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Typical that elite savarna debate on the new educational policy is focusing on the language thing and not the blatantly casteist official support of child labour disguised as vocational courses.
"kids from rural areas, many of whose parents follow these professions, will be entrapped in these jobs. The govt wants people to continue being in the same level without significant social mobility” - Prince Gajendrababu https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/tamil-nadu/2020/jul/30/how-does-new-education-policy-affect-you-2176624.html
Its not that I don't get the superficial appeal of access to vocational courses. 12 year old past me, struggling in school, would have loved to be able to drop physics for printmaking. In an ideal world its a great idea.
But equating vocational courses with academic courses means that schools with limited budgets will choose what to offer their students. And that choice will be dictated by the funders assumptions of the student demographics.
"These are all first generation poor kids of farmers. Give them vocational courses on gardening and dairy farming. No need to do calculus, aakhir koi rocket scientist toh nahin banne wala." That's the doctrine of casteism right there.
Businesses already set up NGOS under their CSR for 'youth skills development' that 'trains' children by giving them part-time employment in industries where inherited knowledge is unpaid for skill: crafts and textiles especially.
In a democracy, if each vote has equal merit and value, then every child MUST be treated as containing equal potential and entitled to equal opportunities. A govt that wants to funnel 6th standard kids into their future careers is creating a casteist hierarchy.
And please remember this isn't theoretical: the CBSE has been offering a variety of subjects you could give board exams in since I was in school. I remember looking the list up and wanting to sit for Music instead of Math. But schools don't offer them.
So you have to be an independent student with the open school to pick and choose subjects. Now imagine this situation from class 6 in thousands of small, criminally underfunded rural schools. Who's going to teach coding as a vocation to kids deemed 'nomadic tribes'?
Bluntly: any profession, any art form, any craft, any sport, that requires training from childhood, which you cannot achieve success at in adulthood, needs to be treated with caution and as an extra-curricular, not as school.
And until I see elite private schools offering sanitation and sewage cleaning as vocational courses I know that the underlying motivation behind even well-meaning support of this policy comes from casteist assumptions of which kids will be better at what kind of vocation.
Also, remember how Akshay Patra is making money off ofserving flavourless Brahminical midday meals? Imagine the local zamindar's wife teaching the picking course to her labourer's kids. She'd get paid, of course, not them.
Our neighbourhoods and villages and cities are already ghettoised by caste and religion. So it is very easy to identify a dominant demographic in any local school. Bad schooling starts with teachers making assumptions based on demographics.
"Isn't it better for a poor kid who would otherwise drop out of school to be trained as a plumber by the time he's 18 so he can support his family" is the "isn't it better he's not beating you where the bruises are visible" of educational rhetoric.
Who has the power? The govt.
What is the govt's responsibility? To provide equal opportunities and protect all rights for every child.
It is the govt's job to ensure no citizen is destitute, not the conscripted teenage plumber's.
What is the govt's responsibility? To provide equal opportunities and protect all rights for every child.
It is the govt's job to ensure no citizen is destitute, not the conscripted teenage plumber's.
Meanwhile, allying ableism to casteism, I just saw an argument that said there were kids who were not intellectually able to make it to college, and so funnelling them to carpentry was the humane policy.
Ableism is universal, of course, but its amazing how smoothly it mixes in with casteism (and racism) when it comes to judging intellectual capacity and the potential of individuals. See also: Victorian workhouses, child apprenticeship
Cognitive studies, psychology studies, developmental studies and pedagogy studies have all made systemic discoveries about ways to teach children. Kids aren't ever failures--its the schools they are imprisoned in which are.
Also, there is a willful misunderstanding of what schools are that drives me up the wall: schools are meant to be a way to provide childcare that socialises future citizens with certain shared, basic skills and knowledge.
Schools need to be as integrated as possible: across ability, caste, class, race, language, in order to provide the best kind of socialisation. Winnowing kids according to their 'vocational aptitude' is the opposite of integrating diversity.
