Articles by Krishna Kumar

Under the neo-liberal State, the idea that educational institutions can be run along market principles has gained both currency and a sense of normalcy. It is the teacher on whom the largest burden of the outcomeoriented institutional culture has fallen. Teachers are required to spend a substantial part of their time formally planning, describing, justifying and assessing their own activities.

This paper attempts to examine the childhood and education of girls in India in the context of their socialisation in the family and the historical evolution of the State's capacity to deal with gender issues. The customs and rituals under which girls are brought up and gendered into womanhood constitute a regime which is incompatible with the normative view of childhood implicit in child-centred policies of education.The evolution of the Indian state under colonialism has made it structurally predisposed towards the maintenance of patriarchy. Education can hardly be expected to interfere with gender asymmetry unless it is epistemologically reconceptualised with the help of a collective academic enterprise involving several different disciplines.

Addressing gender disparity in education goes beyond increasing the presence of girls in school. It involves the removal of deep mental blocks that bind them to limited traditional roles. This article, while discussing the functioning of the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya highlights the problems impeding girls' overall development. If the KGBV is to be given a second chance for mainstreaming rural girls belonging to deprived social backgrounds, it needs to set right certain shortcomings.

The acceptance of childhood as a protected and privileged period of life was simultaneous to the rise of the modern welfare state, and predates by several decades the discourse of globalisation. However, the ubiquitous tools of globalisation, such as the internet and tourism have currently induced a weakening of the welfare state and a dissolution of earlier existing "protective" barriers wherein the teacher and the learning system mediated between the child and the outer world. The more far-reaching effects of globalisation such as the implicit changes seen in work-patterns, child-rearing practices and the very notion of family itself, and in turn, the very impact of such changes on childhood, have yet to be systematically studied.

Recent judicial verdicts on the question of the state's relationship with private enterprise in education suggest a push towards egalitarian redistribution of educational opportunities under overall state guidance. Whether the Constitution was intended to be adequately equipped to control privatisation in education or to promote is a moot question. However, the judicial decoding of the Constitution's intent in this regard has seemingly changed direction in the last two decades. The view that private control promises quality, that appears to have the apex court's concurrence, is helping to sustain an ethos of sharpening social divisions and inequalities, where private interests can boldly advance and the state withdraws.