snow on the ground and it was bitterly cold, I sat with children who were without shoes beside me in the school. I sat with children whose heads were crawling with lice and I went home and told my mother- “No one would sit beside them”. And, she said; “You will sit beside them and I will clean your hair when you come home.” So when I see poor men here carrying heavy load, I see my own people. – Sister Valentine Coming from a rural impoverished Irish background during the World War, the former leadership also suffered the experience of a “subaltern” despite the fact that her skin colour signified “ruling relations” within the postcolonial Indian context as Smith (2005) would argue. However, the very last sentence in the quote above from Sister Valentine move from the ‘personal is political’ to the empathic ream of sahrdaya (empathy or compassion) for the “other”, as argued by Hogan (2003) with regards to Tagore’s “Politics of Otherness”. Though Tagore’s inclusive vision of school was much broader and all encompassing- class, caste, race, religion and gender; within the context of the case study school the vision of the former school Principal, Sister Valentine, as a transnational religious feminist from a working-class background was more geared towards breaking social class barriers. This is evident from the quote below from an interview with her. Everywhere you go you have the same big schools- these big elite schools. Everywhere! You don’t find any place without them. And, everyone feathering the nest of well-off kids and then those kids will go on to later become leaders of the country and possibly bigger exploiters than those that were there already. I mean why all this exploitation continues? ...Because, the people who are doing it are coming from that same insensitive class, because they have never been sensitized as children. - Sister Valentine The “prefigurative politics” behind the conceptualization of inclusive education at Delphine Hart School becomes clearly evident from the above lines. In the following sections of the chapter, I show how with the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s Sister

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Valentine utilized every opportunity to capitalize for the subaltern student population of the local community. I analyse how the historic reputation of the global Jesuitess institution, as well as institutional global connections and global imaginary about the poor “City of Joy” were strategically utilized by former school leadership. Finally, I argue about the possibilities as well as risks associated with such transition from being an old style missionary school Principal to an award winning social entrepreneur.

Capitalizing for the Subaltern

See in Calcutta when anybody talks about the [Jesuitess]...it means something big or something great about it. ...See [the institution] has a name. It is the name of the institution because [the institution] has a reputation for quality education in Calcutta. You ask anybody we are well known...oh [the Jesuitess school]! And, also the work that we do...because you see none of our Catholic schools has a program like the rainbow homes....so that has touched people and now our schools can be used for all these kinds of work for the brick-fields, for Sampoorna55...so that’s where these global organizations feel that this institution... we are working with [the institution] will give 100% and the trust and the goodwill has been built over the years and the work that we do can be seen by them. - -Sister Dora, current administrator of school Though Sister Valentine’s “missionary zeal”56 as a school leader coupled with a cohort of like-minded staff might have played a big role in expanding the work of DHS within the Calcutta (Kolkata) community and neighbouring villages since the 1980s; there is no doubt that the name and reputation of DHS as a Jesuitess institution played a key-role too. Since the school is part of a larger global network of Catholic schools, the very first time when the school faced severe financial challenges in 198357 while the policies of social inclusion were being implemented; Sister Valentine reached out to her personal and institutional Jesuitess network in Ireland to raise funds for the school. Thereafter, within the rapidly changing liberalising Indian economy and high inflation, over the years Sister Valentine along with the help of some staff members, have strategically gathered resources

55 It is one of the many community outreach programs set up by DHS during the leadership of Sister Valentine, whereby women in underserved communities in slums and outskirts of the city on its eastern fringes, are provided basic teacher’s training to run pre-schools for poor children in the community while their parents go out to work as daily wage labourers in the city. This prevents the children from following their parents into the city and get lost as street children or become part of the vicious child-labour nexus in the city. Some of the mothers of these children are also provided micro-credit and training to sell their hand-made products in the city, so that they can have a better livelihood, rather than having to come to the city to work as house-maids and often get abused by employers in the city. 56 A phrase used by the SarvaShikshya Mission (Education for All) State Project director, during our interview to refer to Sister Valentine’s passion for her educational work for the underprivileged.

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through their existing global Catholic and Jesuitess institutional network to raise funds for day scholars studying at DHS, children living in the residential home and other community outreach projects steered by the school. The global name and reputation of the umbrella institution, was a huge draw especially for attracting the support of individuals and agencies abroad, as they were more confident about the optimal utilization of their funds and other resources by the Jesuitess school. It is to be noted here that in recent years the global order of the Jesuitess led by the community of nuns in North America received associate status with the Department of Public Information of the United Nations in 2008 as a global civil society NGO and the worldwide Jesuitess network now has a permanent representation at the UN working to promote education of vulnerable women and children for social development and Human Rights. Here the work of Delphine Hart School under the leadership of Sister Valentine could be seen as part of a tradition of radical global feminist institutional leadership and growth from the late 16th-early 17th Century to 21st Century strategically utilizing global resources through their institutional network to meet local needs in different parts of the world for educating and empowering the marginalized wherever they are. DHS under the existing Jesuitess network was therefore seen as a trusted institution in terms of effectively embracing their responsibilities to other actors in the network; rather than any other native NGOs. Especially since NGO work has been also critiqued as undemocratic, unaccountable and affected by corruption like government organizations in the developing world by scholars, such as Zaidi (1999), Petras (1997, 1999) and Kamat (2004).

Image 8: Global Network of the Jesuitess from their website

57 In 1983 the then government raised teacher’s salaries and required even un-aided government recognised

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Doreen Massey (2005) argued that, "The lived reality of our daily lives is utterly dispersed, unlocalised in its sources and in its repercussions. The degree of dispersion, the stretching, may vary across social groups, but the point is that the geography will not be territorial. Where would you draw the line around the lived reality of your daily life? ...If we think space relationally, then it is the sum of all our connections, and in that sense utterly grounded, and those connections may go around the world” (p. 184-185). Drawing on this relational theory of space, it can be argued that though Delphine Hart School is located in India and though the Irish-born former school Principal has been living in India since her high school days, the school and the school’s leadership inhabited a transnational spatial location. Here I argue that this transnational space was also a major resource for the school to be able to garner support through the school’s global connections to educate and empower socioeconomically disadvantaged girls within the local context. The information about the school’s work were disseminated through the global Jesuitess network outside the school through official school website and also through other google and web-based sites built by school beneficiaries from abroad with graphic images of the poor city and the community where the school is located, highlighting the various community engagement and social justice related work the school has been doing with active engagement of its students and staff. As it has been already mentioned in the introductory chapter; DHS is part of a large global network of Jesuitess Catholic order with 4000 members around the world. It operates several girls’ schools and other ministries in 24 countries and 6 continents. This existing transnational “global connection” (Burawoy et al. 2000), between Jesuitess schools established since colonial times across the world, were strategically utilized by Sister Valentine as school Principal to garner resources to sustain the inclusive reform work steered from DHS for social transformation. The information about the school’s work available through the web and through school publications attracted the attention of those individuals and organizations. The school was thus able to establish successful partnership with individuals and organizations like the UNICEF, Human Rights Institute, Save the Children, as well as local Indian government’s SSA office under the self-described “opportunist” leadership of Sister Valentine since the 1990s to further promote its work and garner resources for the school.

private schools like Delphine Hart School to pay their teachers according to the raised pay-scale.

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Moreover, postcolonial Calcutta (Kolkata) is mostly known as the world famous city of slums. Around the world the popular social imaginary of people about Calcutta is generally associated with the social welfare work of Mother Teresa for the dying poor, orphans and lepers on the streets and the book “City of Joy” written by Dominique Lapierre in 1985 based on which a film was made in 1992. Both the book and the film were scathingly critiqued by the postcolonial Bengali intellectuals for showing only the poverty and deprivation of the third world city to the western audience in a de-historicised manner. The critics claimed that neither the book nor the film let readers or viewers know how colonial policies were often at the root of this poverty and deprivation in the region, as argued by Mukherjee (2011) through historical research. However, such criticism by a section of the Indian intellectual elite and their contrary construction of the false mythical Sonar Bangla narrative has been also critiqued by diasporic Bengali scholar Roy (2003) in her book “City Requiem, Calcutta”. Therefore, I argue here that the fact that Delphine Hart School is located in a very poor community in the postcolonial poor city of Calcutta made globally famous for its poverty, abandoned street lepers, slums and child labour; was probably also a major resource useful in promoting the school’s inclusive reform agenda and attracting volunteers and financial support from abroad, which also included diasporic Bengali academic in the US. It can be argued here that the popular “social imaginary” (Castoriadis 1987, Anderson 1991) about poverty of the city of Calcutta (Kolkata) became primary investment capital like resource for the school; just as micro-credit became capital for the bottom billion of poor women borrowers of the third world in the neoliberal economy, as argued by Roy (2010). However, I argue here that the DHS school leadership has been utilizing the institutional name, goodwill, global network, transnational spatial location and global imaginary about the poor city of Calcutta (Kolkata) as a resource to actually capitalize for the subaltern poor children in the region.

Global Justice Movement

Since the late 1990s, with heightened processes of globalization around the world, “global imaginary” is a term, which is being increasingly used in social science and philosophy by scholars, such as Appadurai (1996), Burawoy (2000), Taylor (2004), Steger (2009) and Rizvi (2010). It draws on Castoriadis (1987) and Anderson’s (1991) notion of national “social imaginary’ based on notions of kinship, religion and implicit backgrounds that facilitate cultural practices with a widely shared sense of their legitimacy structured by

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social dynamics shaped by history; rather than political ideology. However, instead of the Nation, the globe is taken as a frame of reference both by the champions of neoliberal market globalism, and those who are eager to find an alternative imaginary to propagate “global justice movement” (GJM). Steger (2009) argues, there has been an increased awareness since the 1990s about rising inequalities around the world and the injustices of neoliberal market globalism especially in the developing third world and postcolonial countries. Thereafter, an alternative political movement which he calls “justice globalism” has been seeking to create a counter global imaginary propagated by the members of the ‘global justice movement’. This awareness of injustice and inequality was also increasingly documented by task force and policy documents developed by global religious groups like the Jesuit Priests and nuns of the Jesuitess order, as it will be discussed in this section of this chapter. However, as it has been already argued with evidence in the chapter 5, the 1971 Jesuitess constitution within the Indian context already revealed a strong sense of the need to address social inequality through education. As a school leader, Sister Valentine took particular interest in documenting and creating printed materials as brochures, quarterly school magazine, books, pamphlets and other publications to promote the social justice and human rights related work Delphine Hart School has been doing embedded in the middle of one of the poorest cities in the world ravaged by centuries of colonial history, communal riots and settlement of refugees from neighbouring regions.

In recent years, with heightened awareness about issues related to neoliberal globalization, rising socioeconomic inequality, disharmony among different faith groups and faster mobility of people across the globe; the established Catholic networks around the globe have been also rethinking their action plan to extend and implement their core Catholic priorities of social justice and human rights globally. A major global Jesuitess conference took place in Kolkata58, India from November 4-18, 2002, where Jesuitess nuns and school administrators from the US, Australia, East Africa, England, India, Ireland, Mauritius, Peru, South Africa, Spain and Rome participated. A set of global guidelines and brochure was released at this event, where General Superior of the global Jesuitess order stated:

In the context of globalization our international network of schools and colleges has an important role to play in our work for personal and social transformation. These common guidelines are a tangible sign of our worldwide network. As you work with

58 This name change from colonial Calcutta to postcolonial Kolkata happened in January 2001.

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them during next few years, I am sure that these guidelines will raise a variety of challenges in each of your different contexts. I invite you to share the outcome of your deliberations with your colleagues worldwide, and I look forward to hearing how these guidelines have been implemented in each country.

Apart from the guidelines for holistic person centred education, faith development, educating for wisdom, striving for excellence, commitment to being an agent for social change, discernment, community participation and relationship building; this booklet of guidelines also included the need for inclusivity- embracing all for multicultural, multi-faith development and critical awareness of today’s reality. The document also emphasised the implementation of participative management structure based on the spirit of trust, collaboration and transparency as well as global networking by utilizing internet technology, personal contact, educational exchange and visits across institutions and development of collaboration with other global agencies.

Similar developments could be observed within the Catholic Jesuit network with the formation of a Jesuit Task Force to deliberate on the topic of “Globalization and Marginalization” and suggest necessary action plan. “Marginalization is a process denying opportunities and outcomes to those ‘living on the margins’ and enhancing the opportunities and outcomes of those who are ‘at the centre’. Marginalization combines discrimination and social exclusion. It offends human dignity and it denies human rights, especially the right to live effectively as equal citizens.” (Cornish, 2007) Globalization to a great extent has also increased the process of marginalization for many in the world. The Jesuit task force presented their report at the Loyola Institute in Sydney Australia in July 2007. In this report the task force highlighted the need to go further in responding creatively and concretely to the challenge posed by globalization. They suggested that, problems which are “global in nature” need “global solutions”. For this, the task force identified six general global strategies (Cornish, p. 5):

1. Strengthen an individual and corporate global outlook which is rooted in our local commitments. 2. Adopt an inclusive approach which involves all stakeholders, building alliances and bridges which provide spaces for interaction and dialogue. 3. Stress mutual accompaniment supporting the choices of the marginalized in their struggles. 4. Explore the application of the Ignatian principle of communitarian discernment. 5. Promote publicly an overall ethical, human and interior perspective. 6. Design structures of governance which equip us better to face the challenges of globalization and marginalization.

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The report also highlighted the steps that the Jesuit institutions have already taken in recent years “to make the governance of the Society of Jesus truly global and yet rooted in the local situation.” A significant change in this respect has been affirmative steps taken to promote “partnerships in mission”, to make the governance more inclusive by welcoming lay people and members of other religious congregations to share in the mission and work of the Jesuits. “They too are considered by the Task Force to be ‘apostolic subjects’ or ‘Jesuit Apostolic Partners’.” (Cornish, p. 5)

Similar movement to attract lay people outside of the Catholic Jesuitess order and from other religious groups had already begun within the complex postcolonial Indian context driven by local need, as already discussed earlier in this thesis. However, the rising global consensus in the new millennium among the Jesuit and Jesuitess network about the adverse effects of globalization on their institutional social justice mission further helped Delphine Hart School to promote the work it had already begun locally within the Catholic network globally. Though the Catholic religious community (like most religious communities around the world) is shrouded with many internal contradictions, charges of corruption, child abuse and controversies; the recent election of a Latin American Argentinian Priest as Pope, and Pope Francis’ comparatively liberal attitudes and open global campaign against capitalism throwing open the Vatican for financial scrutiny can be seen as a gradual institutional trend within the Catholic order towards more democratic and inclusive reforms.

Leadership Marshalling Support

As an insider and an active change agent within the global Catholic network having close friends among Jesuit Priests and Christians Brothers in Europe, Canada and Australia; Sister Valentine could see that the work Delphine Hart School has been doing in order to meet local needs in Calcutta (Kolkata) since the political turbulence of 1970s now has global significance. The opportunities to establish transnational relationships to facilitate Delphine Hart School’s work further became apparent especially after the 2002 conference of the Jesuitess in Kolkata. The heightened global processes in the new millennium further facilitated the work of the school as Sister Valentine got invited to deliver talks at the UN headquarters in the US and several Universities and organizations in Europe, Canada and Australia following her national recognition within India in 2007, as the first non-Indian-born

166 Chapter 6: Promoting Inclusive Education Reform 167 resident to be given the fourth highest civilian award by the Indian President for her work in the field of education. Therefore, it can be argued that her role as a principle actor within the existing global Catholic network has been extremely important in promoting the work of DHS not just nationally but globally, which raises questions about sustainability of the DHS model of inclusive reforms in the absence of an equally active leader for change. The school leader’s capacity to reassemble resources from the existing local and global network to promote reforms for community engagement, social justice and human rights appear to be crucial in the DHS model of inclusive school reform, especially since it is an un-aided government recognised private school. This issue of sustainability will be analysed at greater length in the next chapter. However, what I am arguing here is that the established global institutional and religious network has been also crucial to enable the school leader and help her to attract financial, intellectual and human resources for supporting the school’s work to educate and empower the marginalized subaltern girls of Calcutta (Kolkata). The following quote from an interview with an Australian beneficiary of the school, Kate, who has been spending at least couple of months every year for the past 10 years volunteering and fund-raising for the school, is useful in understanding that it is not just the school leader as an active agent facilitating the school’s work. The established institutional network is also very important in terms of the school leader’s capacity to attract resources from elsewhere outside the local context. My son’s friend, Lori, this wonderful girl who studied in the Jesuitess school here was actually responsible for my relationship with DHS this past 10 years and I have been coming here every year and when I go back to Australia I organize fundraising events for the school. One day she came and told me that they are going to India and asked me “Kate would you like to come with me”? You see I had very late and difficult experience of child-birth after 15 years of marriage. I had almost become hopeless but then I was blessed with my son, but he was diagnosed in school as being dyslexic. So, I had challenging years as a mother too while raising him. With God’s grace my son grew up to be a fine boy and he is now in college. I always wanted to do something for disadvantaged children. When Lori wrote back to me from India with pictures and asked me again if I would like to go there and join her, I said to myself, “Yes, this is where I should go and work for the children. This is something I have wanted to do!” So I went there, met Sister [Valentine] and told her that I would like to work for her. She asked me “what can you do?” I said, “I am a mother, I can do anything.” - A School Beneficiary

Kate’s connection with the school and long association thereafter was thus driven by a Jesuitess school connection in Australia. Similarly, the school volunteers and benefactors

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from Ireland and England, whom I interviewed for this research, had institutional connection with Delphine Hart School as alums or staff of Jesuitess schools in Ireland and England. One research participant from Germany, who is the sponsor for some of the girls in the residential home at Delphine Hart School, had personal family connection with the city like another participant from the US. The second research participant from the US had both Catholic institutional connection with DHS and family connection with the city of Calcutta. The research participant from Canada, who is a researcher on indigenous education, established connection with DHS through a Jesuit Priest in Canada and was visiting the school with a research team during my own field research. School teachers and Principal from an Australian Catholic school also participated in research and were visiting the school for the India immersion program for their students. They had established connection with the school through a Catholic Brother’s mission, the Edmund Rice Education Australia. 59

As noted earlier, applying Massey’s (2005) theory of space to understand the work of Delphine Hart School, it can be argued that Sister Valentine and each of these school beneficiaries within the larger global network of Catholic institutions, as well as global network of native Calcuttans now living and working in other parts of the world, are inhabiting a transnational space. In fact, the entire funding for the residential home for street children on the terrace of the school in the late 1990s came from a big company in Netherland through personal network of a West Bengal Governor’s daughter, who married a Dutchman and was looking for a trustworthy NGO in Calcutta to donate for charity, as part of the company’s corporate social responsibility work. Each of these beneficiaries thus constituted a transnational space of power and resources which helped to facilitate the work of the school. However, each of them were also driven by a sense of “prefigurative politics” driven by their personal life stories, connections with the city of Calcutta and strong sense of social injustice, which can remind a distant observer the famous quote from cultural anthropologist, Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. The following section will further elaborate on the interconnected reform agendas of the local and global organizations and individuals, who facilitated and promoted the work of Delphine Hart School.

59 See: http://www.erea.edu.au/about-us/our-story/edmund-rice/the-educational-philosophy-of-edmund-rice

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Interconnected Reform Agendas

This section of the chapter will reflect on the interconnected reform agendas of global organizations, such as UNICEF, Save the Children as well as national organizations, such as the Sarva Shikshya Abhiyan (Education for All) of Government of India and Institute of Human Rights Education (IHRE), whose work in spreading human rights education for social justice has been studied by Bajaj (2011). The partnership work of Delphine Hart School as North Eastern regional partner of IHRE further helped to promote particular kind of inclusive reform agenda for social change that Delphine Hart School has been instituting since the 1980s. As already referred to in the earlier chapter, the ten part series of values education curriculum, “We are the World” developed by Delphine Hart School and published by Orient Longman was adapted as the official Human Rights Education curriculum. The long quote in the next page from the Preface to the book- “Human Rights Education Teachers Manual and Student’s Module” published by Delphine Hart School in collaboration with the Institute of Human Rights Education (IHRE) is good example to show the interconnected nature of local and global reform agendas in education within the Indian context, since this curriculum was also adopted for promotion in the public schools by the Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (Education for All) State Project directorate office of the Government of India.

Image 9: Front Cover of book on Human Rights Education

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We live in a world of a thousand oppressions. Millions of our people, children, women, dalits60, adivasis61, the poor, slum dwellers and many others are subjected to injustices, rights denial, exploitations, oppressions, discriminations and violence. How do we change such a brutal, heartless world? Where do we begin? It can only begin in the classroom, where the destiny of the nation and of the world is forged. The seeds of a better world, of love, friendship, compassion, beauty, creativity, freedom, equality should be sown and nurtured in the minds of children ...The purpose of all education is to sensitize, to humanize, to take humanity to higher levels of knowledge, awareness, freedom and social responsibility. However, education as defined above is a distant dream. The education system today divides, discriminates, fragments. It justifies existing inequities and creates new ones. It alienates the student from the world around, from the society that gave birth to her and nurtured her. It prevents the students from relating to and understanding the denials, deprivations, the struggles of large sections of society and thereby also denies wholesome knowledge. Human Rights Education is a different education, an alternate radical education. It is sensitizing, humanizing, bondage-breaking, liberation education. It celebrates humanity. It cultivates critical insights in students, equips them with tools to question, to analyse, to challenge and ultimately to change system of injustice and oppression. It helps each child to realize her ultimate potential, not as a self-centered, aggressive individual, but as a member of a society, of a democratic nation. It is the fruition of the dream of reformers, radicals, national builders for a long time. The radical education needs a radical pedagogy. The classroom, as it exists today, is ill situated to transact a humanizing education. Classroom relations are power relations with the teacher wielding absolute authority over the student. The curriculum, evaluation methods, a fiercely competitive culture and concept of discipline militated against nurturing human rights and democratic culture. Human Rights Education needs to be child-centered education, re-presenting the child’s role as a constructor of knowledge rather than treating her as a passive recipient of information. ...Together, we have a world to challenge and change and a world to win. Chairperson, Institute of Human Rights Education, India The content of the preface above resonates with the anxiety about mainstream education system expressed by indigenous education reformer Tagore over a century ago during colonial India (Dasgupta 2009, Ghosh, Naseem & Vijh 2010, Mukherjee 2013, Bhattacharya 2013). As an ‘organic intellectual’ (Gramsci 1992), Rabindranath Tagore in India, whom Ghosh, Naseem and Vijh (2010) refers to as the “intellectual forerunner” of Paulo Freire in Brazil, envisioned such an alternative inclusive model of schooling and took direct action to establish this school prefiguring a new world order, when the minds of children will be free, not just from colonially imposed shackles but also indigenous modes of

60Dalit is a term used to refer to a group of people traditionally regarded as untouchable within the Indian context.Dalits are a mixed population, consisting of numerous social groups from all over India; they speak a variety of languages and practice a multitude of religions. There are many different names proposed for defining this group of people, including Panchamas ("fifth varna"), and Asprushya ("untouchables") 61Adivasi is an umbrella term for a heterogeneous set of ethnic and tribal groups claimed to be the aboriginal population of India. They comprise a substantial indigenous minority of the population of India.

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oppression. Freire worked among oppressed communities in Brazil for raising critical consciousness against the dominant structures of society and critiqued the “banking system of education” prevalent in the mainstream, similar to the “factory-model” of “parrot’s training” critiqued by Tagore. Towards the end of his life, Friere also began thinking about the need for expanding the “social radius of acceptance” through education in the “Pedagogy of the Heart” (1998). Similarly, “Tagore ardently believed and hoped he could rouse consciousness through awareness campaigns about societal evils, exploitative politics and religious conservatism…. throughout his life he remained an advocate of creative freedom, one that would lead to an inclusive spirit of universalism, rather than orthodoxy.” (Dasgupta et al. 2013, p. xii-xiii) An educator from the very beginning Tagore realised that the expansion of the “social radius of acceptance” particularly for those who are in positions of advantage/privilege in society was very important for the upliftment of the marginalised. It is essential to open the minds and hearts of those who are in positions of power and advantage in society for transformative social change to happen. With evidence from historical writings on the Jesuitess order India and data from my ethnographic research, I have shown that though the work of the case study school was rather exclusive since colonial times due to unjust colonial government policy, the school became progressively more inclusive. This was particularly under the leadership of Sister Valentine since the 1980s with similar ideals like Freire and Tagore to expand “social radius of acceptance” among the privileged for “ripple” effect within Indian society. With shifting global imaginary about education in contemporary times, scholars such as Torres (2009) and Rizvi and Lingard (2010) have argued how the neoliberal imaginary has been crowding our understanding of educational problems and solutions in a problematic way. The issue of social equity in education is no exception. International donor organizations and scholars to the right of the political spectrum use human capital theory and the market logic to argue for even social equity in education. The problem with such rationalizing of educational purpose is that it does not just undermine the intrinsic human values of education as argued in the Preface to the HRE teachers’ training manual and theorists such as Freire and Tagore within the colonial Indian context; but it also widens the educational inequities around the world and acts as barriers to implement inclusive education for all, as it has been studied by many scholars in recent times. Rizvi and Lingard (2010, p. 201) argues that, If the neoliberal imaginary steers us towards a particular formation of subjective awareness, together with a particular ideological interpretation of recent changes in the global economy and culture, it cannot be challenged without a competing

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imaginary. This competing and new social imaginary will empathize cosmopolitan learning that does not ‘ontologize’ market logic and the self-capitalizing individual, but seeks to work with a different moral sense of people’s ‘situatedness in the world’, in ways that are both critical and reflexive.” In the middle of this global scenario, the partnership of IHRE with Delphine Hart School to further critically reflexive values based Human Rights education could be seen as a viable alternative to not just address local problems within the Indian society as stated by the chairperson in the preface, but also a global problem in the neoliberal era. It is to be noted here that IHRE is a department for educational program under the larger human rights organization, “People’s Watch” which was registered in the year 1981 as The Centre for Promotion of Social Concerns (CPSC), a Charitable Trust under Indian Trust Act. The CPSC, popularly known as People’s Watch based in Madurai, Tamilnadu (a Southern Indian State) is headed by an indigenous Tamil Christian convert and human rights activist. His personal website is full of news about oppression against dalits in various parts of India and especially Tamilnadu, the Southern Indian state, which has been historically a hub of right-wing Hindu activities and ill-famous for individualistic hierarchical caste-based oppressive identity politics (De Neve and Carswell, 2011). Many Christian converts across the country are mostly from dalit communities within India, which includes several board members of the Institute for Human Rights Education and CPSC. The board of the CPSC and People’s Watch in general is a group of self-selecting network of people, an example of local civil society and moral entrepreneurship seeking to utilize the powerful global discourse on Human Rights to build political consensus about addressing local needs of caste, gender and religion based discrimination and social oppression. However, even in doing this kind of work for social justice, they face many barriers as the established order of the society and State would not even allow them to use the word, Human Right to register their organization.62

62 “We are not easily allowed to form associations which have the objective to work on human rights, and if we are then there are problems in registration. In Tamil Nadu, for example, there is a fairly recent law that says an organisation cannot have the words ‘human rights’ in its title. We also face constraints in exercising our right to seek and utilise resources, whether domestic or international, for human rights work. In spite of our vibrant constitution and our vigilant judiciary, which most often is willing to stand on our side, we find that our right to assemble, to protest, to show dissent is being violated. Social protest in this country is gradually becoming criminalised.” - See more at: http://www.ishr.ch/news/henri-tiphagne-indian-human-rights- defender#sthash.VbdsEClo.dpuf

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The board of “People’s Watch”, therefore, consists of indigenous dalit activists, left- wing indigenous middle class Indian academics, retired Indian government bureaucrats, Judges, representations of international Human Rights Commission and religious missionary social reformers of contemporary times, such as Sister Valentine of Delphine Hart School. Here it is also important to note that a “Human Rights” or “child rights” based “learner- centered” pedagogical approach, which is the kind of progressive reform that DHS has been promoting in collaboration with IHRE and other global organizations, such as the UNICEF and Save the Children might be critiqued by some scholars such as Tabulawa (2003), O’Sullivan, (2006); and Schweisfurth (2011) as a continuing process of Westernization in the developing world disguised as quality or effective teaching. However, as I have argued earlier in chapter 2 by citing from Mignolo (2000) and Chen (2010) that such critique of progressive educational ideas as westernization is ideological and does not solve the pedagogic problem of diverse needs of learners. It is equally rooted in the colonial logic of difference and division of the world into East - West and North - South. Moreover, it would be truly “disingenuous to call human rights Eurocentric” since it goes against the interest of “righting the wrongs” of the colonial past commissioned by the UN Special Committee on Decolonization as Spivak (2004) suggests. Moreover, as it is the case with IHRE and its partners like Delphine Hart School within India; large numbers of human rights workers in these former colonized countries include domestic oppressed communities, who are often culturally positioned against Eurocentrism and the elite diaspora abroad from the economically developing world also champion for “diversity”, positioned “against Eurocentrism” internationally (Spivak 2004). Pieterse (2000) argues that development discourse and work of development agencies and civil society groups both in the global South and the North may be authoritarian and prescriptive in many ways, but to label it as 'westernization' ignores diverse historical currents that shape development work or reform. A more appropriate analytics would be polycentrism, so that the rejoinder to Eurocentrism is not Third Worldism but recognition of the fact that multiple centers, also in the South, now shape development discourse and work. This is quite evident from the complex polycentric interconnected nature of the civil society organization CPSC and the way in which their program IHRE, UNICEF and Indian Government’s SSA office have partnered with Delphine Hart School to promote child-centric human rights based curriculum and pedagogy through publication of text books and teachers’ training both in private schools as well as government run public schools.

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The values-based curriculum which could be available only to students and teachers of elite English medium schools was translated into Bengali and Hindi to make it available for teachers and students who are part of the public system within West Bengal and also to neighbouring Eastern States. This process of indigenous knowledge transfer from Delphine Hart School’s innovative work in curriculum and pedagogy was also supported with funding from the UNICEF, which helped the school to establish a “Knowledge Hub” within the school to recruit staff for translation of the curriculum from English to local Indian language (Bengali and Hindi) and design appropriate pictorial illustrations for the textbooks. The goal was to draw on the indigenous practical knowledge of the school Principal and teachers as practitioners of inclusive pedagogic model within their school, in order to transfer the knowledge to other schools through publication of a toolkit for teachers and teacher’s training. Dreze and Sen (2013) suggest in their book, that the privileged in society should take active role in advocating for the welfare of the marginalized subalterns of the society as public debates in the world’s largest democracy is skewed towards the interest of the relatively privileged. “This exclusion, in turn, leads to a pervasive disregard for the interests of the underprivileged in public policy” (p.286) they write. As mentioned earlier, they highlight the centrality of education for development and the need for the comparatively privileged to empower the marginalised. They highlighted the problem of privileged excellence and social division within Indian society hindering real inclusive and sustainable development. Within this context, the inclusive model of values-based education charted in the image below can be seen as a welcome pedagogic solution seeking to change the privileged middleclass Bhadrolok subculture and their “babu-coolie” relationship with the subalterns of their society to get publicly engaged with issues of inclusive social welfare and development. This inclusive vision of the school is represented well in the image below from “A Toolkit for Teacher” training manual published by the school from the Knowledge Hub funded by the UNICEF.

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Image 10: Diagram from “A Toolkit for Teachers”

As an institution, Delphine Hart School’s work has been lead more by its spiritual institutional philosophy, rather than any political ideology. Though, as it has been argued earlier in this chapter, a kind of “prefigurative politics” envisioning a new world order inspired several key actors, who initiated and promoted change within the school for a more inclusive school culture. Just as the future of Latin America cannot be projected without taking into serious consideration its colonial legacy of Christianity as argued by Mignolo (2000); the future of India and South Asia in general cannot be projected without taking into account the indigenous modes of social inequality and injustice along with British colonial legacy of English language and legacy of Christian missionaries from different parts of Europe and America. In many ways these missionaries became symbols of deliverance for the oppressed class of people within the indigenous society, i.e the lower-caste, dalit, Santhal and other tribal oppressed groups. As it has been already stated above, the director of the Institute for Human Rights Education (IHRE) based in Madurai within India comes from a dalit Christian Tamil ethnicity background. The choice of global engagement by these

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marginalized groups of the Indian society both in the historic past and at present is driven by their own marginalized “subaltern” position in their native society. As argued earlier in this thesis, much like the rise of Christian liberation theology in Latin America which ran parallel to the colonial history, the radical message of equality and justice in the gospel also inspired and still inspire the marginalized and oppressed groups within the Indian subcontinent. As Noam Chomsky said in an interview recently to social justice activist, Abel Collins- “There is a reason why Christians were persecuted the first three centuries....The Gospels are radical – it’s a radical text – that’s a basically radical pacifism with its preferential option for the poor.”63 The priests along with lay people driven by a sense of social justice would set up groups with Latin American peasants to read the Gospels and encourage them to demand more rights from the region’s military dictatorships – which became known as liberation theology (Berryman 1987, Brown 1993). Therefore, in the next section of this chapter I will again analyse more specifically on the agency of the former school Principal, Sister Valentine, as a religious feminist with a strong class-consciousness and commitment to social justice strategically negotiating with diverse ideologies, discourse and political interest to enable resources for the particular model of inclusive education agenda which organically developed at Delphine Hart School.

Leadership Enabling Resources

We can do it. We have enough schools in India to really change the system if we want to. And, to keep in mind that all those children who are emerging from the big schools, they are going to be the future IAS officers and leaders. On the other hand, the poor ones we take in are going to be the future politicians. So we need to take them all in and conscientize them…All over the world there are thousands and thousands of secondary school kids who could easily make the rest of the children literate and benefit a lot in the process. - Sister Valentine

In spite of the fact that the school promotional material borrowing from the DFID report deny the need for massive (financial) resources to enable transformative inclusive reforms; it is quite evident from field data that large global assemblage of human, intellectual symbolic, ideological and financial resources have gone to develop and promote inclusive education at Delphine Hart School. As argued earlier in this chapter, this was possible because of the

63 See: Chomsky (2013) in: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/12/noam-chomsky-u-s-used-to-have-people- killed-for-practicing-what-pope-francis-preaches/

176 Chapter 6: Promoting Inclusive Education Reform 177 institutional global network of the school and the school leader’s ability to utilize these resources strategically. However, as one of the Irish participants for research stated: “we are so wasteful. I am amazed at the amount of work that is being done here with so little resources.” Similarly, international agencies like UNICEF and Save the Children as well as other individual school volunteers and benefactors who were interviewed from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane (Australia); New York (USA), Winniepeg (Canada), Bray (Ireland) and Manchester (UK) could see maximum utilization of the resources that Sister Valentine has been assembling from the existing global network of the Jesuitess order of schools and other organizations. Moreover, the rising global discourse about “inclusive education” and “human rights” and “child rights” in the recent past even within the global Catholic and Jesuitess network was useful for Delphine Hart School to promote its indigenous inclusive model of education which also inspired other Jesuitess schools and even the government. This is evident from the following quote from the school newsletter and as it was also observed during fieldwork for this research. You will be happy to hear that the Central Government has now sanctioned 600 homes for street girls all over India and is quoting the example of the Jesuitess Homes of which we have six in kolkata as model. With the new RTE act which mandates all children within the age of 6-14 years are to be in school, there is huge scope for all we have been trying to do here in our small way in terms of teacher’s training and reaching out to all children in need. So I look forward to a very busy retirement when I finish here in December 2011! (Sister Valentine; School Newsletter May 2011) The school under the leadership of Sister Valentine has been also utilizing the intellectual resources and social network of several individual volunteers at the school both from within India and from different parts of the world. The case of an Australian Math teacher, Joseph, in this respect is particularly interesting to note. Joseph has been associated with the school for 20 years now. He stated during interview that he went to India through British council for a conference to actually explore the thriving Indian private school market to be able to sell his fun-math and children’s picture books for primary and middle schools. He met Sister Valentine during the seminar at the British council, where the school Principals from various city private schools were invited. He offered to visit their school to teach the teachers how to utilize the curriculum materials in their classroom with the hopes of being able to sell these textbooks in the future if the curriculum was adopted.

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Though Joseph is a self-proclaimed atheist, according to him Sister Valentine converted his heart turning a humanitarian out of him. After visiting the school and seeing the levels of poverty and deprivation within the community where the school was operating and after listening to Sister Valentine’s missionary consciousness raising call for help, Joseph has now become one of the most committed donor and beneficiaries for the school, who raises funds for the school in Australia to support various school activities in Calcutta (Kolkata). This could be interpreted critically as “social pornography” such as in the “white messiah” movies by critical scholars, such as Vera and Gordon (2003). However, it is to be noted here that like many other individual school beneficiaries, Joseph has become a prime beneficiary for the school over the years driven by Sister Valentine’s selfless “charism” as Alpion (2007) described the term with respect to Mother Teresa. The fact that the school leader’s ability to capitalize on global connections and resources changed many lives in the poor community of rising number of refugees and street children is illustrated by the following case of one such prime beneficiary, Ameena. She came to the school in the mid-80s when these reform efforts were picking up. She came from a very disadvantaged refugee Muslim family background from Bangladesh and studied in the school as a day scholar along with well-off children. Later she also got secretarial training at the College in Park Street run by the same Jeusitess order. Her college education was also sponsored by the school and the school also provided her employment. She is now a smart educated confident woman working as the coordinator of one of the school outreach projects- “ChildLine” with a 24/7 emergency hotline number- 1098; funded by the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development linking State Governments, NGOs and corporate sectors to serve all children in need of care and protection. Ameena appeared as a gregarious person and narrated her entire life story and family history to me. She now earns and provides for her parents, as her father survived after contacting Tuberculosis but could not continue doing his work as a daily wage earning labourer. She is also happily married to local Kolkata Muslim businessman, who runs a textile shop in the nearby New Market area. She expressed her gratitude towards, Sister Valentine. According to Ameena, without her mentoring and help she could not be in the position in which she is now. She appeared to be passionate about her work and she does not look at it as 10-5 office job. She works round the clock as and when it is necessary and is very passionate about what she is doing.

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See it doesn’t matter what time it is. Whenever, we get a call on Childline that a child needs to be rescued, we have to go. Of course, I have my team of staff whom I send more these days as I am going to have a child (smiles). But, I am available 24/7 and even in this condition you know I went almost near the Bangladesh border the other day to rescue a child who was being trafficked. I have to prepare our regional reports and then attend National Conferences where the regional Childline coordinator meets. When I work for these children I remember at each and every step how blessed I have been for getting admitted to this school and getting the opportunities I got for education. - Ameena

Image 11: Poster of Childline at the School

Risks and Issues of Sustainability

In some cases like in Australia, the work of missionaries has led to the formation of a “lost generation” as part of the civilizing mission. (Allender, 2014) This is probably true to some extent even within the Indian context. However, the significance of the work of particularly the Jesuitess order and Delphine Hart School within the Indian context cannot be discounted as colonial because of this, since historical evidence on the Jesuitess work in India shows that the priorities of this institution was to educate and empower the poor marginalised Catholic girls in the region. Following historic demographic changes in the region the Jesuitess missionary nuns slowly began to also educate diverse groups of indigenous girls in the region and inspiring them to become change agents within their own community, though paternalistic sometimes in their attitudes as argued by Allender (2014). However, though the DHS model of school reform appear to be a hybrid indigenous model of inclusive education for development, which involved a healthy dialogue between the East and the West; yet one cannot discount questions of its sustainability, especially based on observations during fieldwork. The primary reason appears to be the model’s dependence on entrepreneurial school leadership’s ability to assemble necessary resources for the inclusive school reforms from diverse local and global sources. Moreover, there appeared to

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be total absence of conceptual understanding of the concept of inclusive education and its relevance within the contemporary Indian context among some of the school staff, as well as the larger school community. Though the inclusive pedagogic practices developed by some of the school staff was being published with funding from global donor agencies, such as UNICEF. Moreover, within the God/Goddess worshipping society many of the reforms at the school are perceived as purely “Sister Valentine’s idea” as revealed through data from this research. Though, these reforms were instituted by the school leadership based on local needs as they arose, and were implemented following the philosophy and tradition of the Jesuitess nuns historically. However, speaking with members of the school community and even some international school beneficiaries, it appeared they literally think “inclusive education” within that context is Sister Valentine’s idea which is now being celebrated globally. Even most teachers in the school do not have theoretical understanding of inclusive education at the conceptual level, though they were trained by Sister Valentine to practice the 5-step methodology of teaching for inclusive education. While some almost worship her as a “Goddess” (Devi) for noble ideals following local cultural tradition of hero/idol worship, others more westernised rational thinking school staff and community members think her ideas do not work locally, since the social gap between the haves and the have-nots in society is huge. Several local research respondent64, also referred to Sister Valentine as “Devi” (Goddess) during interviews, which is something the local poor indigenous people of Calcutta (Kolkata) also refer to Mother Teresa (in spite of the criticism from intellectual Bhadrolok) even before the Catholic order in Vatican considered conferring her sainthood. As it became evident from one of the interviews, this kind of indigenous spiritual beliefs also acted as a major resource for Sister Valentine and her team of like-minded staff at the school to exercise their authority in pushing for inclusive reforms as against the resistance from the Bhadrolok middleclass. This could be a risky prospect for future sustainability of such reforms unless the local community (including the Bhadrolok) take collective agency for instituting these reforms and unless they realize the benefits of such inclusive school reforms for future

64 These respondents were Bengali speaking indigenous students living in the residential home at the Delphine Hart School and even Principal and teachers in neighbouring Government schools with whom Delphine Hart School had partnered to do community outreach work for teacher’s training and to provide education for poor children of the residential home, who could not cope with academic pressure of the English medium school.

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inclusive development of the community, as Dreze and Sen (2013) had argued in their book based on their lifetime of research on development issues in the region. However, this element of “hero worshipping” is probably not just an indigenous Indian cultural phenomenon. In the age of global capitalism and rise of the neoliberal entrepreneurial logic of leadership to solve global social problems, such elevation of the individual leader’s work can be observed everywhere. In giving responsibility in the hands of the individual social entrepreneur even for development work; such discourse ignores the larger structural inequalities of this world based on nationality, race, gender, class etc. It is to be noted here that in recent years, the work of Delphine Hart School under the Leadership of Sister Valentine was also recognized by a major global organization as successful example of “social entrepreneurship” by a school leader to solve local problems. The popular discourse about the school’s work among the subaltern indigenous community as well as among some international organization, therefore, appears to be that of either “Goddess phenomena” or “entrepreneurial leadership” of Sister Valentine. Though, the DFID case study (Jessop 1998) refutes the thesis that the work of Delphine Hart School was driven by a leadership style which could be defined as a “personality cult” and it claims that the “best practices” can be replicated elsewhere in other school contexts. However, during the research when I asked questions about the award for “social entrepreneurship” to Sister Valentine, she did not appear quite happy with the award as it did not help to bring any financial resources needed by the school. Indeed, the award for social entrepreneurship conferred by the particular global organization is a symbolic recognition of the school’s work and that of the school leadership. It is expected that individuals, such as Sister Valentine will be entrepreneurial to raise money from various sources, just has she had done before.

Conclusion

The problem with both the logic of de-contextualized formulation of “best practices” and public discourse about “personality cult”/ “Goddess phenomena”/ “social entrepreneurship” is that they ignore the historical and sociological forces facilitating social change and interconnected nature of institutional work embedded within the society, as argued in this chapter and the previous chapter. The problem with such popular neoliberal rationalizing of the role of the individual for social change and de-contextualised notion of best practice is that it overlooks the role of other major and minor actors and stake-holders initiating change, just as it also ignores historical forces. The role of the school leader has

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been crucial for conceptualizing and promoting the inclusive educational work of DHS. However, the elevation of one leader for social change either as the “Goddess” according to traditional indigenous beliefs or “social entrepreneur” according to the logic of the 21stCentury market society, ignores the contribution of the vast network of people, institutions and their support utilized by the self-described “opportunist” leader in promoting social change. It also creates unhealthy competitive environment within the institution itself, which is seeking to promote collaborative community values for transformative social change. As Sister Valentine herself said in one of the interviews reacting to rumours about the Jesuitess order sending her back to Ireland, “When you get a lot of praise and you get recognition, there is always jealousy you know and people start spreading rumours.” Such discourse could be divisive and eventually hurt the very collaborative community values the institution has been working to establish and make it difficult to actually sustain inclusive reforms, because the local community actually fails to take ownership in instituting these changes, which is a necessary condition for sustaining radical reforms. Though in her evaluative case study Jessop (1998) argued strongly that she observed a sense of community ownership in the school about the inclusive school reforms, evidence from this research shows mixed response. The next chapter of the thesis will further discuss and analyse in detail some of the sustainability issues observed during fieldwork.

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Chapter 7

Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms

Introduction

Chronologically speaking the previous two chapters analysed the school’s work prior to the beginning of fieldwork for this research. However, data about the school’s work during the 1980s and 1990s till the time when this research began was generated during fieldwork through interviews with old school principal, administrative and teaching staff, alumni and archival school publications, as well as other scholarly publications on the school’s work. This chapter is an analysis of the school’s dilemmas of transition from old style missionary schooling and leadership to a new kind of schooling and leadership geared towards globalizing standards as observed during the fieldwork for this case study. It analyses the school’s struggle to meet the competing demands of State policy and global development agencies, as well as the demands of the new Indian middle class parents actively seeking to engage in the neoliberal global economy and prepare their children to compete globally.

Drawing on ethnographic observations in the field, interviews with research participants and critical ethnographic work on the city of Calcutta (Kolkata) in recent years by Roy (2003, 2011), Ganguly-Scrase (2003) and Ganguly-Scarse and Scrase (2008); this chapter particularly analyses the dilemmas and challenges of the school. The chapter analyses how the current school leadership has been struggling to balance the social justice mission of the institution while managing the existential crisis the institution is facing now because of dwindling number of fee-paying students, decline in donor funds from abroad and steep competition from new corporate schools in the 21stCentury. In doing so, this chapter argues how the

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institutional policy changes that are taking place right now are occurring alongside historic dynamics.

The chapter suggests that despite the Global Justice Movement (GJM) within the Catholic Jesuit and Jesuitess Network in the new millennium to address issues of rising inequality and uneven development because of neoliberal globalization, Delphine Hart School and its historic inclusive school reform model appear to be in a state of high-tension. This chapter argues that global neoliberal economic forces and social imaginary appear to be reifying indigenous social class hierarchies, even as global development agencies, the global Jesuitess network and National policy, such as Right to Education Act (2010) are pushing for socially inclusive schooling policy and practice. It analyses the changing nature of the school’s pedagogic approach and youth social action in new times, to suggest a sense of uncertainty about the future of inclusive reforms in the middle of deep societal changes that are taking place within India.

Leadership Change and Organizational Restructuring

The school is under renovation. Not just the school building but internally the school is witnessing great changes and restructuring. Instead of the former school Principal, Sister Valentine; there are three Sisters now looking after the multifarious work of the school. There is a visible division between the school and a separate [Jesuitess] Social Center. The school is no longer the center for social transformation. As I entered the school building, I could see bamboo structures & tarpaulin covering the school buildings. The courtyard in the middle, surrounded by the school buildings on 3 sides, where kids play for lack of proper playground, was covered with streaks of sand and cement. The new school Principal, Sister Dora introduced me to Mrs. Jones as the teacher-in-charge, who would assist me in my research related work at the school. (Field notes 5th October, 2012)

From January 2012, a new school Principal, Sister Dora took leadership of the school and there has been major organizational re-structuring of the school. Delphine Hart School is no longer the central hub coordinating the community outreach activities like the spokes of a wheel with active engagement of school students in these activities, as shown in the school publicity hand-out (see image 11 below) during prior visit to the school, before the formal fieldwork for this research began. During the first phase of my fieldwork, I found that the administration of all the community engagement activities, including the night-shelter for homeless

184 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 185 children have been put under a separate charitable organization named after the foundress of the particular “Jesuitess” order with a local nun as regional administrator. The night-shelter for homeless children living on the roof-top residential home of Delphine Hart School is looked after by another nun.

Image 12: Older Organization of the School’s work

The new school Principal is only looking after the regular administration of the English medium school and she is coordinating her work with the other two nuns, since some of the children living at the residential home also study in the English medium school. The current school administration explained that much of this organizational re-structuring was done because it was not possible to manage the school along with all its multifarious community outreach projects by one person. Moreover, since the outreach work of the school was gradually expanding outside the school premises, even the former Principal, Sister Valentine was increasingly depending on a core group of staff, who worked closely with her to manage the daily affairs of the school and outreach programs. Several research respondents at the school also reported this fact. This fact was also verified by Sister Valentine during interviews with her.

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Figure 6: New Organization of the School’s work

Nonetheless, children coming from well-off families in the school and those who are academically strong still continue to volunteer to teach underperforming children coming from disadvantaged background in the English medium school in order to facilitate peer-to-peer learning and all school students still volunteer to teach once a week at a village school. Apart from these two activities, the participation of the school students in most school outreach activities has been reduced. However, the work of the school girls in these village schools is still very significant, since school attendance on these days is higher as the village children enjoy sitting in small groups with their DHS School “Didis” (sisters) learning their lessons through story-telling and through various fun game activities.

Image 13: DHS School Girls Small-Group Teaching in Village School

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The Hidden Domestic Child Labour (HDCL) program (to track child labour working in middleclass homes to incorporate them into the schooling system) was originally started by DHS girls as part of their Leadership Training Service (LTS) program. However, since the “Childline” program began with support from the Union Ministry of Women and Child Welfare, and since Save the Children and Institute of Human Rights Education started working in the region partnering with Delphine Hart School as regional partner, the HDCL program has now been undertaken by the outreach staff, who work for the Jesuitess Social Centre in collaboration with other National and Global NGOs. The DHS school students are not that actively involved anymore in this program. The outreach program of students volunteering at the Old age home has been also discontinued. The school students also do not participate in outreach activities at satellite primary schools set-up for children of Fisherfolks and Brickfields. The Barefoot Teacher’s Training and Human Rights Education program for rural and suburban schools in poorer neighbourhood is also run by school the staff of the local Jesuitess Social Center. However, during international Human Rights Day and other special UN sponsored days, the school girls participate in special events organized by the school in collaboration with the staff of the Social Centre.

Image 14: Group of Australian High School Students and Teachers at Jesuitess Social Centre

Groups of students and volunteers from abroad continue to visit the school, such as the groups of students, who were visiting from a Christian Brothers school in

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Australia and were particularly visiting the school in India and some other places as part of their India immersion program. The Principal of the school expressed his wish to begin a student and teacher’s exchange program in the future with the school. Though, he was not quite sure about the logistics of such program, since the systems of education are so different. However, the students and the teachers of the school were much moved to see the work of satellite schools in brickfields and committed to raise funds for continuing the work of these schools. Migrant labourers mostly trafficked from Bangladesh, Nepal and from other poorer Northern Indian states like Bihar are often recruited to work in these brickfields. They are cheated out of their wages by contractors, since most of them are illiterate and cannot even keep account of the numbers of bricks they make each day. It is a form of modern day slavery happening in the outskirts of ever-growing mega-city Calcutta (Kolkata), about which no novels of slavery has yet been written. The current leadership of the Jesuitess Social Centre are also committed to continue with their work in these satellite schools in Brickfields, provided the can manage to keep procuring funds from abroad. The school’s outreach work in these satellite schools bringing relatively affluent foreign visitors for donations to run these schools can be criticised as “social pornography”65 of Indian poverty by those belonging to the Bhadrolok subculture. However, they actually have little choice than to exhibit Indian poverty to attract foreign donations in light of the larger structural inequalities and poor state provision for education.

Image 15: A Brickfield school

65 See: http://articles.latimes.com/1991-03-28/news/vw-1453_1_proud-city

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In many ways their work in these schools follow the Jesuitess tradition of teaching poor Indian girls in “out-schools” (Colmcille 1968) during British colonial times, when only European and Eurasian girls would get access to study in the main Jesuitess schools funded generously by the colonial government. If we would compare and analyse the work of the school in contemporary times with its work historically within the Indian context, it appears quite ironic that the Jesuitess leadership now has to attract foreign donors to appeal to their kindness and sense of charity to fund the education of the most underserved children within the local community, since they are totally unaided by the postcolonial Indian government and the State system of schools have also failed to provide these children with basic education. This failure of the state system to provide basic educational resources and infrastructure for the subalterns of the society again became apparent when groups of students and teachers also visited the school during field research from a Catholic school in Ireland. Once a year when groups of school children from this Catholic school in Ireland visit Calcutta, the Delphine Hart school students participate with them to help build at least 2 rooms within the compound of neighbouring village government Madhyamik (till class 10) schools, so that the schools could apply for recruiting teachers and other support from the government to offer education till higher secondary (class 12) level. Just as they have been doing it every year for the past several years, during my fieldwork once again these groups of students from Ireland visited a remote village government school in the Sunderban region to build classrooms in government schools to help promote these schools to the higher secondary level. This fact is even more ironic in the context of rising Indian economy in recent years and India joining the rank of emerging BRICS nations. The Shikshyalaya Prakalpa for training para-teachers working in unrecognized local community schools run by NGOs piloted during the erstwhile West Bengal Communist government regime stopped with change of local government and the central government’s new Right to Education Act 2010, though the outreach staff at DHS still continue to train rural village school teachers in tribal areas under the Barefoot Teacher’s Training Program. Some of these Barefoot

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Teachers trained by DHS school outreach staff also teaches in satellite primary schools set up in poor suburban Eastern Bypass region at the fringes of the city under the Sampoorna program to teach the children of women who work in the city as domestic servants and maids. One of the DHS school teachers, Titli, who teaches sociology in the higher secondary (year 11 and 12) section of the school, acts as coordinator for this program and also the related micro-lending program for the mothers of children, to help them develop their artistic talent for handicrafts and sell them in the city markets. Sampoorna in Sanskrit means whole. This program was initiated by the DHS school social worker, Vanessa, who traced the root cause of ever increasing stream of homeless street children coming to the city. The program was set up for holistic development of the region in mind under the former leadership of Sister Valentine with active engagement of Vanessa and Titli. During fieldwork it was observed that, most of the school community outreach work is still continuing, but with less involvement of school children in coordinating them. Moreover, all the outreach staff members now work as the staff of the regional wing of local Jesuitess Social Centre. Visiting these projects and learning about these programs from the staff and people involved testified the problems of gender and the politics of poverty in this region discussed and analysed by Roy (2003) in her book. In spite of the good work these people are doing and the good intention of the Jesuitess administration, their work do not actually solve the problems of these region at a systemic level, though global organizations promoting social entrepreneurship and the school had been advertising their work as entrepreneurial solutions to the social problems in the region. They appeared to be acting like band-aids on existing wounds, but they can do precious little to cure the disease of ever-increasing encroachment of the globalizing mega-city of postcolonial Calcutta (Kolkata) encroaching on rural farm- lands and wet-lands rendering rural families with children homeless and driving the women to work as domestic servants in middleclass homes living in the city to feed their own families- children and also jobless husbands, who have lost their sources of earning in farms and other rural occupation. They often drink with the money the wife earns and then also beat their poor wives out of frustration. As Roy (2003, p. 225) writes:

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When I first started researching landlessness in West Bengal, I wrote in my field journal in great surprise:

It is rather astonishing that despite a communist government with a political platform of agrarian reformism, and a formidable data-producing bureaucracy, West Bengal does not produce a single, reliable indicator of rural landlessness. Roy’s (2003) in-depth ethnographic analysis reveal how even the organizational structure of the local communist government was structured by the “discipline and control” patriarchal feudal power regime “establishing continuities in hegemonic practices within and between households” (p. 213). Social structures of domination around the world have shown great resilience down the ages in different societies, unless of course the hearts and minds of those who are in powerful privileged positions in society change through critical consciousness raising pedagogy and inclusive democratic education. The subalterns will probably continue to reinforce their own subaltern identity even as they gain greater visibility and audibility to speak through self-mediation or mediation by organizations like the Jesuitess NGO. Chemmencheri (2015) has argued by analyzing two major social movements in India in recent times that, though it might appear that neoliberal globalization with increased access to new media and technology might have given voice and a public platform for the subaltern to be heard, yet they “do not lose their claim to subalternity after accessing avenues to speak and be heard; rather, the mediation process becomes a part of their reassertion of subalternity” (p. 13). Similarly, it can be argued that, though these community outreach work by Delphine Hart School as an active mediator is commendable, it is doubtful that their work will be able to solve the problems of uneven development in the region, where the subalterns are being constantly pushed out of their livelihood and forced to live in precarious situation. Global Financial Crisis and Changing Local Expectations

Though it might appear that change in leadership is the main reason behind all the structural and organizational changes within the school, interviews with various stake-holders of the school during fieldwork and review of official school records revealed that the institution has been facing major financial challenges with dwindling finance coming from international donors in the context of Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Moreover, changing expectations of new middle class parents within the local community and falling numbers of fee-paying students at

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Delphine Hart School with increase in numbers of scholarship seeking students multiplied the economic crisis. These challenges steadily became apparent in recent years even while the former principal was in charge of the school. The 50:50 balance of fee-paying and scholarship recipient students became off-balance for a while even before change of school leadership. The former leadership was managing the situation by utilizing personal charisma and global institutional network to deliver international talks and raising funds for the school. However, such a method of fund-raising which requires the school Principal to stay away from the school often to deliver talks abroad was clearly not sustainable. In 2013 less than one third of the selected candidates took admission for beginner’s nursery class in the school. Finally the school had to send second round acceptance letters to candidates whom they had already rejected during the first selection process. Clearly for the well-off parents of those 70 children who chose to send their daughters to other schools, Delphine Hart School was not their first choice. During our conversations, the current school administration and several other staff, who also worked under the former principal and is still working under the current principal expressed anxiety about the growing number of corporate schools in the fast gentrifying neighbourhood attracting most students whose parents could pay high school fees. I visited one of these schools during an inter-school event with the Delphine Hart School students and was quite surprised in many ways to see the infrastructure and facilities they have made available for students even within such a poor “city of joy”, known around the world for its poverty and the social work of Mother Teresa! These schools are providing state-of-the-art facility to students with libraries called “information systems lab”, gym, swimming pool, tennis court, dining hall and fully air-conditioned campus buildings with large auditoriums. These schools are also providing after school hours recreation and coaching facility for their students at a premium price66 and the students are spending almost 10 hours at school, so that they can go back home only after their parents return from their corporate offices at night.

66 There is no standard rate and it fluctuates widely from region to region and even within one city. Here’s the rate taken from the website of one such school: - For admission from pre-nursery to KG; Rs 127,150 (2,285.00 AUD) payment for just one quarter and for admission in classes 1 & 2, Rs. 184,350 (3,304.78 AUD) payment for the first quarter of the year.

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The old joint-family structure within India is fast disappearing. In the absence of and poor availability of any state welfare system or good quality private system like play-school and day-care for children, these private corporate schools are providing both schooling, as well as after-school play and day-care facility for children. It is an attractive package for new Indian middle class parents with children, especially if both parents are working long hours in corporate offices and there is nobody at home to look after the child once they return from school in the afternoon. How can old style convent schools with their social justice mission for including poor children and community engagement programs compete with these new corporate schools, which are openly declaring to parents through their websites that these schools will prepare their children as citizens of a global society? Delphine Hart School’s “We are the World” values based pedagogic approach also share a global cosmopolitan orientation to schooling because of its own historic global network and origin. Yet, their work within postcolonial India has been more oriented towards producing patriotic Indian citizens proud of their own philosophical spiritual traditions, but critical of various social evils to become change agents within their local community. Though DHS is part of a large global network of schools, it operated very much as a locally rooted community school. While DHS school website exhibited their community outreach work for kolkata’s underserved poor children, the websites of some of these schools strategically exhibit Nobel Prize winning Indian economist, Amartya Sen, and well-known former President of India and noted scientist, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalaam, among other noted luminaries from the field of sports and other professions on their website and within school campus wall. Though none of these noted Indians actually studied in rich corporate schools. Even other traditional missionary schools with strong social justice mission are facing huge challenges within this highly competitive corporate environment, as global companies are buying the shares of most English medium private schools and seeking to transform them to meet the needs and standards of the 21st Century global capitalist economy.67 These field observations verify the assertions made in the quote below:

67 80% of the shares of a private English medium high school run by an Anglo-Indian community trust, where I personally taught as an English teacher, have been recently bought by a British multinational

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Globalization has fundamentally altered the world economy, creating winners and losers. Reducing inequalities both within and between countries, and building a more inclusive globalization is the most important development challenge of our time … Addressing these inequalities is our era’s most important development challenge, and underscores why inclusive development is central to the mission of the UN and UNDP. (Dervis 2007, UNESCO) The current school Principal inherited the goodwill the school’s work built nationally and internationally. However, the leadership also inherited the financial challenges coupled with the challenge of competition from the corporate schools in the new economy after liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s. Moreover, in spite of the school’s established global network; unlike the Irish-born previous school leadership the current leadership does not have personal family or social network outside India. Principal Sister Dora was born and raised in postcolonial India, and she has worked in different places within the particular missionary order in India. She has no personal social network abroad and never travelled outside India before getting posted as the Principal of the school. Hence, the new principal is increasingly utilizing internet and communication technology to do her work by sending personal e.mail updates about the school’s work to existing school beneficiaries, trying to build a database of these beneficiaries to maintain relationship and communication with them to keep soliciting financial support for the future. Though according to most recent news from the school, after serving the school for three years during this phase of crucial changes, Sister Dora has been now sent outside of the country for the first time to Rome. The Vice Principal of the school, who is not a nun, but who has served under both former leadership of the school, is now the interim acting Principal of the school, according to e.mail updates and newsletters I received from the school. Though the schools in India appeared to be operating quite independently for all these years and though the relationship of the Jesuitess order with Rome has been historically quite strained, it is only a matter of conjecture what this travel of the new Principal to Rome will bring in the future, in terms of continuing the school’s work for social justice and inclusive education.

company according to confidential sources at this school and the company is transforming the curriculum and pedagogy of these schools to suit the needs of the market economy and employment sector.

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During fieldwork, it was also observed that though the school does not have the financial resources and land necessary to build large dining hall, gym, swimming pool etc. to compete with the new corporate schools; the administration decided to make some investment to spruce up the school’s existing building infrastructure to make it more attractive for the modern consumer parents. When I visited the school again early in 2014, there was an impressive display of achievements of the school students in competitive events- academics, sports and arts- neatly displayed inside glass showcases at the new school office. The new office also looked more like a corporate office now, divided into separate small cubicles for the staff. When I expressed admiration seeing the exhibition of the cups, shields and medals; the school staff reported that these were all achievements of the school students over the years. Whereas in the past they were kept in a less publicly visible area, now they have been displayed to attract the new middle class parents of prospective students.

Image 16: Art-work by students on new school website Similarly, these achievements have been now also displayed on the new school website, which no longer promotes the inclusive educational work of the school. Rather, the new school website offers a 360* tour of the spic-and-span school building after renovation. It now exhibits the achievements of the school’s students and also includes exhibition of artistic work by school children in the “kid’s corner”, as it is shown in the image below. It appears that the school as an institution, which

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had gained a name for itself in the past couple of decades as a school for the poor subaltern population of Calcutta (Kolkata) is trying its best to create a different space for itself in the global media space- a space which showcases academic and co- curricular achievements of the school’s students, rather than its work for the upliftment of the poor underserved students in the region.

Pedagogic Re-structuring

The most important change in the school appeared to be not just structural and organizational, but conceptual in terms of the school’s pedagogic aims and objectives. Rather than active citizenship education, participation in activities outside academic work is seen as social work separate from the main curriculum and pedagogy of the school. The school is now geared towards preparing students to compete in the highly competitive Indian system of education, which is becoming more competitive according to the demands of the new middle class parents eager to prepare their children to compete in the global economy. School children’s participation in the community outreach programs and projects are no longer viewed as integral part of their citizenship education. It is now seen as social work, though philosophically Sister Dora appeared to be agreeing with much of the school’s community-oriented philosophy. The quote below from the staff of a global development organization is very significant to understand the major shift that has been happening at the school. Especially, since this organization considered the inclusive pedagogic approach developed by DHS as authentic example of indigenous inclusive educational reform and they have been partnering with the school as a Knowledge Hub under former leadership to share the pedagogic knowledge generated at the school with other schools in the region- both private and government run schools. They appear to be missing the vision of a development professional and they seem to be thinking more like a typical Indian convent school teacher now. You see in our country the social elites see social work and education as separate and not inclusive. It saves them from the burden of taking responsibility for systemic oppression and historic injustice, but gives them the pleasure of “doing good”. To me as a researcher the changes in the school also became very apparent, as it did to some old school staff, beneficiaries and global donors. During fieldwork, the school appeared to be operating more like a regular English medium convent school.

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There were distinct changes in school policies and pedagogic practices. Policy for language use within the school has been revised and all students (including the homeless children who study in the regular DHS English medium school and not in neighbouring Bengali Medium Corporation or Baptist mission school) must speak in English during regular school hours. Otherwise, they can get punished according to the rules of the school. Along with re-instatement of fine for speaking in native languages and late fee for students, fixed working hours for all staff have been reintroduced. Re-instating policies like charging students a fine for coming late to school or speaking in native vernacular language rather than English especially puts disadvantaged children into difficulty and has the potential of increasing risk of school drop-outs (absence) of girls from poor marginalized backgrounds when they cannot pay these fines. However, the current administration will argue that these changes were made in order to restore order and discipline within the school and to cater to parental demands for English language immersion during school hours. The main purpose of middleclass Indian fee-paying parents, who send their children to English medium schools, is to let their children have a proper English language immersion five days a week for at least seven hours each day. As it has been already argued in the methodology section of this thesis within the postcolonial Indian context, this demand for English medium education is connected with aspirations for both social and economic mobility within the larger Indian society. Moreover, culturally the Indians take great pride in acquiring English language skills. There is great cultural aspiration too among the Indian middle-classes for mastery of the English language as “The Empire Writes Back” in their diverse voices (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2002). It is to be noted in this context that even poor parents whose children study as day scholars or live in the residential home want their children to be able to learn English. Parental choice for English language education has been a much researched topic within the Indian system. This fact was highlighted even in the PROBE68 study and several other independent reports of parental choice with regards to schooling in India. It is in many ways a legacy of the colonial history as it was also argued in the

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methodology chapter of this thesis. During one of my interviews with the former school Principal, I was also able to observe another instance where an old Hindi speaking grandmother, who sells vegetables in the local market, was desperate to get her younger grand-daughter admitted as a residential student at Delphine Hart School. The older grand-daughter was already studying in the school as a residential student. Both their parents died due to illness and poverty related issues leaving two daughters behind with their old grandmother. I was obliged to act as an interpreter as the former school Principal did not understand Hindi that well and most importantly could not speak Hindi. So, I became the interpreter for their conversation. Even as the former Principal, promised to help the old grandmother get his younger grand- daughter admitted in a government school and home for orphans, the grandmother was inconsolable and kept insisting on admitting her at Delphine Hart School, like the other grand-daughter. Though she was an illiterate woman selling vegetables in the nearby market, she appeared to know well the privilege associated with the name of Delphine Hart School and the fact that education at this missionary English medium school might open up doors for social mobility for her grand-daughter compared to government run Hindi or Bengali medium public school. Though the postcolonial state sought to reinforce vernacular medium instruction in State-run schools, such parental choice and pressure has been in many ways driven by the prospect of “economic apartheid” (Juneja 2014), that children from poor disadvantaged background face in the larger postcolonial society because of vernacular medium education. Neoliberal globalization is once again reinforcing the demand for English language education as parents are seeing the economic opportunities for their children associated with the mastery of English language. Because of this parental demand, there is actually a burgeoning market of private fee- paying English medium schools even in suburban and rural India. Even poor illiterate parents associate knowledge of the English language as a road to attaining socioeconomic mobility within the postcolonial Indian context.

68 See: http://www.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/public_report_basic_education_india.pdf

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During fieldwork, the school leadership of a neighbouring old Bengali medium school69 set up by American Baptist missionaries, expressed the fact they are looking for well-trained teaching staff to convert the school to English medium school, because of rising demand from parents in the local community. Otherwise, they are running the risk of closing the school due to dwindling number of students. However, what will happen to the children like the disadvantaged children living at Delphine Hart School home, but studying in the Bengali medium schools as they could not cope with the English medium education? The authorities of both schools did not have any answer to such a question, as they appeared concerned with issues of their own institutional sustainability. The images of the dilapidated school building and the dilapidated neighbourhood speaks volumes about the fact that Bengali language is now associated with decay and decadence, as against English, the language of trade, commerce, business and above all corporate jobs in the 21stCentury. It is the language of new life for globally aspirational middle-classes and also the subaltern parents in the decaying old city. Who will now take time to halt and think about the learning needs of the subaltern students? Referring to the 1953 Mudaliar Commission Report, Mukherjee (2013, p. 455) affirms that Indian school education system is still besought with the same problems against which Tagore sought to establish his alternative school during colonial India. In their postcolonial zeal to decolonize curriculum and language of instruction, the local state school board of education- such as WBBSE (West Bengal Board of School Education) to which Delphine Hart school and most of the local English and Vernacular medium schools are affiliated paid much attention to only changing language and medium of instruction in government schools to decolonize, but did not change their curriculum for over 30 years under the former communist regime. Little attention has been also given to proper teacher education in order to change pedagogic approach to a more child-friendly approach promoted by educational reformer like Tagore, for real learning to serve both the intrinsic and instrumental purpose of education. However, the Indian middleclass parents are becoming deeply aware of changing needs of the job market in the new globalizing

69 Some of the children living in the night-shelter home of the Delphine Hart School study in this school as they could not cope with English medium instruction.

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economy, including the need for learning English. Even working-class Indian parents of girls studying in a school like DHS are deeply concerned about their daughter’s future career and life as it appeared from interviews with parents. Hence, economic concerns and future employment prospect is pre-dominant in the minds of not just parents across socioeconomic class divide, but also school administrators. There appeared to be little understanding among parents and a section of the teaching staff that the inclusive pedagogic approach and five-step teaching methodology developed by the school over the years will be eventually helpful for the children. The mixed-group teaching methodology facilitating peer-to-peer learning developed at the school appeared to be still followed in some of the classrooms. However, some of the teachers appeared to have reverted back to a more traditional style of teaching. Here again the pressure from local middleclass parents for a more traditional mode of competitive education cannot be discounted. This was also evident from the critical voices of students themselves against the attitude of competition and pressure from parents in the skit they performed for the school talent show. This will be discussed at length in the next section of this chapter. Sister Dora also admitted during conversations that she was finding it a major challenge to “break the attitude of competition” among parents. This attitude of competition is not just evident from the attitude of middleclass parents, but the school leadership is also struggling with the fact that the overall private educational market is becoming more and more competitive with the new corporate schools attracting new middleclass parents. Perhaps to a great extent within an old decaying city like postcolonial Calcutta (Kolkata), such competition to some extent is necessary. The school buildings like most old buildings in Calcutta (Kolkata) needed renovations. There was a fire in the school kitchen and an old market adjacent the school during fieldwork70. The entire city of Calcutta (Kolkata) in fact needs renovation in terms of infrastructure and is almost like a tinderbox, and old buildings, shops and markets often catch fire and reported in the news. A Canadian academic and his students visiting the school for research during my fieldwork openly stated

70 see: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/many-areas-in-kolkata-still-a-tinderbox- says-mamata/article4458125.ece

200 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 201 during the interview about their fear and safety concerns while at the school and in the city for their research, because of the dilapidated condition of most buildings and open electric wires everywhere. It is to be noted in this context that, in West Bengal “Deprivation of public provisioning has been very high compared to health deprivation and deprivation in knowledge in every state in India.” (Planning Commission 2010, p. 29) Reflecting on reports of recent changes in the schools and infrastructure investments following her retirement, the former Principal, Sister Valentine said in an interview, “I also made many changes after becoming Principal of the school. The school building and infrastructure has also gone through renovations several times over the years. Probably this is providence and it was necessary. Probably because she has a very different reserved personality and the staff were used to a more open approach with me; there is general dissatisfaction among certain sections of the staff as I understand. But, slowly it will settle down.” However, as referred to earlier in this section of the chapter, the changes that were happening were not just necessary infrastructure spending by cutting back on student scholarship. The biggest change appeared to be the change in educational aims and objective of the school, which is revealed from this interview with one of the current school administrators: You see when parents send their daughters to an English medium convent school, they have certain expectations. “I am sending my daughter to a convent school because I want her behaviour to be refined.” Minimum discipline, punctuality, refined behaviour is what parents expect their daughters to be trained in a convent school. So, when they don’t get that... and for education you see most of the rich kids their parents send them to private tuition to compete in competitive exams. But the kind of comfort and facilities that kids from regular families get at their home that has gone down in this school a lot over the years. Parents even when they are happy to see the child allowed coming late to school at the end of the day they want their child to learn the habit of being in school on time. Just because we now have 70% underprivileged children instead of bringing up their standard in terms of behaviour, the standard of the rest has also gone down. From the perspective of classroom management it is daunting task for us, teachers. – School Administrator The quote above highlights the contradictions of formulating policies of social inclusion, when the privileged start taking advantage of such policies which were created to give the disadvantaged a leeway to be part of the mainstream system of education. The current school administration reported that it was becoming difficult from administrative perspective to maintain such a policy, since girls (not

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coming from disadvantaged backgrounds) were also taking advantage of the flexible policy of attendance in school. There was no way for me to triangulate this information whether the girls of well-off backgrounds were also taking advantage of the policy or not. Since the policies were already changed while I was there for fieldwork. However, the statement from the school administrator shows how policies based on the philosophical concern for equity and justice can often become hard to implement and sustain, unless all concerned within the community understand why these policies were made and for whom. The quote also makes it evident that the priority of new middle-class parents about their daughter’s comfort in school is now the priority of the school, than inclusive education. Those in authority of running the school now apparently are more interested on catering to local market needs for institutional survival. Though the new school Principal during fieldwork formally acknowledged that there is “need to include more marginalized and differently-abled children, and break the attitude of competition”, there were obvious signs of progressive shift away from the school’s philosophical approach of inclusive education to a more market driven approach of policy-making and reform. The numbers of physically and mentally “challenged children” studying in the school have also reduced. They are also provided basic instruction and care in a separate room in the school, as observed during fieldwork. I also came to know from teachers and observed that only 3 of these children continue to come to school regularly. The dedication of some of the school teachers, who take turns on rotating basis to help these children learn, was admirable. Teachers also humbly admitted that none of them are trained as special education teachers and are actually doing the job not as professionals, but as somebody who loves to work with children and care about them.

Youth Social Action in New Times

Much of the inclusive pedagogic approach and community outreach activities which slowly evolved at Delphine Hart School was in many ways institutional response to increasing social unrest because of extreme inequality in the immediate postcolonial era, as analysed earlier in chapter 5. Moreover, unlike the way in which the school’s work is promoted by global organizations promoting “social

202 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 203 entrepreneurship” in an era of receding State responsibility for social welfare globally, the school’s inclusive pedagogic work and community outreach evolved over time because of initiatives taken by various actors inside and outside the school. Though, the idealist and self-proclaimed “opportunist” school leadership was only too eager to encourage these initiatives driven by not just the Jesuitess philosophy, but also a sense of ‘prefigurative politics’ imagining a new world order as argued in chapter 6. This sense of ‘prefigurative politics’ imagining a new world order was somehow missing in the work of the school with new organizational and pedagogic restructuring; though the school as an institution still promotes youth social action. There appeared to be a distinct shift in focus with regards to student engagement through just social action. This change relates to the conceptual change in the schools aims and objectives in recent times. Youth social action is no longer considered as education itself, but as co-curricular social work. The school’s engagement with the global is no longer for pragmatic purpose of social action in the local community for the education and upliftment of marginalized students by capitalizing on global resources. Rather, the school’s engagement with the global is now more symbolic in terms of the school’s participation and celebration of major global events related to the education and empowerment of the girl child, human rights and other events endorsed by the UN. However, these symbolic engagements did give voice to the middleclass girls to express themselves in the public sphere. It also helped some of the subaltern girls to get recognition for their various characteristic qualities like- leadership, community engagement, sense of social responsibility, sincerity, work ethic etc. in the form of certificates from the school. What the outcome of such individual recognition and ability to speak in public sphere would be is yet to be seen in the future. In the following paragraphs after brief descriptions of the events, I will analyse some of the contradictions of such youth social action in new times and challenges facing new school leadership negotiating with competing challenges. During fieldwork, four big international themed events were observed at the school under the leadership of the then new school Principal, Sister Dora – (i) the International Girl Child’s Day on October 12, 2012; (ii) International Human Rights Day on December 10, 2012; (iii) Annual school sports day- “Aqua Lore” on February

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2, 2013 commemorating United Nation’s International Year of Water Cooperation; and (iv) Global 1 Billion Rising Campaign on February 14, 2013. During each of these days, children of the entire school participated along with the school academic and non-teaching staff. On international Girl Child Day, girls who were rescued from working as domestic child labour and were admitted to various neighbourhoods Bengali, Hindi and Urdu medium schools were felicitated by the Delphine Hart School girls by playing indoor games with them. These girls were also awarded character certificates by the Jesuitess institution based on reports from their respective institutions.

Image 17: School Girls Performing Skit on Domestic Abuse

Later that day, during the senior school talent show event, the school girls also performed two very powerful evocative skits as musical dance and songs from popular Hindi movies expressing their feelings about forced arranged marriages right out of high school, domestic abuse for dowry including marital rape. The play began with a song from popular 90s Hindi movie “Roja” with the song “Dil Hai Chota Sa/ Choti si asha” (Little heart and little dreams) of a young girl Roja who wants to study in college and travel around the world. But, then she is forced to agree for arranged marriage. But, unlike the romantic turn in the Bollywood movie, Roja, the girl in the play is shown to suffer marital domestic abuse for dowry and rape. But, despite all the abuse she can’t go back to her father’s house. As she sat on the floor of the stage with her face smeared with the red colour of vermillion, the popular Hindi song sung

204 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 205 by famous Bengali singer Manna Dey was played in the background- “Ja ke Babul se najare milaun kaise?/ Ghar Jaoun kaise?/ Laaga chunri mein daag/ chupaoun kaise? Laaga chunari mein Daag” (How can she now look into her father’s eyes? / How can she go home now? / How can she hide it? There is a stain in the scarf). The entire baggage of culturally embedded beliefs about women, chastity and self-blaming of victim (irrespective of religion) even for marital rape was unleashed just by one song towards the end of the performance. Spivak (1988) wrote about Bhubaneshwari’s story of hanging herself and her concern about chastity while hanging within the context of colonial India. It appeared from the performance which gave voice to the feelings of these girls about their lives that even in 2012, the girls from that region of the world are still carrying the same cultural baggage, though now they appear to have gained “institutionally validated agency” as “subjects and agents in the public sphere” (Spivak 2002, p. 24) at least on the stage of the school. The suppressed emotions and anger expressed through these powerful performances were very moving not just for the researcher observing these events, the performances were also moving for other international volunteers at the school from Europe and the United States of America. The European & American school volunteers and visitors openly stated that they cannot imagine such young school girls performing something so serious during school talent show. “I can imagine my students doing something much more fun and light-hearted during a talent show like this”, said Alex, a German public school teacher and scholarship sponsor for some residential children at DHS. Just as the first musical dance performance, gave voice to the girls about the oppression they experience because of culturally embedded values about women’s chastity, the second play gave voice to the oppression they experience within the increasingly competitive education system. It expressed their anguish about parental pressure for securing high scores in exams and moral corruption among youth when they are forced to cheat in exams under pressure as they fail to rote memorise. This was a bold performance by the girls offering a sharp critique of not just their parents but also the mainstream Indian system of education through artistic expression. It was also an affirmation of the concerns expressed by the long-serving former Principal, Sister Valentine and also her successor, Sister Dora about the negative impact of

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such hyper-competitive system on actual student learning and also the philosophy of inclusive education. On Human Rights Day, children and staff from several neighbouring schools were invited whom the DHS staff members have been providing training in collaboration with the Institute for Human Rights Education (IHRE). The new Principal released a bunch of rainbow coloured balloons from the school courtyard commemorating the day’s events, which included poster exhibition by school children on human rights issues, distribution of certificates for human rights training to other school children and staff; and an inter-school debate competition for children on the issue of “corporal punishment” in schools. I was requested by school authorities to coordinate as a volunteer to facilitate this debate.

Image 18: Students Exhibiting Posters on Human Rights Day Quite interestingly, almost all school children from local Bengali, Hindi and Urdu medium schools argued for corporeal punishment in schools and they appeared to be delivering rote-memorized speeches written by their teachers. It was really hard to imagine school children delivering speeches in favour of corporeal punishment in the way they did. Though it is almost over a century later compared to the time when Tagore went to schools in the same city and dropped-out of school, it appeared that Tagore’s observations of his schooling experience were still alive within the larger Indian context as he wrote that his philosophy of education “was not any new theory of education, but the memory of (his) school day" (Tagore, 1917, p. 138). It appeared that Tagore’s critique of early 19th Century “Parrot’s training” model of education during colonial India was still very much relevant. The mainstream Indian system of education has done little to change their system following the pioneering work of

206 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 207 their own native organic intellectual, though he is worshipped widely as “Gurudev” (Teacher-God) in the local language among the local community. However, the posters made by the students gave voice to the students about what they want in their school, as it is shown below in one of the posters- “Schools Do Not Frighten”.

Image 19: School Girls Performing “Aqua Lore” on Sports Day

Commemorating the UN Year for Water Conservation in 2013, the school leadership also took lead in choosing “Aqua Lore” as the theme for the school sports day71 and organized colourful song and dance performance by the school children before the sporting events to raise awareness about issues of water conservation and the environment on the School Sports Day on 2 February 2013. However, the irony and rather the most interesting aspect of the school observing UN Year of Water Conservation on school annual Sports Day is that, this entire region actually faces huge crisis of pure clean water72. Clean pure drinking water and water for domestic use is actually a major problem throughout India73 and particularly in the Gangetic

71 It was held at the play-ground of another Jesuitess convent school. Delphine Hart School located in the middle of city across the railway station has no playground for children. They just have an open courtyard in the middle of the school, which is used as a basketball court. 72 see: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Water-crisis-worsens-summer- torture/articleshow/35575109.cms 73 “Water touches every aspect of life, and in India uncertainty over access to and the availability of this basic resource may be reaching crisis levels.... Should no action be taken, there could be dire consequences. The World Health Organization estimates that 97 million Indians lack access to safe water today, second only to China” http://www.nbr.org/research/activity.aspx?id=356

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delta region of India and Bangladesh. In most (supposedly) privileged middleclass homes in the region, people have to buy drinking water by gallons from private company at a premium price, since the water supplied by local government of Calcutta Corporation is not safe for domestic use. The global problem is not global within this context it is a very local problem. The children in the school were actually giving voice to some of the daily problems they experience due to water crisis in their own life. These are not the “subaltern” underclass or rural population, but “so-called” privileged middleclass whose purchasing power is supposedly increasing also to buy water for daily consumption from unregulated private providers at a premium price. While the rural and urban “subaltern” class queue up in front of roadside tap during specific hours of the day to collect water from corporation taps to again spend fuel on boiling the water to be able to drink. This was also shown in a tableau by the school children. Within this larger context of serious water crisis for even basic domestic use, the crystal clear water of the blue swimming pool in the nearby corporate school offers a striking contrast. Indeed it appeared to be like “A Tale of Two Cities”: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Image 20: School Girls Participating in 1 Billion Rising Event

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After the school sports day, the next big event at the school was organized on 14th February 2013, the school leadership secured special police permission to block the entire main street in front of the school for about 15 minutes during the afternoon of Valentine’s Day for school children to participate in the Global 1 Billion Rising Campaign, where the school girls performed song and dance expressing their feelings through creative performance and conducted silent march on the streets with posters in their hands condemning Violence against Women and gathering signatures from passers-by for the 1 Billion Rising Campaign. This event was a great emotional release like the talent show song and dance drama for the school girls. Lot of their anger about the December 2012 New Delhi gang rape incident of a young college student was expressed through their posters, art-work and also the incidental interviews gathered by me as a participant observer at the event. The excerpts from some of these spot-interviews quoted below reveal the angst of the young girls at the school within the deeply patriarchal Indian society, where they constantly experience various kinds of “unfreedom” in the society, including their home, just because of their gendered identity. We are protesting here against all kinds of violence on women. Not only rape. There is domestic violence and all kinds of discrimination against women still in our society. All in all what we want to project is women are half of the world population. We are going to the moon as well as managing homes. There is no reason for us to be looked down upon and belittled. So why should we comprise? Just because this is a male dominant society and probably they are more physically strong? I want to become a lawyer and fight for women (class 11 Humanities student)

Due to the recent rape case in New Delhi, all of us class 11 students are protesting about violence against women as part of 1 Billion Rising Campaign….the global movement. So, these are posters which we have made with our own hand impression on the poster asking to stop violence against women. That’s because we wanted to give these posters a personal touch. You see there are 93,000 rape cases pending still now in India and like these are the ones which have been filed in court but yet there hasn’t been any judgment for these. Apart from these there are huge numbers of cases which are still hidden in our hearts like when we were small or even now we must have been molested in buses, trains, some…like in “Crime Patrol” we see generally fathers, brothers they may do something which might feel bad but because we are afraid of the society we do not say anything to our mom or do not go out to say anything to the police…and then women in the rural areas their husbands torture them and rape them in marriage…they are also not saying anything to the police or others once again afraid of society. They still have the age-old thought that husband is like God and we should obey them. So, we are just playing a small part here

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to make people aware of what’s wrong with our society. I want to become a journalist or a teacher to continue raising awareness (Class 11 Humanities student) This poster says that when a man says something he is a man. But, when a woman says something she is a bitch! I mean the discrimination between boys and girls is so much even in 21stC girls still don’t even have the right to speak about their own liking, about what they want. In everyday life all the time we have to ask either our husband or if not married the head of the family, which is always the father. Should we go out at night? If they yes, only then you can go. Even if there is a divorce is marriage everybody says what’s wrong with the woman? Nobody asks the man why? So, we ourselves have to ask and understand why? Until and unless we know the reason why nothing can change as the change comes from within us. I want to be a journalist and report about these issues in our society. Give women voice in the public sphere. (Class 11 student and Student Council Executive) It is to be noted here that, much like the school talent show, the school teachers and administrators gave the girls total freedom at the event to express themselves without any supervision. However, the school authorities took all the necessary steps required and gave the students a public space to express their protests. The girls expressed themselves through posters, silent march and dance performance. As the entire senior school girls marched across the streets with posters in their hands, a small group of girls performed to the tune of songs, including a song from Tagore’s dance drama “Chitrangoda”74 played in the background in front of the school gate. The lyrics of the song declared: "I am Chitrangoda. Neither goddess nor servant am I. If you let me stand by your side at your darkest hour, let me be the friend of your soul, let me share in your joys and sorrows, only then shall you know me." The posters, the silent march, dance moves and Tagore’s songs- all combined together to express the suppressed voices of these young school girls. Spivak (2002, p. 24) wrote: “I presented “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as a paper twenty years ago. In that paper I suggested that the subaltern could not “speak” because, in the absence of institutionally validated agency, there was no listening subject. My listening, separated by space and time, was perhaps an ethical impulse. But I am with Kant in thinking that such impulses do not lead to the political. There must be a presumed collectivity of listening and countersigning subjects and agents in the public sphere for the subaltern to “speak.”” This event of the school girls

210 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 211 taking part in 1 Billion Rising campaign appeared to be like coming of age for Spivak’s (1988) middleclass gendered “subalterns” in her own native city, where they can now at least speak their mind with their written words, art-work and movement of body along with Tagore’s songs to voice their protest against gendered violence. We can argue here that the middleclass gendered “subalterns” from the girl’s school in Spivak’s native city have at least found “listening and countersigning of subjects and agents in the public sphere”- from the stage inside the school to the streets of Kolkata and from the streets of postcolonial Kolkata to the global public sphere, through their participation in the 1 Billion Rising Campaign. In his reading of Spivak’s original essay “Can the subaltern Speak?” Khair (2008) suggests that subaltern speech often has a bodily character. Especially in contexts where the subaltern is denied speech, she speaks through her body. Spivak (1988) ended her essay with the rhetorical question- “Can the subaltern speak?” During colonial times within a context of the disappearance of “Indian women in British legal history”, while bourgeoisie male Indian freedom fighters were fighting against bourgeoisie male English colonisers; it can be argued that Spivak’s (1988) protagonist, Bhubaneshwari’s dead body acquired a different kind of “subaltern” speech speaking about colonial patriarchal oppression by hanging herself. Similarly, it can be also argued that these new 21stCentury subalterns spoke by taking part in silent march and dance as part of a global movement in the new millennium. Though in her recent recounting of the death of her female ancestor, Bubaneshwari; Spivak (1999, p. 331) laments that “Today’s program of global financialization carries on that relay. Bhubaneshwari had fought for national liberation. Her great-grandniece works for the New Empire. This too is a silencing of the subaltern”. Nonetheless, in a society where even large masses of middleclass parents are still regaled with traditional gender-roles and stereotypes during junior school function at the school, taking part in an event like this was no doubt an empowering event for the school girls. In that sense, the strategy of the new school leadership appear to be mediating between postcolonial patriarchal social reconstruction of modern urban Indian femininity (Chatterjee, 1989) and millennial postmodernity

74 Chitrangoda was a mythical North East Indian warrior Princess from the Indian epic, Mahabharata. See: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/rabindranath-tagores-legacy-lies-

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upholding women’s rights as individual human rights. However, as Chemmencheri (2015, p. 13) argues, “It remains to be seen how in the age of self-mediation, which benefits from the neo-liberal easing of access to communication channels, subalterns emerge from the ashes of post-coloniality and exploit media structures— whether they restrict themselves to reinforcing their subalternity through opportunities of mediation and present their subalternity to be the very reason why they are newsworthy, or they exploit the new media opportunity structures to overhaul structures of discrimination.” The “border tensions” of postmodernism here as M.P. Smith (2001, p. 140) argues, seemed to have blurred the boundaries between postcolonial gendered construction of the new Indian woman and the millennial construction of the activist empowered Indian woman- “a hybrid subject in patterned networks” of global Jesuitess order and 1 Billion Rising Campaign. However, the middleclass gendered “subaltern” about whose ability to speak in the public sphere Spivak (1988) once raised questions due to lack of “listening subjects” appears to have found a global public sphere for listening. As the voices of these Delphine Hart School girls suggest, these girls are ready to raise their voices and speak not just for themselves but also for the “subaltern” rural and urban underclass women of their society. It also appears from their voices that these “Chitrangodas” (warrior Princess) of the new millennium are also going to speak for the “Chandalikas”75 of their society. The voices of these senior school class 11 girls thus affirm earlier study by Chattopadhyay (2015) on the school’s success under former leadership in establishing an inclusive culture inculcating the values of justice, sincerity and love among its students. However, as these middleclass urban gendered “subalterns” speak as part of the heteroglossia of the new-age global women’s movement, whether the inclusive pedagogic project at the school survives or not, is yet to be seen.

in-the-freedomseeking-women-of-his-fiction-2279473.html 75 See: “Among the dance dramas of Tagore, Chandalika has a special place as it foregrounds the theme of female desire in an untouchable girl, a tabooed subject in his times, indeed even now in Bengali writings. This paper tries to show how Tagore uses the nuances of the dance form to showcase the intersections of caste, class and gender as well as the evolution of selfhood in Prakriti, the Chandal girl.” Chauduri (2010) in “Signifying the Self: Intersections of Class, Caste and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s Dance Drama Chandalika (1938)”: http://rupkatha.com/tagores-dance-drama- chandalika/

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In “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference” Chakrabarty (2007) has discussed at length how public discourse about the plight of Bengali upper caste widow and domestic cruelty gave “birth” to colonial subjectivity and the cultural “other”. Despite the fact that there were indigenous intellectual men fighting for women’s rights particularly in 19thCentury during the Bengal Renaissance, while the status of women in the colonizing metropolis UK was not that enlightening even centuries after the global heritage of European enlightenment. Therefore, can the act of the school girls joining the global 1 Billion Rising movement be interpreted as the “birth” of neoliberal subjectivity of women and girls as the saviour of themselves and this world? As Josh Gorban’s voice singing contemporary church hymn “You Raise Me Up” broadcasts from new school website along with the image of a school girl performing as mythical Indian warrior Goddess Durga flashes on the new school website, (see image below) this question becomes even more potent in the mind of this researcher. Maybe, this will be an academic question for exploration in this new millennium for years to come.

Image 21: New Homepage of DHS during local Durga Puja festival

It is apparent that within a larger social and political context of contemporary India76, when religious minorities are increasingly feeling insecure and threatened

76 See: http://scroll.in/article/718353/Ashis-Nandy-on-being-an-Indian-Christian,-Julio-Ribeiro%27s- pain-and-why-he-opposes-conversion “In Calcutta, where I grew up, the Christian community is taken as part of the landscape and played an important role in defining the culture of the city. Bengalis,

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with the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, the images of the school girls enacting Goddess Durga on the school stage as shown on the new website along with faces of Christian nuns and hymn in the background does send a strong message of cultural hybridity. However, the strong Hindu feminist symbol of Durga beside the image of the Christian Nun and foundress of the order, who was incarcerated by the patriarchal Catholic Church appeared even more significant for this researcher reflecting on the paternalistic statement by Jesuitess historian Colmcille (1968), “To the Hindus and Mohammedans, thronging the slopes of the railway bridge, and perched on the top of the convent fence, it became apparent that the “Christian Mission” was a considerable section of Calcutta’s citizens, apparently oblivious of caste and race, and having an orderly and rather beautiful way of doing puja to their God” (p. 154). Indeed, it made me reflect on the possible historic roots of some of the contemporary social problems of religious disharmony within India. Challenges for New Leadership

Despite the new leadership’s active engagement with the global and the local in her own way, it is clear from field observations that her strategies have been more geared towards balancing books of accounts by uplifting the general impression about the school as an English medium convent school among local middleclass fee- paying parents. This became even more evident during a conversation with a former administrative staff of another Jesuitess school in the city. She has left her job at the school and is working now for one of the most noted NGOs in the city, which works for the education of underprivileged children of Calcutta (Kolkata) asserted, “Oh Delphine Hart School is not an elite school anymore. The standard of the other Jesuitess schools are also going down. Only the main school at Park Street still has some standard.” It was clear from her statement that though she was working in the sector of social work for the underprivileged, inclusive education for both the children of Bhadrolok and Chotolok is not part of her moral vision. This was also the case with her Bhadrolok employer, who runs the NGO and transferred his own daughter to another expensive international school from Delphine Hart School, as already

whether Hindu or Muslim, would have been shocked to hear about these attacks on Christians.”- Ashis Nandy

214 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 215 referred to in chapter 6. This phenomenon of “Bhadrolok-flight” can be read as the phenomenon of “white-flight” from schools in the US after school de-segregation following the Brown vs. Board of education case in 1954. The difference is that in the case of United States it was a flight based on racial identity and history of racial segregation, but within the Indian context the flight is based on social class identity and history of social class segregation, reinforced by colonial policies and influence of deeply class-divided Victorian England. There has been also a widespread perception among people within the Kolkata community that the academic and behavioural standards of the school as a polite English medium convent school have declined. Despite the achievements of the school girls in competitive academic and co-curricular events, which are now displayed in showcases at the news school office and archived on the new school website, it was considered that the rising numbers of children coming from disadvantaged background which includes homeless, refugee and slum children were responsible bringing down the standards of the school. Of course, the school was in many ways out of capacity with underprivileged children. As noted earlier that by the time fieldwork of this research began, students on scholarship constituted 70% of the children within the school, instead of 50% as it was documented in earlier research on the school’s work. Over the course of this study the numbers of scholarship students were brought down to 20%. There is mixed response among various stakeholders within and outside the school about the recent changes in school policies under new leadership. Affected parents, students and also some older staff complained about recent infrastructure spending, increase in school fees and cut-backs on student scholarships; while others affirmed that they were necessary. A section of the local staff and some international beneficiaries apprehend that Delphine Hart School will soon lose its distinctive character of being an inclusive place for all children and will become like the other elitist English medium convent schools in the city and around the country catering only to the upper class children from privileged backgrounds. However, it should be noted here that the leadership change at Delphine Hart School happened at a critical time when the admission of fee-paying students have

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been steadily declining for the past few years, while donor funding from abroad was dwindling due to Global Financial Crisis77 and the flow of aid-money through global IGOs was also reducing. In many ways the problems DHS has been facing to sustain its inclusive education program is a global problem due to poor state investment in education and decline in donor funds. Moreover, a major challenge for the school right now is the rehabilitation of the very homeless girls- Maya, Kali and others- whose faces are being flashed around the world through worldwide web and at international film festivals abroad by a team of Norwegian, Czech and American film-makers celebrating the work of Delphine Hart School under the leadership of Sister Valentine following her address at the UN and Clinton Global Initiative. Even as these international beneficiaries are seeking to raise donations and funds for their global “inclusive schooling initiative” in the Czech Republic, the US and also for DHS school in Kolkata, by selling Sister Valentine’s values-based “inclusive pedagogic” approach to teacher’s abroad; the current school leadership and also Sister Valentine is deeply worried about the future of these girls after they complete their schooling. Many of these girls suffer from severe learning difficulties and opportunities for them outside the gates of the school within the larger Indian society are very few. Though there have been some successful cases of poor girls studying in the school as day scholars, securing jobs in upcoming new shopping malls or getting a nursing training to become a nurse. The opportunities for especially homeless orphans like Maya and her twin sister, Kali with learning difficulties are very few within Indian society. Though they have received shelter, care and access to education in the school; they have not received the professional help they needed to help them with their learning difficulties. The school is now faced with major ethical dilemma about what to do with these academically failing girls living in the residential home. Even those girls, who are doing well academically, do not have the means, resources and family support to study in college and pursue a professional career independently,

77 Individual international sponsors of the school who would be sponsoring 6 children would be now sponsoring 3 children now. The school social worker, Vanessa, who maintains much of these contacts with international donors admitted this fact and showed documents to the researcher during field research. Some of the international school beneficiaries interviewed for research also corroborated this fact.

216 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 217 though many of them are now nurturing these dreams as revealed during a survey conducted by me during field research. Since the opening up of the economy in the 1990s, led by the neoliberal imaginary of social entrepreneurship of individuals solving economic and social problems for development promoted by global organizations and donors kept the school leadership and its staff working for constant expansion of its work and activities as a centre for social development. However, as they have been setting up schools even in remote fishing communities in neighbouring states wooing international funds, it appears that the school somehow lost its main pedagogic purpose of inclusive education. In the middle of this constant expansion for community outreach led by donor interest to become a Hub for social transformation and development in the region, the school’s pedagogic innovations to solve educational problems came to a halt. Moreover, even Sister Valentine admitted during an interview that though she tried to train some of the older girls living in the residential home at school (but failing to cope with school education) to recruit them as “au pairs” in middleclass homes within the local community, it actually did not work out within the Indian context. Rescuing poor young uneducated girls from working in middleclass homes as domestic child labour, giving them some elementary education and training at an English medium school to recruit them back again as domestic workers does not change their life. It does not change the attitude of those who recruit them as house- maids within the Indian society outside the premises of the school. They are not treated with respect in local middleclass homes like educated “au pairs” are treated elsewhere. During fieldwork, the researcher observed that none of these girls also wanted to work as domestic workers after living at the residential home and studying in the school for few years. They were very much aware of the “babu-coolie” (master-porter) hegemonic relationship that dominates the relationship of the Indian middle-classes with the subalterns of their society. ‘Save the children’ is now providing beautician training to some of these girls, so that they can be recruited in local beauty parlours. However, the apprenticeship salary of Rs. 1500/month that they receive is barely enough to even cover the monthly cost of their food. The choices outside in the society are so few for these girls that it has now become a vicious cycle of poverty. Those girls who start

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falling behind in school or cannot look beyond the school to find any career for themselves; look for early marriage with someone as a solution. Then they come back to the school to admit their own daughters in the residential home as their poor husbands cannot afford to raise a family. Some of the older teachers in the school reported that the mothers of some of the children in the residential home now also lived in the same residential home as children. The school authority is therefore facing a major ethical dilemma now, especially with regards to these homeless girls. I came to know about several such stories of homeless orphan girls during her first five months fieldwork at the school. The stories of Ruma and Ashima are particularly worth recounting here. This will be discussed analysed further in the next section of this chapter.

Challenges for subaltern girls

I found the Rainbows are a chatty effusive, warm and giving group of children. They would force me to eat and share their food. As I started refusing their offering, one of them said: “Oh. Aamra dichchi bole khabe na?” (Oh you will not eat because we are giving?) I could not refuse their toffees, peanuts and biscuits after that. They love to hear stories and kept nagging me to tell a ghost story or a love story. “Ekta galpo bolo na?”: This is what they ask most visitor volunteers. Even the Fulbright English teacher, Kate, who is now also learning Bangla at the Indo-American Institute, reported this to me. Though I would read out stories to little children in my family and neighborhood many years ago, I was caught unprepared to narrate a tale to the rainbows. So, I started having casual conversation trying to learn about their stories with the promise of telling a story another day. They are extremely talkative and love to talk about themselves and family in spite of the difficult circumstances which has brought them to the rainbow home. (Fieldnotes from December 7th, 2012)

It becomes clear from the above notes that despite the schools attempt to create an inclusive schooling experience for the subaltern girls at DHS, these girls are somewhat conscious of their inferior status within the school. “Golpo bola”- Story telling became a naturalised relational exchange between us, through which I learnt about the many challenges facing some of these girls. For example, Ruma, looked like a teenage girl who suffered from severe learning difficulties and the school staff could not help her continue in school beyond class 8. They also found it hard to help her get any kind of vocational training other than training as a beautician with the help of ‘Save the Children’. While I was in the school, one day she came to see her

218 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 219 fellow friends in the residential home at the school with a bag of toffee in her hands. She now works in a local beauty parlour as an apprentice and earns Rs1500, which is insufficient for any person to survive in the city of Calcutta, especially if the person does not have a home to live. The school authorities allowed her to stay on, but with new leadership change and overall re-structuring of the school to balance books of accounts, made lives of residential homeless students most insecure. Under pressure to find a place to live outside the protected school premises, Ruma accepted the offer of a young man working in a neighbourhood tea-shop to get married. Though she looked visibly under-age to get married, but now she has a “shashur-bari” (in-laws house) in the neighbouring village to stay. She will probably have to leave the apprentice job in the beauty parlour, as her earnings are not enough for daily commuting in train from village to the city. Another girl, Ashima, who has multiple learning difficulty and a traumatic family background was in a similar situation working at a local beauty parlour for just Rs 1500 while still continuing to live in the school. One evening after Saraswati Puja (Saraswati is the Indian Hindu Goddess of Learning) celebration at the neighbouring Bengali medium school, where many of the residential girls study, Ashima began narrating her story to me. The smile on her face soon vanished as she began narrating her story to me addressing as “Didi” (elder sister). Ashima’s father worked in a garment factory in a notoriously gangster infested neighbourhood in Calcutta. One night while returning from work her father got caught in between two groups of fighting gangs and was shot dead. Ashima was only a year and half old then. Her mother began working as domestic servant to raise Ashima and her older sister. But, when Ashima was 7 years old, the older sister hanged herself one day after being raped by some local “mastaan” (gangster) in their slum. Within a year after this traumatic event, when Ashima’s mother was also detected with TB (tuberculosis), she could not continue to work as domestic servant. She found help through a Father (Catholic Priest) who works in the region, to admit Ashima at Delphine Hart School residential home to live and study. Ashima’s mother passed away soon after that and Ashima was now alone without any family. Ashima finds it very hard to memorise and remember anything. Memories of her childhood, her mother and sister particularly haunt her, since her father passed away when she was

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too young to remember anything. Hence, remembrance is a painful exercise for Ashima even when it is study material from textbooks. Like Ruma, Ashima also could not proceed beyond class 8 in school. She kept crying and saying in Bengali “Ami Thakur ke boli je amake para mukhosto koriye dao. Kintu kichutei mone rakhte pari na” (I pray to God and ask to help me to memorise lessons. But, I just cannot memorise). Though unlike other Indian schools Delphine Hart School follows more child-friendly pedagogic approach, beyond class 8 it becomes imperative within that context to train students for rote-memorising to pass in competitive board exams, since the language skills of most students are very poor. Though Delphine Hart School began running parallel National Open School program to help children who cannot cope with intensive regular school board curriculum, children like Ruma and Ashima, who cannot cope with English are still left with no choice but to drop-out after class 8, because NOS is run in English medium. As she expressed deep gratitude for what the school and particularly former Principal, Sister Valentine has done for her; Ashima also expressed her fear about her future. Ashima does not consider herself attractive enough for marriage like Ruma, as she limps with one short leg. She confided that she does not eat at the school anymore, since she is now earning. She just comes to school at night to sleep. As a researcher, I kept wondering what she is eating with just Rs.1500 (28 AUD) salary per month, especially with rising cost of food even within a comparatively low-cost Indian city like Calcutta (Kolkata). But, the biggest question was- what will she do when the school administration finally says that, they can’t allow her to stay in the school anymore? This question bothered Ashima as much as it still keeps bothering me as a researcher. My incidental learning about Ashima’s story and many other stories like Ashima’s story, also made me understand the ethical dilemmas of the school as an institution committed to social justice within the ever-increasing larger structural inequality of Calcutta (Kolkata) and this increasingly unequal world. I was bound by the ethical codes of research about identity, anonymity and protection of human subjects of research. Yet within this context, I struggled hard to reconcile with these codes of conduct for ethical research practice. Especially after such unexpected incidental revelations from vulnerable girls, the subjective experience of processing this information and then disengaging was particularly hard

220 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 221 as a researcher morally and ethically. However, this moral and ethical impulse is now urging me to give voice to these vulnerable underclass “subaltern” girls of the city of Calcutta (Kolkata), with the hope that those elites of the world who have real power to make change in this world will one day listen to their voices, since subaltern speech remains silent mostly due to the “unwillingness on the listener’s part to hear”

(Chemmencheri, 2015). When I visited the school again in early 2014 and inquired about Ashima, one of the school outreach staff reported with great disdain in her voice in Bengali, “O oder dara kichu hobe na jaano. O tho boyfriend-er saathe chole giye biye koreche. Bhaloi aache hoyeto pore kono din bachcha ke ekhane bhorti korate aashebe” (Oh nothing is going to happen to these girls you know. She has gone with her boyfriend and got married. Perhaps she is doing well and will come here sometime in the future to admit her own daughter).

Negotiations over Conflicting Demands

As stated earlier in this chapter, by the time the research for this study began, 70% children in the school were coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. Though the long-serving school Principal, Sister Valentine was being nationally and globally acclaimed for her work at DHS; within the local Calcutta (Kolkata) society DHS has been losing its status and reputation even academically due to this apparent imbalance. Interviews with some of the staff in the school also revealed their exhaustion to meet the emotional and learning difficulties of this large pool of children due to their difficult and often traumatic backgrounds. As a school staff stated during our interview, “If the other schools would obey the law of the land now with Right to Education Act and admit 25% disadvantaged children; at least our school would not be so inundated with these children. Over the years we have created a reputation that this school admits poor children and does its best to support them. Now there is also a law and so what do we do as a school? How can we run a school like this depending on uncertain global financial donation and no support from the government?” The new administration of the school is therefore caught in a tough situation having to deal with competing pressures from the local and the global in order to run the institution. The school needed to take certain steps at least to bring the balance back into the institution and the goal appeared to be to recapture the local market of

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fee-paying parents. The first step to restore balance was to re-organize the entire management structure of the school as discussed earlier in this chapter. Just as the new administration nudged and regaled the fee-paying parents of the junior school to retain their loyalty and faith in the school, the new administration began giving public notice during morning school assembly to parents of children in higher classes of the school, who were not paying school fees for a while and seeking scholarships for their children. I was present inside the school during one such public notice at the morning assembly. It was a very awkward scenario as the Principal announced that the children will be given TC (transfer certificate) from the school if overdue school fees were not cleared within a week. Quite surprisingly within a day parents of 50% children, who received public notice for transfer from the school showed up to pay overdue school fees. The school authorities informed that the school fees were due for more than a year, even before the new Principal took office and increase of school fees. In recent years the monthly school fees even at this comparatively low-fees missionary school like Delphine Hart School has progressively risen from Rs. 200 to Rs. 2000/month78. The downside of all infrastructure spending by the school and rising school fees was that more students started seeking scholarships in the higher classes of the school due to increase in school fees. For lower middle class Bengali parents (some of whom might have more than one child going to school, often with the father as only earning member in a highly gender-divided society), earning maximum between Rs.10,000-Rs.15,000/month, Rs. 200/month was affordable 10 years ago when they admitted their daughters to the school. However, for many of them who ran small businesses or worked in the unorganized sector of the economy, ten times leap of school fees in recent times became unaffordable without any equivalent increase in their earnings, as their daughters are now in higher classes in the school. Moreover, for many of these lower middleclass parents, the new economy has made their income become volatile, as it has been studied by Ganguly-Scarse and Scarse (2010), Gooptu (2009) Mukherjee-Reed 2008 and Patnaik (2010).

78 The new school website also declares that the school has right to increase fees at any time deemed necessary and the school has right to increase school fees at least 5% rate each year.

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The plight of these parents was also evident as I spoke with some of them. The anxiety of the Bengali middle classes in neoliberal times was palpable especially among the lower-middle class parents of the children in the school. Life is a daily struggle for many of them to keep up with their middle class social status and diminishing purchasing power with uncertain sources of income and rising costs of daily living. One of them revealed taking a personal loan to clear daughter’s school fees, since his small textile shop in the neighbourhood practically had no sales for several months, like many other small business owners in the neighbourhood. As I listened to the plight of these parents as owners of small businesses in the neighbourhood, I also observed that a huge big shopping mall has opened right across the street from the school. Apparently shoppers within the local community who have money for shopping prefer to go to shopping mall for cheaper ready-made clothes, than buy textile from small businesses to get their clothes tailored. However, some of the non-teaching school staff, who directly interact with parents openly complained and found it objectionable for parents to be able to buy mobile phones for their children, even as they were seeking scholarships and cannot pay school fees. It seemed that these staff members of the school, who also belonged apparently to the upper classes of the hierarchical Indian middle classes, perhaps do not realize that these gadgets have now become an essential part of middle class social status within the country. Moreover, often mobile phones are also essential means of not just communication, but also unorganized money transfer and banking facility especially for the unbanked poor and working-class to communicate with their family and for their daily livelihood and financial transactions at the grassroots level. This phenomenon within India in recent years has been studied by scholars like Doron and Jeffrey (2013) and Singh (2013). The tension between the lower middle class Bengali parents with some of the upper-class school staff, seem to echo the anxiety of the broader society of Indian middle classes in the neoliberal era, especially in the city of Calcutta (Kolkata), as it has been studied by Roy (2003, 2011) and Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase (2008), who quotes from a research participant: “In the future, the middle class, families like ours, will disappear. People will either move up to the upper-class or they will get absorbed into the lower class. We'll become like Bangladesh!" (p. 197).

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The pressure from the international donor organizations and a section of the school staff was also urging the current school administration to continue with the policies and practices of the previous administration, since the former school Principal and the school’s work received global recognition. Yet, one can ask here how many of these social workers and international NGO staff would be really ready to send their own child to study in Delphine Hart School? Probably very few or none would do so. Probably they would also admit their own daughters to a posh international school like Mr. Deb, the father of the girl who was transferred from Delphine Hart School. Rizvi (2014) has argued in this era of globalizing circumstances, old elite schools are strategically reworking their histories to reposition themselves in the increasingly competitive market for private schools in order to attract fee-paying elite and middleclass parents. This observation also appears to be true for DHS. The new school website or publicity material circulated by the school no longer promotes the 50:50 model of social inclusion in the school. The new school website has strategically re-worked the school’s history of operating separate free schools and reserving only 20% of all seats for economically disadvantaged girls. The school website also clearly publicise the raised tuition fee and other financial liabilities for the parents. The rise in the numbers of scholarship seeking students in the school at the time when this research began is indicative of greater financial need among not just the underclass “subaltern” student-body of the city like Ruma and Ashima. As argued in this chapter, it is also indicative of the financial need of several of the lower middleclass students, whose fathers are struggling financially in the new economy due to decline in public sector jobs, failing small businesses within the fast gentrifying neighbourhood and new vulnerabilities in workplace as workers of the large 93% unorganized sector of the Indian economy. (See: Mukherjee-Reed 2008, Dreze and Sen 2013) However, in the middle of financial challenges caught in between competing demands; the new school Leadership was rationally seeking to meet the demands of the local new middleclass parents for institutional sustainability. Though she openly appreciated the transformative ideals of former leadership, it was not possible for the new Principal missed to capitalize on global resources to continue with the social

224 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 225 justice and inclusive education program. The local population with means within India are also not as philanthropic as global donors. During one of our informal conversations, this fact was admitted by the new Principal Sister Dora herself, who was extremely critical of native Indian’s lack of interest in philanthropy. Even as capitalism now rules India with greater force since the opening up of the economy in the 1990s79 with Indian billionaires now competing with their counterparts in the developed economies, “philanthrocapitalism” (Bishop and Green 2008) as it is referred to by many critical scholars in western countries, is still not part of capitalist culture within Indian society, as it is in a country like the United States. The Indian capitalists in the 21st Century are apparently least interested in social returns unlike their western counterparts, as it has been also revealed in a recent research study broadcast through the news media.80 Therefore, within a volatile nature of global economy, poor local philanthropy and practically no State-support as an unaided- government-recognised private school; the new school leadership had practically little choice than to follow market dictates.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I argue here that there appears to be a slow and steady shift in focus of the school from transformative “social action” for “radical politics of inclusion and social justice” as theorised by Bajaj (2011) for the upliftment of the “subaltern” underclass to individual “rights-based protest” against gender oppression in general. Also, the differences of even “gendered” experiences based on race, class, nationality, different-ability (disability) appear to be blurring. How it is going to impact the upliftment of the gendered subaltern of the lower classes and different- ability through inclusive education in the long-run appears to be uncertain, especially since the student scholarships were being cut by school authorities to not just restore 50:50 balance within the institution, but to bring scholarships down to 20%. The

79 Though critical scholars of Indian political economy would argue that historically Indian economy has always worked in the capitalist mode (D’costa 2010) because of the vestiges of feudal capitalist cultural values, despite constitutional commitment post-independence to establish a socialist democracy in 1947 80 See: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Why-Indian-billionaires-are-so-bad- at-charity/articleshow/43991413.cms http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/global/25rupee.html?_r=0 http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/03/right-to-education-act-india/

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future of girls like Maya, Kali, Ruma and Ashima referred to in this chapter, appear to be uncertain and caught up in the seemingly vicious cycle of poverty and deprivation. Therefore, within a complex schooling context like Delphine Hart School, data from this study suggests that it is extremely hard to sustain programs of inclusive education reform like the one developed and implemented by Delphine Hart School for over two decades towards the end of the 20thCentury. Though during the first decade of the new century the school appeared to be successfully promoting its work globally, yet it appears that its sustainability was too much dependent on the school leader’s ability to negotiate with competing pressures to gather resources and to also sustain policies and practices for social justice and inclusive education. Based on these key findings from the study as analysed in this chapter and previous two chapters; the following concluding chapter will therefore, argue about the challenges of implementing the RTE mandate of 25% reservation for children from disadvantaged low SES backgrounds into unaided private schools.

226 Chapter 7: Sustaining Inclusive Education Reforms 227

Chapter 8

Conclusion

Sustainable inclusion in education may only be achieved when we have a social and political environment that is focused on the idea of an inclusive society in which equity and social justice are the predominant goals and notions of caring and interdependence take precedence over selfishness, materialism and market competition….Nevertheless, striving to create inclusive schools may contribute to this wider goal by promoting an understanding of inclusion and by providing examples in practice. (Ballard 2013, p. 771)

In this thesis I have shown that even though the concept of inclusive education has sometimes been thought to involve “utopian thinking”, it has also been considered a necessity for helping to build a socially inclusive society. However, inclusive education for all remains a major pedagogic challenge around the world. Despite its ideological appeal, it has failed to be institutionalized in mainstream educational institutions. Indeed it is becoming increasingly more difficult to sustain inclusive educational reforms under the neoliberal economic conditions around the world. Even though policy documents of both politically left and right inclined international organizations and national governments uphold the principle of inclusive education for creating a socially just society and for ensuring sustainable development, there are few examples of robust programs of reform anywhere in the world.

This is true also of the Indian context. However, among the few success stories, Delphine Hart School’s work stood out as an exceptional case, nationally and globally noted for its efforts and celebrated for its achievements in the face of overwhelming odds. Its success is even more noteworthy in view of the fact that this is a private school belonging to a prestigious global network of schools established and managed by a religious order foreign to Indian society, which had in recent years provided education largely for middle class girls. How was it then that this school became committed to the principle of inclusive education, looking after the needs of

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the most marginalized communities in the city of Kolkata? And how did it implement this principle, overcoming the opposition from entrenched interests? The research reported in this thesis began with a sense of curiosity to study the work of Delphine Hart School to gain deeper understanding about ways in which Delphine Hart School conceptualized the idea of inclusive education and translated it into effective practice. The regular references to the school in the academic literature on educational reform in the developing countries and my own experiences of a sister school of DHS within the city of Kolkata added to my research interest. The two main research questions were thus designed to understand the school’s conception of inclusive education, which drove its programs of educational reform; and to examine the ways in which the school mobilized the ideological and material resources it needed to implement these programs. During the course of the fieldwork, a third question emerged: how sustainable are the school’s reforms in light of the shifting organizational, ideological and economic conditions under which it now operates?

Ethnographic data was gathered over a period of ten months in three stages. During the first stage, this involved participatory field observations, individual and focus group interviews with administrators, teachers, parents, alumni and students within the school in India over a period of six months. At the school, several international research participants were also present and were interviewed during this period. Archival historic data about the school’s work in school publications was also gathered. The second phase of data collection involved two months of interviews with researchers and development and educational activists who knew and often supported the school outside India- in Australia and also in the US and Canada using skype. After a break of eight months following the first phase of fieldwork, a third stage of the research involved another site visit to the school, where follow-up interviews with some of the same research participants were conducted. A large amount of data was thus collected, not only from administrators, teachers, parents, alumni and students at the school itself, but also from the various people who had researched the school and those who had supported and championed its work, both within India and globally.

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Key Research Findings

As I have already noted, Delphine Hart School is a government recognized, but a financially unaided minority Catholic school; and as such has considerable autonomy to develop a sense of its own educational priorities. The data collected for this research indicated that the school’s distinctive understanding of the concept of inclusive education emerged out of both in-school and out-school factors, based on intellectual resources drawn from a wide variety of sources. For most of the three decades while Sister Valentine was its Principal, the school’s conception of inclusive education was guided by the inspiration it drew not only from the Jesuitess educational mission in India and the principles embedded within the postcolonial Indian constitution, but also global policy rhetoric about the need to provide education for all since the 1990s. Much of the literature on policy borrowing and lending have critiqued how global policies have been often selectively borrowed by local governments and communities under pressure “to achieve standardized targets, determined in the North, in a more efficient and, if possible, cost-effective manner” (Steiner-Khamsi 2009, p. 258). However, this case study shows that much before such discourse gained currency globally and nationally, the school’s understanding of the idea of inclusive education was based on its recognition of the desperate needs of the very poor children who lived within its geographical community. As it has been already shown earlier on p. 124 by quoting from the Ripples and Rainbow booklet of the school, Delphine Hart School has been experimenting with an inclusive model of schooling middle-class and disadvantaged girls of the community since the 1979 driven by local needs.

The school viewed the educational needs of the marginalized, which included refugee children from Bangladesh as a moral imperative, within the tradition of its Catholic mission. However, it also drew upon both local and global intellectual resources to think about the pedagogic challenges and possibilities of education for a socially just society. Its conception of inclusive education is thus a hybrid formation, based variously on the ideas drawn from Tagore’s philosophy of education, Freirean notion of the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and global discourses of human rights. The data collected for the thesis showed the school used these and other related ideas freely to develop and justify its programs and practices.

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This conceptualization of inclusive education was also driven by the Jesuitess institutional history within India. It is to be noted here once again that the Jesuitess schools (including DHS) were first set up during colonial times by the Irish missionary nuns under the pioneering leadership of a German Priest to provide education to the poor illiterate Catholic girls of the region (Nolan 2008, Colmcille 1968). However, the larger Jesuitess order struggled during the British colonial rule to actually reach out and educate the poor and vulnerable Indian girls, due to what Jesuitess historian, Colmcille (1968) described as “injustice in the educational policy” (p. 280) as noted earlier in the thesis. While the school was initially established for the poor over time however it became a school for the middle class girls, both Indian and expatriates. It was only after independence that the Jesuitess order re-asserted its original mission, but only in ways that suggested the need to teach middle class girls a sense of the moral responsibility they had towards the poor. For example, the 1971 school Constitution:

Our goals is to form women alive to the needs of our world, with the knowledge which gives them power to act, and motivated by the love which gives them purpose and wisdom in their action. The education of girls from every social background has to be undertaken so that there can be produced not only women of refined talents but those great souled persons who are so desperately needed by our times. (p. 29) Towards the end of 1970s, with the appointment of Sister Valentine as the Principal at Delphine Hart School, the school began to shift its focus away from the education of middle class girls and express explicitly its commitment to the most marginalized in its community. I have shown how initially Sister Valentine did not find it easy to achieve these ideological and organizational shifts, in light of resistance from the teachers and parents at the school. It was only as a result of the success of the school’s strategic partnerships with global and local organizations, such as the Institute of Human Rights Education, UNICEF and Indian government’s Sarva Shikshya Abhiyan81 (Mission) State Project Directorate’s office that helped the school to adopt, what Bajaj (2011) describes as “persuasive pragmatic” approach. This involved persuading the local school staff, teachers and parents that the school was doing something of national and global significance. As it is evident from interviews with some of the old school staff and also with some old alums of the

230 Chapter 8: Conclusion 231 school these strategic partnerships helped to instill a sense of pride within the local community about its approach to education. With initial success, Sister Valentine was able to take the good stories from the school to the world, garnering further financial support, enabling her to establish initiatives that were unthinkable with the traditional avenues of funding, involving a heavy reliance on student fees.

Receiving the UNESCO NOMA award in 1994 became a milestone for the school. In 2007, Sister Valentine was also awarded the fourth-highest civilian award by the Indian government in recognition of her work as a school leader and educational innovator. These awards further assisted the school to obtain resources from various state agencies and development organizations both locally and globally, enabling it to extend its reforms both within the school and outside the school within the local community. The school became, for example, the North Eastern regional centre for the promotion of Human Rights Education, and elements of its values- education curriculum were incorporated within the national Human Rights Education curriculum. Moreover, a knowledge hub was set up inside the school with funding from the UNICEF and the school published several books on an inclusive teacher’s training methodology, theme-based teaching, and child-friendly teaching of English, History and fun Math at the elementary level, based on the practical knowledge of teachers working in inclusive classrooms at DHS. The school also published several big picture books for elementary level school children in English and local language Bengali with illustrations in these books made by school staff and students. These materials were shared and distributed to teachers and school Principals of other English medium private schools and Bengali medium government schools in the region during teachers’ training seminars and workshops organized by local Sarva Shikshya Mission office. Indeed, the school became a center for social transformation and inclusive education, enhancing its reputation and prestige- as a school that began to be highly regarded for its “best practices” by bilateral global development government agencies, such a DFID and multilateral UN agencies. This neoliberal trend of formulating standardized “best practices” for development policy transfer for North-South-South transfer has been already much critiqued by critical comparative education scholars, such as Steiner-Khamsi (2008, 2009, 2012)

81 Also known as Sarva Shikshya Mission particularly in the State of West Bengal

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Moreover, it is to be also noted here that, in DHS’s success, the role of the principal cannot be overlooked. With extensive global networks, Sister Valentine was able to travel widely and promoted the school’s reforms, attracting not only recognition but also funds with which to establish further initiatives both within and outside the school. Success became a catalyst for further success. The extent to which the fact that Sister Valentine was an Irish-born, a white person, with energy and charisma to burn, contributed to the school’s success is of course a mute point, and can only be speculated upon. Without funding from abroad, however, it is inconceivable that the school would have been able to establish its extensive programs of reform. At the same time, however, the school leadership clearly played a significant part in conceptualizing, implementing and promoting the school’s various initiatives around inclusive education.

The issue of the role of school leadership is linked to questions about the sustainability of the reforms that DHS has pursued over the past three decades. Even while Sister Valentine was still the Principal, DHS had begun to experience significant financial challenges. Since the school gained reputation within the local community about being an inclusive school, it had begun to receive an ever- increasing number of applications for admission from poor children. At the same time, with the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s and establishment of several new corporate-run for-profit schools in and around the city of Kolkata, the school began to experience a steady exodus of fee-paying middle-class children out of the school to study in these new corporate schools. By the time the new school Principal, Sister Dora took charge of the leadership of the school, the 50:50 balance of fee-paying and scholarship students at the school had become imbalanced and had declines to almost 30:70, with greater number of poor children enrolled on scholarships than ever before. At the same time, financial resources received through donations and grants declined significantly after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

As the financial position of the school deteriorated, the current Principal has been required to stabilize and improve its financial health. Born and educated within India, as a nun, Sister Dora does not have the capacity to engage the global like Sister Valentine. The reform efforts under the current school leadership are, therefore, increasingly geared towards meeting the demands of the local fee-paying new

232 Chapter 8: Conclusion 233 middleclass parents within an increasingly privatized education market. These market demands are disproportionately in favour of the traditional i.e. colonial “factory- model” of schooling within the Indian context, which became a mainstream educational norm within the colonial Indian society as critiqued by Tagore and considered as good schooling among local parents. It appears to have once again become an educational norm within the emerging Indian society in the 21st Century.

The recent policies at the school are thus beginning to reverse many of the earlier practices established by the former Principal. This has raised some serious questions about the sustainability of inclusive educational reforms established by the school. A multiplicity of both in-school and out-school factors are influencing these changes at the school, suggesting a complex relationship between the global and the local. The strong market forces now operating within ‘neoliberalising’ city of Kolkata and India at large, as well as local class hierarchies and prejudices, are affecting sustainability of school reforms. Indeed, the larger global structural forces may be reinforcing local hierarchies and prejudices.

In India, as elsewhere, as a result of the rising demand for education, the local state machinery is working proactively to de-regulate the market, increasing competition in every sector of the economy, including education. However, it is clear from the data that such competition works against the values of inclusive education, since in a highly competitive system; “good” education is traditionally imagined in meritocratic and consumer-driven terms. In an era of privatization, the ideals of inclusivity are not widely prized and supported. What is celebrated instead is an education designed to meet the needs of a competitive labour market. This was clearly evident in the interviews with some parents, current school administration and even some staff members who thought any attempt to accommodate children from disadvantaged backgrounds necessarily damaged standards at the school.

What has also become clear is that though the school’s inclusive pedagogic approach and innovations were much acclaimed nationally and globally, a section of the school staff was clearly never convinced, and now openly expresses their frustrations at the school becoming over-crowded and under-resourced as a result of the presence of non-fee-paying poor students. They feel “burnt out”, and hanker for a school in which considerable social problems of Kolkata do not affect them on daily

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basis. What is clearly evident is that while the school remains committed to the idea of inclusive education, its ability to sustain the reforms for which it has been widely celebrated is severely diminished, due to factors within the school, the community in which it is located, the Indian society and also globally.

Lessons from Delphine Hart School

The key findings that have emerged from this research however suggest that the initiatives towards inclusive education developed and implemented at Delphine Hart School over the past three decades represent a significant educational innovation that has considerable relevance to the broader Indian system of education. The DHS educational innovation, points to the hard work that the school has done over the years. It shows that it is possible to develop a conception of inclusive education that is both globally informed and locally grounded- the traditions of the Indian society as well as in the global discourses of human rights. It indicates how the school’s success is partly due to its ability to strategically obtain the consent and support for its various reform initiatives from its teachers, parents and the local community. However, in doing this, the role of leadership emerges to be highly significant, for clearly its charismatic Principal was able to promote the school globally and garner ideological and financial support not only from state and national governments within India but also international organizations. The accolades that the school received gave its community confidence, together with a perception that the direction of its reforms was on the right track.

This research shows that the positive reviews that have been written about the school’s efforts to promote inclusive education are mostly justified. The school’s work deserves to be celebrated. However, it is also clear that moving ahead the school will find it difficult to sustain its program of reform, especially under the changing administrative conditions within the school, and the ideological shifts within the Indian community. The broader neoliberal reforms in Indian politics are now beginning to lead to significant cultural changes within Kolkata, resulting in a declining commitment to the principles of social justice. On the other hand, the global discourse surrounding the idea of inclusive education remains strong; and the Indian national government’s Right to Education Act (RTE) 2010 provides a context

234 Chapter 8: Conclusion 235 in which even the most elite schools have to demonstrate a commitment to inclusive education.

Despite the financial difficulties that DHS is now facing, and while there are doubts about the sustainability of its reforms, I want to argue that its experiences are nonetheless highly instructive for the private Indian system of education as a whole, as it seeks to implement clause 12 of Right To Education’s requirements. It is to be also noted here that being a minority religious community run institution, Delphine Hart School technically does not fall under the clause 12 mandate of RTE. However, it has been historically implementing equity-based access policy for inclusive education driven by its institutional social justice mission. Since the late 1970s, the school also began developing an inclusive pedagogic approach, policies, practices and teacher’s training program for establishing an inclusive school culture. This is how the school’s inclusive work caught the imagination of global development agencies, as well as National policy-makers. This is evident from the fact that the school’s work is documented as a successful example of Inclusive Education for All even in the Indian government’s Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan publication.

So, while I do not view the findings of one case study as generalizable to all other contexts in any tight sense, I nevertheless believe that they do point to some “lessons”- generalizable insights that can be examined for their local relevance. For example, some of the policies and practices developed by Delphine Hart School could be useful in designing school leadership training and teacher education program for inclusive education to implement the clause 12 of Right to Education Act 2010, which mandates unaided government, recognized non-minority private schools to include 25% children from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is important to understand the challenges private school principals face with the new Act, especially if their school is totally dependent on private school-fees paid by middleclass parents. In this context it is important to note that there have been several media reports in recent times with private school administration complaining that they have not received their reimbursement from the government under clause 12 of RTE for admitting children from low SES backgrounds. These reports in the media about policy-practice and implementation gap are also supported by recent research evidence from some private schools in Delhi (Srivastava and Noronha, 2014). The

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ways in which DHS managed these challenges are surely helpful to develop insights about the challenges in implementation, not just for access, but also for student learning, retention and success in school! The various strategies DHS implemented in its school for creating inclusive learning spaces and experiences of children, such as peer-to-peer learning, teacher promotion with students, mixed group teaching and learning with children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and a reflective five-step methodology of teaching involving individual and group activity for children could be very useful inclusive pedagogic strategies within the Indian context.

Figure 7: Stages in the Adoption Cycle of A Social Innovation Source: Flynn and Nitsch 1980; 364 as cited in Stangvik 1997; 44

The case study of Delphine Hart School suggests that a more systemic approach is needed to address external (outside school) factors, which act as barriers for sustainable inclusive educational reforms. It points to the dangers of “exceptionalizing schools” and suggest the need for a more holistic approach for “societal institutionalization” as suggested by Stangvik (1997) for conceptual understanding, acceptance, legislation and most importantly necessary resource allocation in order to sustain inclusive educational reforms. For “societal institutionalization” of inclusive education, the case study of DHS suggests that there needs to be better conceptual understanding and acceptance of the concept of

236 Chapter 8: Conclusion 237 inclusive education as Stangvik (1997) suggested, since the school sector within India has been historically highly segregated. Moreover, since the challenges of implementing and sustaining inclusive school reforms within the Indian context are becoming extremely difficult within the neoliberal economic environment, with steep competition from new exclusive corporate schools conceptual understanding appear to be even more important since “within the Indian context, it [i.e. inclusive education] is a much abused term and is often rejected too easily without much research” (Bhattacharya 2010, p. 18).

School Leadership for Inclusive Education

Data from this case study suggests that much like in other parts of the world, the role of school leader would be significant in establishing, promoting and sustaining inclusive educational policies and practices. In discussing school leadership for social justice and inclusive education in historically inequitable school districts in the US for example, DeMatthews and Mawhinney (2014) argued that the school leaders “sense of commitment toward inclusion was related to their experiences”…and whenever school leaders “meet challenges and resistance, their commitments enabled them to continue” (p. 33). Here, I would argue that in this study within the Indian context, it was also found that the “prefigurative politics” of former school leadership and some of the staff in the school bolstered their sense of commitment towards pushing for inclusive education within the local context against dominant social norms. However, with change in the school leadership, local market forces now appear to be driving policies and practices in the school more than its sense of ‘prefigurative politics”. Thoughts of institutional sustainability appeared to be weighing more on the policy decisions of new school Principal, though ideologically she appeared to be agreeing with the work done at the school under former leadership. Ward et al. (2014) argue that within the context in UK, three approaches might encourage more engagement with issues of inequity and inclusion. These are: “(1) critical reflection; (2) the cultivation of a ‘common vision’ of equity and (3) ‘transforming dialogue’” (p. 342). Within the Indian context at Delphine Hart School, much critical reflection and transformative dialogue between the former school leader and the school community took place over a period of three decades.

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However, though the earlier evaluative case study by Jessop (1998) claimed that a shared ‘common vision’ existed within the school community, it is clear from evidence gathered through this case study that despite the institutional mission for social justice and former leadership’s effort to cultivate a ‘common vision’ for equity; not everyone in the school community shared this vision. Now the role of school leadership becomes even more crucial in pushing back against the market forces, since the school does not only have to resist emerging pressure but also redefine a new commitment. As McLesky and Waldron (2005) argues quoting from

Salisbury (2006), “Schools that function inclusively do so for a reason . . . principals in these schools were the reason” (p. 79). What is clear then is that the policies, practices and leadership strategies that have been successful over the past three decades are still relevant in training school leaders to create ‘inclusive school culture’ (Ainscow and Sandill 2010). Likewise, the problems and hurdles faced by Delphine Hart School in sustaining inclusive educational reforms help us to understand what kinds of strategies need to be undertaken and what resources need to be put in place in order to persist with inclusive policies and practices, under the new conditions of financial constraints. This is particularly important, since schools within the Indian context historically get little systemic support in terms of necessary resources and research-based training, as is often the case in most developed economies. The social imaginary of the postcolonial Indian nation with its socialist democratic priorities is also fast changing with neoliberal globalization, often reinforcing indigenous structures of inequality, as it has been studied by various scholars (Sridharan 2004, D’Costa 2010, Roy 2003, 2011; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 20108). The changes in the school are therefore happening at the historic intersection of conflicting social, cultural, economic and political priorities both locally and globally as the neoliberal restructuring of the economy, ideology and social imaginary is geared towards creating individuals more concerned about themselves, than the broader society. With respect to the education of girls, the neoliberal changes have conflicting consequences. While the middleclass gendered subalterns within the Indian context are clearly becoming empowered to some extent as part of such campaign as 1 Billion Rising; and the restructuring of the economy is helping to make them a part

238 Chapter 8: Conclusion 239 of the 21st Century workforce. However, these changes are not necessarily helping to free their less privileged peers. In recent years, much has been written in India and abroad about the role of the educated girls can play as agents of educational and social change. Yet this case study of DHS draws attention to the cultural consequences of projecting educated girls as agents of social change within a context of rising inequality, where the economic and social burden is often being borne mostly by women and girls, as it has been also argued for example by Ghosh, Chakravarty and Mansi (2015), Armstrong (2014), Donner (2008) Ganguly-Scrase 2003. Recounting the stories of several girls from disadvantaged backgrounds at DHS, I have highlighted the powerlessness and vulnerabilities of these girls within the larger Indian context. The case study also highlights the plight of lower-middleclass parents struggling to pay raised school fees and homeless vulnerable girls like Ashima, Ruma, Maya and Kali, facing uncertain future without any promise of the kind of help they actually need. The vulnerable marginalized girls in the community need far more resources than it is possible for one school and one school leader to assemble. Educational access of subaltern girls into private English medium schools needs to be supplemented with necessary resources to rehabilitate them beyond the school community with pathways towards well-paid employment, so that they can live with dignity outside the gates of the school and not left again vulnerable on the streets. What DHS was able to do for the successful case of Ameena, the Bangladeshi refugee girl referred to earlier, is clearly an exceptional case. It was obviously not possible for the school to do so for all girls from disadvantaged homeless backgrounds. Khooja-Moolji (2015) argues, “Exceptionalizing schools—either as a panacea for, or a cause of, societal problems—directs attention away from the group of institutions that partake in producing livable conditions for people” (p.102). It takes lot of resources to provide a child an education till the school leaving stage and then provide necessary tertiary training to employ them. The social entrepreneurial work of former school leadership, Sister Valentine, is highly commendable, in terms of her ability and vision to capitalize on personal and institutional global network to assemble resources to sustain the inclusive educational work of the school and to provide support to disadvantaged girls to succeed in receiving school leaving

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certificate (either through mainstream school board or, through National Open School). However, such an approach of assembling global resources to sustain the local work for education, social welfare and upliftment of the poor children is clearly not possible across the country. Moreover, within a society where house-maids are treated as lesser human beings (never mind if they are educated till class 8 in a convent school) and can rarely be treated as an educated “au pair”, the question is whether elementary education in a private English medium school or a convent school really empowers these girls! After studying till class 8 in a convent school when a girl gets trained as a beautician by Save the Children and placed as an apprentice for just Rs 1500/ month in the city of Kolkata, does it really empowers the girl outside the school gates? What are the choices for this girl to survive with dignity? These are important questions to think about at the levels of both policy and practice, if the clause 12 of RTE is considered as a solution to educational and social problems within the contemporary Indian society.

Beyond the Discourse of the Educated Girls as Saviour

A number of scholars, such as Rizvi and Lingard (2010), have pointed to the rising global income inequality around the world resulting from neoliberal restructuring. Yet paradoxically there has been a global rise in reform discourse for gender and social equality for minority groups in terms of the promotion of “rights” as if for “righting the wrongs” of colonial past and also the “wrongs” of the present era of neoliberal globalization (Spivak 2004, Connell 2011, Armstrong 2014, Khooja-Moolji 2015). Within this broader liberal global discourse about achieving gender equality and social equality of marginalized groups, the support of the privileged, who are in positions of power, has been encouraged. Yet, the neoliberal market-oriented imaginary appear to be slowly crowding the fight for equal rights for women and other minorities based on religious, class, caste, racial and sexual difference. Global and local development organizations, such as UNICEF, IHRE and Save the Children continue to espouse the liberal values of human rights and social justice, but now utilize the market discourse and human capital theory to argue for gender equality and social justice.

240 Chapter 8: Conclusion 241

Girl’s education is pitched as the most important global development agenda in the 21stCentury for economic growth and sustainability. The entire responsibility of saving the world from the ravages of colonial histories and patriarchal capitalist exploitation rests on the shoulders of young girls. For example, Malala Yousufzai and her utopic idealistic child-like quotes without much critical reflection on the structural inequalities are now publicised by global development organizations to promote the idea that individuals can change the world: “One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world.” However, even within the supposedly oppressed Pushtun society of Pakistan, the fact that Malala and her family were located in a position of relative privilege to be able to establish networks of contacts with the liberal western world outside for support is often overlooked. In recent years the words of the US secretary of States, Hillary Clinton saying that “I believe that the rights of women and girls is the unfinished business of the 21st Century” and the world of religious leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu saying: “If we are going to see real development in the world, then our best investment is women” are widely circulated by global development organizations everywhere through mass media and social media. The seemingly market discourse of democratization of capital and education as “investment” for girls as the socially marginalized of the world for global development is promoted through little girls like Malala Yousufzai. The work of educational entrepreneurs such as Sister Valentine has arguably become located within this tradition of thinking. However, Khooja-Moolji (2015) has observed: “The centering of girls’ education as the problem and the solution, hence, is ideology-in-the- making....Ideology apoliticizes and ahistoricizes girls’ issues” (p. 102). Hence, taking into account the realities of the specific political and historical context of India, whether the girls at Delphine Hart School will be able to meet dual challenge of being really like the ten-handed mythical Goddess Durga to act as agents of social change for the upliftment of the “subaltern” underclass of their society, as well as be the career woman to meet the needs of the local and global economy or not, is now a pertinent question.

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Conceptual Adoption

Drawing on Flynn and Nitsch’s (1980) stages of adoption for cycle of social innovation; Stangvik (1997) argues that, adoption-in-theory is primary to translate social innovation such as inclusive education into adoption-in-practice. I have argued earlier that conceptual understanding and wide-ranging institutional acceptance of the concept of inclusive education at cognitive level is clearly necessary, as indeed are proper legislations at the state level, but also resource allocation for widespread implementation and societal institutionalization. However, this case study suggests that the conceptualization of inclusive education at the school was led primarily by former school Principal, Sister Valentine’s particular interpretation of Jesuitess institutional tradition and local needs of the community. This conceptual thinking also happened during a specific historic time of increased political turbulence and socioeconomic inequality. It was also led by a sense of “prefigurative politics” among key actors at the school- including some students, teachers and the school Principal.

There was clearly absence of indigenizing the concept of inclusive education, drawing upon distinctively Indian traditions, particularly the educational theory and experiments of Rabindranath Tagore, though some teachers in the school came from Tagorean tradition of inclusive schooling and were actively involved in reform related work. Evidence can be found in the historical writings of Jesuitess historian, Colmcille (1968) that the community of nuns also showed great interest particularly with regards to Tagore’s artistic work and cultural production. But, no evidence of theoretical understanding of Tagore’s pedagogic work was found either from archival writings and interview data. As stated earlier in this thesis, adoption-in-practice of the concept of inclusive education preceded adoption-in-theory following the generation of global discourse on inclusive education for all, as Sister Valentine admitted in an interview: “In most of the training colleges 90% is theory which is like the shoe. On the other hand the practical which is the foot is only about 10% of the training colleges. So, we dispense with the theory.” Here I would argue that it is important to understand the concept of inclusive education theoretically, particularly within the context of shifting neoliberal imaginary and aspirations of the Indian middleclass.

242 Chapter 8: Conclusion 243

Moreover, empirical data from this study suggests that, apart from school leadership and some of the school staff, who worked closely with her, there was serious absence of conceptual understanding even about the need and benefits of inclusive education among the school community and society at large. This is evident from the interview with a language teacher, who appeared both oblivious of Tagore’s theoretical ideas on education and society, as well as the global discourse about “inclusive education” for all. To her the concept is something associated with former school Principal, Sister Valentine as it is evident from this quote:

You see Sister Valentine really believed in this inclusive education thing…but you see these girls…it really does not work here. The “dirty” (vulgar) language in which they speak and what they learn on the streets and “bustees” (slums)…how can you teach them Tagore’s language?…the beauty of the language is lost on them. I read the poems in class and they laugh! This is ironic particularly since Tagore spent the entire second half of his life for the upliftment of the subaltern marginalized sections of Indian society through education. Interestingly, however, a recent report in the news-media about a poor Indian girl working as maid82, who studied in two different vernacular medium and an English medium school with umpteen family and financial challenges before taking and scoring high marks in high-school leaving exams negates this teacher’s understanding of the capabilities of children from low SES background. Her ideas are rooted in the deficit ideology of her own Bhadrolok cultural background against a child from Chotolok background. She is clearly unaware of the problems of her own pedagogic style and failure to engage the kids in the learning process. It is also important to note that the arguments against inclusive education as impractical in classrooms by this Indian teacher also echoes the arguments against inclusive education often raised by some teachers even in western societies, as it is evident from this recent article in the Guardian with regards to the inclusion of children with disability83. It suggests that teachers both within India and also in comparatively developed economies need more specialized support in developing conceptual understanding along with resources to help build inclusive school culture

82 see: http://www.bangaloremirror.com/bangalore/cover-story/17-year-old-works-as-maid-in-five- houses-secures-85/articleshow/47334831.cms

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to make inclusive education a reality both in classrooms and the society outside the school. Teachers do not operate in a cultural vacuum. Teachers are as much part of the society where they work in schools. Hence, I suggest that it is extremely important to design teacher education curriculum that incorporates critical consciousness raising and capacity for critical self-reflection. Freire (1993) refers to such education as “conscientization”. However, along with consciousness raising about inequities and the dismal mechanical education system, Tagore (1906) also recommended Indian teachers to go back to their ancient indigenous heritage and take up teaching as a serious duty of a “Guru” for the greater good of larger society, rather than being a “tradesman, a vendor of education” (p. 121). According to his analysis: “what we now call school in this country is really a factory, and the teachers are part of it” (Dasgupta 2009, p. 112). The only way Tagore could find a way to reform the system is to go back to India’s ancient tradition to focus on the relational aspects of education and real learning which “is thwarted at every step by the human teacher who believes in machine-made lessons rather than life lessons, so that the growth of the child’s mind is not only injured, but forcibly spoiled” (p. 109) as Dasgupta (2009) quotes from one of Tagore’s talks to teachers. As has been noted in chapter 7, the promotion of inclusive reforms at DHS was also led by the Jesuitess tradition of promoting “youth social action”. The first call for radical inclusion of disadvantaged children within the school came from a section of school students following the rape of a homeless girl-child outside the gates of the school. As stated earlier, it appears that in this case adoption- in- practice of inclusive education preceded adoption- in- theory. This conflicts with Stangvik’s (19997) view that conceptual understanding and acceptance of inclusive education is a pre-requisite for adoption-in-practice and societal institutionalization of social innovation. However, as Pieterse (2001, p. 2) has argued: Theory is a distillation of reflections on practice into conceptual language so as to connect with past knowledge. The relationship between theory and practice is uneven: theory tends to lag behind practice, behind innovations on the ground, and practice tends to lag behind theory (since policymakers and activists lack time for reflection). A careful look at practice can generate

83 See: http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/may/23/secret-teacher-support-inclusion- but-not-at-any-cost

244 Chapter 8: Conclusion 245

new theory, and theory or theoretical praxis can inspire new practice. Theories are contextual. While theories react to other theories and often emphasize differences rather than complementarities, the complexities encountered in reality are such that we usually need several analytics in combination. Therefore, in conclusion, this study suggests that within a complex postcolonial context like India (where postcolonial nationalist sentiments converge with enthusiasm for political and social liberalization, consumerism among the middleclass and poor state investment for education further decreasing within the neoliberal global economy): local meaning-making or, conceptual theoretical understanding of inclusive education must take place within the realm of everyday practice.

Inclusive program of school reform at Delphine Hart School emerged over time driven by local needs, activist entrepreneurial school leadership and some school staff within particular historic, cultural and sociological context. In the long run, however, such reforms are hard to sustain unless more systemic approach is also taken at the state-level to regulate market-forces, make necessary resource allocation for implementation and institute critical consciousness raising public awareness campaign about the benefits of inclusive education for the larger society. Rather than rejecting the concept of inclusive education as either a western hegemonic imposition or, an idea of a specific school Principal; conceptual theoretical understanding of inclusive education or “adoption-in-theory” at the macro and micro level in schools has to be both local and global. These various initiatives and practices have to occur simultaneously and in relation to each other. Perhaps it is time to reflect on the educational ideas of indigenous thinkers and reformers within the Indian context, such as Tagore’s ‘Southern Theory’ of inclusive education, especially since his alternative model of schooling was a reaction against the highly standardized colonial model of schooling during the Victorian era, which had little room to pay any attention towards the diverse learning needs of students. Hence, Tagore wrote about his own school: “I know what it was to which this school owes its origin. It was not any new theory of education, but the memory of my school day." (Tagore 1917, p. 138)

While arguing for ‘learner-centered’ or ‘child-centered’ pedagogy utilizing Bernstein’s theory of “pedagogic discourses as a process of recontextualisation”

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within the rural Indian context, Sriprakash (2011) draws on Ball’s (2006) argument about the ‘ad hocery and messiness’ of education policy processes to also suggest “the importance of contextual specificities.” Therefore, within the Indian context it is probably useful to raise mass awareness about learner-centric and socially inclusive democratic educational model, such as the one Rabindranath Tagore sought to establish within the colonial South Asian context. Especially, since he wrote and worked passionately for the educational rights of children and critiqued the mainstream system by asserting that “the child’s life is subjected to the education factory, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead” (Dasgupta 2009 p. 108 citing from Tagore’s talks to teachers). Much like the context within which Delphine Hart School’s model of inclusive educational reforms evolved, Tagore’s ‘child-centric’ inclusive southern theory of education was based on his deep reflections on increasing socioeconomic inequality within Indian society and the “factory-model of schooling”, which was alienating learners with diverse learning needs, widening inequality among the indigenous Indian population and also increasing communal and inter-racial disharmony among people. The pedagogy promoting rote-memorization and standardized benchmarks was not suitable for all learners and it was also inhibiting highly creative learners and sensitive child, such as Tagore’s own ability for creativity, innovation and critical thinking. This has been expressed in several of his lecture tours delivered in English abroad and also through his essays written in Bengali for teachers in India. It seems that history moves in cycles and in the 21stCentury, Indian schools like schools around the world are at similar cross-roads with regards to educational aims, goals and objectives driven by globalizing standards to meet the instrumental needs of global financiers and neoliberal restructuring of education. However, as Carnoy (1998) argues in his foreword to Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Heart”, “(t)he basis for economic and social development in the new global economy is conscious critical thinking and knowledge networks…the needs of global capitalists have caught up with his conception of education” (p. 19). Similar arguments can be found in Tagore’s writings. It is important to note that, Tagore’s ideas on society and education were developed within a colonial capitalist

246 Chapter 8: Conclusion 247 context as a reaction against rising inequality, environmental exploitation and degradation. It is probably time to get new middleclass Indian parents, teachers and school administrators to critically engage with Tagore’s theoretical ideas on education and society and reflect on the colonial capitalist context within which his ideas germinated and its parallels with neoliberal times. It is important to understand and “adopt-in-theory” the social and economic values and benefits of inclusive education for all to build an inclusive society for sustainable development.

Some Final Thoughts

There is “need for impatience” as Dreze and Sen (2013) have argued, to get the “comparatively privileged but not most privileged” middleclass of Indian society “which constitutes the category of the so-called ‘ordinary people’ (aam-admi/aurat) with political power” to speak up for the underprivileged Indians, especially for vulnerable girls like Ashima, Ruma, Maya, Kali and others, whom Dreze and Sen (2013) refers to as the “underdogs” of Indian society. This is particularly important, since it is evident from this case study of Delphine Hart School and also the voices of students that, the inclusive pedagogical approach was successful to an extent in making middleclass students active stake-holders and peers in the learning process of their less privileged school-mates. These “Chitrangodas” (Warrior Princesses) are willing to speak up in the public sphere not just for their own rights but also for the rights of their marginalized peers, the “Chandalikas” (‘dalit’ subaltern girls) of the 21stCentury. Hence, for the long-term benefit of society at large, and to decrease the “survival divide”84, it would be essential to educate the “ripples” and “rainbows”, not just in girls’ schools but also in boys’ schools and co-educational schools. As Raewyn Connell (2011, p.166) argued: Cultural politics has been a great field of invention and upheaval in the last generation. We are still coming to terms with the idea of plural cultures and multiple knowledge systems. New technologies, hyped and commercialized as they are, have great possibilities of decentralized sharing of ideas….A sustainable movement for democratic change needs imagination. We do not want blueprints anymore; we expect to feel our way into the future. But we

84 See: http://scroll.in/article/726403/on-mothers-day-a-global-report-reminds-us-that-poor-urban- indian-mothers-are-struggling

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certainly need utopian thinking, the capacity to break out of the given, to find beauty, to create symbols. The Waratahs matter, as well as the Bread.

Based on this case study, I argue that in order to successfully implement and sustain inclusive educational reforms within the Indian context surely some degree of “utopian thinking” is necessary for societal institutionalisation of inclusive education, but within the context of an understanding of and empathy with the real material inequalities that exist across India and Indian schools. Ballard (2013) in his persuasive essay on the importance of ideas for sustaining inclusive educational reform within the current neoliberal economic environment highlights the necessity for “thinking in another way” (p. 762). He cites the work of Fraser (1997), Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) and also Freire (1998) for thinking and imagining the possibility of an inclusive society through education and asserts that “To change from exclusive to inclusive practices we must change the ideas we have about the kind of world in which we wish to live…To achieve sustainable inclusion across systems and communities requires a major change in the ideas that determine policy and practice” (p. 771). As it has been already argued earlier in this thesis, I argue once again that much like progressive thinkers in other parts of the world, the value of social inclusion has been also upheld by several modern Indian thinkers and these values are embedded in the postcolonial Indian constitution and current policy priorities, especially in the clause 12 of the Right to Education Act. By particularly applying Tagore’s theoretical ideas about ‘child- centric’ socially inclusive community-oriented and world-minded education to analyse the pedagogic work of Delphine Hart School; this thesis has suggested the need for “thinking in an other tongue” (Mignolo 2000) and eventually for conceptual adoption, acceptance, resource allocation, implementation and societal institutionalization of inclusive education.

248 Chapter 8: Conclusion 249

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Author/s: MUKHERJEE, MOUSUMI

Title: Inclusive education and school reform in postcolonial India

Date: 2015

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