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The Introduction discusses the themes covered by the essays in this volume about the history of the development, the trajectory, location, and contemporary concerns of the sociology of education (SoE) in India. The essays included are based on the presentations made at the March 2006 seminar held at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, titled ‘Sociology of Education in India—Looking Back, Looking Ahead’. The content of SoE courses taught in universities today are rarely a matter of discussion for scholars, and the work of internationally known classical thinkers on SoE have been largely ignored. In this volume, many contributors reflect critically on the work of these scholars in the context of contemporary concerns in education in India. Some chapters focus on the need to include courses on SoE in teacher preparation in India while others attempt to ‘counter neoliberal and intellectually conservative onslaughts on knowledge generation, which…deflects attention from increasing inequality in society and education.’ The Introduction outlines the content of the two sections of the volume. The first deals with disciplinary trajectory of SoE and analyses its journey and theoretical and methodological concerns. This is followed by chapters on emerging discourses and contemporary concerns about SoE in India. The second section brings together contributions that break new ground in theoretical and empirical engagement with equality, identity, and exclusions in education.

This chapter examines the place of the sociology of education (SoE) in Sociology and the interface between sociology and education in India. It argues that while education is critical to sociological development, it enjoys a lower status in the social sciences, and that SoE continues to be marginal issue in sociology. Considered as a softer option within the social sciences, education occupies the margins of sociology as an academic discipline. The author describes the criticality of education, the social and economic transformations due to globalization and liberalization, the shifts in the boundaries of different disciplines, and the increasing emphasis on trans-disciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches and applications in the social sciences. Besides exploring the impact of institutional spaces and disciplinary boundaries on the history of SoE in India, the author charts recent changes in approach, and how sociologists today are doing applied research in education to provide important inputs in policy formulation and programme implementation. Educationists are also looking beyond the school to understand what is happening to the student in the classroom. The author also chronicles the development of the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies (ZHCES).

This essay presents an account of the author's own personal and institutional experiences related to sociology of education (SoE)) in India. It explains that the author has been a sociologist of education for 45 years since 1964. It suggests that the establishment of the sociology of education (SoE) as an academic field in India started in 1964, with the appointment of the Education Commission which had the mandate to advise the government on how education could be used as an instrument of national development. This chapter highlights the accomplishments of Commission Member Secretary Shri J.P. Naik and the importance of the December 1964 seminar organised by the Commission in the history of SoE in India.

This chapter examines the sociology of schooling in India, and describes the contours of this field of research. It highlights the failure to realize the full potential of sociological research in India, and to open up the so-called black box of schooling. The author feels that Indian schools and classrooms are among the most under-researched segments of the sociology of education (SoE), and this neglect has led to a glossing over of complex processes that mediate school experiences and influence learning in children. She stresses the need for sociologists to study learning contexts and schooling processes in order to better understand the potential and limitations of the institution of formal education in India. In this context, the author discusses the complex practices and processes of discrimination, disadvantage, as well as spaces that provide opportunities for exclusion of lower caste students, or dalits, within educational institutions. The author feels that SoE has a critical role to play in bringing in the language of possibility for the equitable inclusion of such excluded groups. For this, the building of a theoretical and empirical understanding of schools as institutions within Indian society—keeping in mind their linkages with the larger social context—becomes very important.

Sociologists and anthropologists always have a sense of unease over what education is doing to society. Does education really make any difference? Or is it only reproducing inequality? And how can one know the answer? This chapter highlights some of the ways in which recent social theory can help us grapple with these questions. This chapter evaluates the notion that education leads to the reproduction of inequality in society, culture, and economy, and examines the roles played by structure and agency. It argues that a literal interpretation of the reproduction thesis is misleading, and suggests that a more nuanced understanding—with a more differentiated conceptual treatment—is needed. This author identifies the ways by which social theory can help illuminate the role of education in inequality, and discusses the views of Margaret Archer and Anthony Giddens who integrated systemic theorizing with the play of individual agency. In conclusion, the author suggests that we need a vision that encapsulates a wider view of the concrete roles, groups, and processes in society. Only then may one begin to address the question of whether education is making any difference at all.

This chapter examines the nature, forms, and consequences of caste and social discrimination in education in India. After discussing the theoretical background of discrimination in general, the author goes on to analyse discrimination in the Indian context, and how this impinges on education. This chapter describes the different forms of caste discrimination which include caste-intensified discrimination, caste-specific discrimination, caste-imposed discrimination, and self-imposed caste discrimination. It goes on to discuss discrimination in education and academic discourse in general. In Indian society—based on a rigid social structure—education has been viewed both as means of development and the source of perpetuating inequality. After describing various forms of social discrimination, the author points out that the mentality of the ‘victimizers’ also needs probing. How far has Indian education contributed to the modern values of justice, equality, and secularism, through the democratic pattern of governance vis-à-vis caste system needs to be conceptually and theoretically understood and analysed. The author concludes by pointing out that analysis about caste as the base of social discrimination, and its impact on education, is missing from the discourse of social sciences, including SoE. This needs to be remedied.

This contribution sheds light on the complex dynamic that produces cultural, economic and normative frames of reference for popular adult education. A cultural frame is what gives meaning, and assigns values to, popular adult education as a context, place-, and time-specific experience. A normative frame is what legitimises its provision, whereas an economic frame is what makes it sustainable. The authors apply a frame analysis to an Italian Third Age University, as an illustrative case, to examine its establishment and continuous operation over four decades, despite today’s dominant neoliberal discourse based on a competitive market approach. Drawing on this analysis, the authors pinpoint some actions that may open interstices for resistance to such a dominant discourse by popular adult education providers, but also policy makers, professionals, and volunteers who support or are involved in popular adult education.

Drawing on Biesta’s distinction between three functions of education: qualification, socialisation and subjectification, the chapter traces adult education policy in Denmark from the 1960s to the 2010s. Based on analysis of policy papers, we show how adult education policy during the past 50 years has developed from a combined focus on all three functions of education to a dominant focus on qualification from a human capital perspective, subordinating socialisation and subjectification to the idea of integration into the labour market and being employable. By shedding light on changes in adult education policies, we aim to question today’s language of economic necessity and technocratic inevitability in relation to adult education policy and to evoke a discussion about what adult education should be good for. The historical reading of Danish adult education policy, thus, serves as a resistant act by showing that adult education can be and has been thought otherwise.

This chapter argues that equity and inclusion may be understood in different ways according to certain, dissimilar, philosophical traditions. This is exemplified by neoliberal interpretations of equity in education that have gained currency after the turn of the century and which construe equity as the achievement of quality an excellence in learning outcomes. The chapter contends that this take on equity is limited and may lead to the reproduction of disadvantage and marginalization. It is thus proposed that equity and inclusion be conceptualized under a notion of social justice so as to deconstruct inequality and subvert dominant utilitarian discourses. Finally, the chapter asserts that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the education goal (SDG 4-Education 2030) represent an invaluable opportunity to counter neoliberalism in education and to ideate different resistance practices.

This chapter introduces the key conceptual frameworks that are deployed and developed in the book. It begins by situating the book within recent geographies of education and childhood, sub-disciplinary concerns that form the immediate context for this book and my own research. It then highlights three theoretical strands that inform the analysis and which each defy simple labels: ‘radical’ theories of education, informal education, and alternative education; diverse economic and autonomous geographies; nonrepresentational geographies and the politics of life-itself. Cross-reference to longer-standing work on sociologies of education and education studies is also made throughout this chapter. Attention is also paid to critiques of ‘radical’ and alternative education approaches.

This paper draws on a longitudinal UCU research project: FE in England - Transforming Lives and Communities to explore transformative teaching and learning in adult literacy education and to argue for the place of research in affirming localised understandings of education that cut across the grain of contemporary educational reform. In the context of the dominance of a ‘skills’ discourse in further education in England, this research project focused on literacy education as a creating a discourse community offering ‘differential space’ (Lefebvre 1991) that is emancipatory for many learners at the local level of family and community. The research data illustrate that adult literacy education can be disruptive of the rigid linearity of a model of ‘learning progression’ that sorts individuals according to a qualification/age matrix. Instead, it can offer organic tools for resistance – through consciousness-raising and transformation by acting as a hope catalyst for changes in learners’ lives and teachers’ practice.

The chapter explores the impact of neoliberalism on Irish society and higher education (HE) and how this has been resisted. Taking a critical realist approach it seeks to analyse neoliberalism in HE in a way that is neither simplistic nor politically immobilising. It outlines the trajectory of neoliberal ideas in Ireland and their impact on higher education especially in the wake of the Great Recession. Most research on this topic neglects questions of agency and resistance. Thus, the main concern of the chapter is to document and analyse the various ways neoliberalism has been resisted in Irish higher education by staff, students and through social movement campaigns. It draws on mixed methods and qualitative research alongside documentary analysis for this purpose. The chapter concludes with reflections on how this resistance might be strengthened in the future by building alliances in order to reimagine the university.

Based on the preliminary results of the European research project EduMAP the chapter discusses the widely recognised yet weakened position of active participatory citizenship and its role in the current debate on the responsibility of adult education as a medium for empowerment and emancipation from prioritised neo-liberal values. The initial focus is on the various problems faced by adult education in Europe. Adult education as a means to achieve active participatory citizenship is then discussed suggesting that it is important to examine the educational implications of relevant theories and practices on citizenship. The paper concludes by suggesting that the current discussion on the challenges European societies face today, must acknowledge the need for adult education to be reformulated in ways that are enriched by diversity and the wide range of learning contexts and communicative practices that pose new challenges.

Adult Basic Education (ABE) emerged in Australia as an organic, practitioner-driven field motivated by social justice concerns; however, neoliberal ethos has now overtaken the driver’s seat of the field. The changes in ABE from a practitioner led provision to what remains now is a story covering over four decades. Ironically, however, what has been most impactful in recent years is the absence of an identifiable policy. Tracing the ABE’s trajectory into a policy vacuum, and analysing the difficulty this vacuum presents for activists within the field, the chapter points to possibilities of resistance that may strengthen and restore an ethos of social justice in the field.

Education policy is a national competence within European Union rules, and therefore the responsibility of national governments. However, encouraging education policy co-ordination across Member States, and developing a European education ‘policy space’ has always been a feature of EU activity. In this chapter we demonstrate how the EU’s economic governance structures, known as the European Semester, introduced after the 2008 financial crisis have developed to include a significant role for developing European education policy. We identify the need to ‘open up’ the European Semester to more democratic influences and show how education unions across Europe are working to ensure the Semester promotes socially just and democratically accountable public education.

Over the last two decades, parents and community members in New York have increasingly resisted the neoliberal corporate reform agenda in schooling, including rejecting high-stakes testing. The parent-led opt-out movement in New York State has successfully opted around 20% of eligible students out of the Common Core state standardized tests over the last three years. To understand how a parent-led grassroots movement has achieved such political success, this chapter focuses on the two most influential opt-out organizations in New York State, the New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) and Long Island Opt Out (LIOO). The chapter investigates how they used social media and horizontal grassroots organizing strategies to gain political success, along with vertical strategies pressuring the legislature and Board of Regents. Our research reveals that parents in New York are reclaiming their democratic citizenship role in influencing their children’s public schooling and rejecting the corporate reform agenda.