Routledge Elementary Education in India: Policy Shifts, Issues and Challenges

This book examines the policy shifts over the past three decades in the Indian education system. It explores how these shifts have unequivocally established the domination of neoliberal capital in the context of elementary education in India. The chapters in the volume: • Discuss a range of elementary education policies and programs in India with a focus on the policy development in recent decades of neoliberalism. • Analyse policy from diverse perspectives and varied vantage points by scholars, activists, and practitioners, illustrated with contemporary statistics. • Introduce the key curriculum, assessment, and learning debates from contemporary educational discourse. • Integrate the tools and methods of education policy analysis with basic concepts in education, like equality, quantity, equity, quality, and inclusion. A definitive inter-disciplinary work on a key sector in India, this volume will be essential for scholars and researchers of education, public policy, sociology, politics, and South Asian studies. Review ‘Elementary Education in India: Policy Shifts, Issues and Challenges constitutes an urgent challenge not only to India’s educational system but to the underpinnings of the crisis in which it is perilously enmeshed―the roots and branches of capitalist overproduction and consequent immiseration. Jyoti Raina has assembled a distinguished group of Indian and international educational scholars whose critiques of neoliberalism and education sound the death-knell of efforts to repurpose education to accommodate a capitalist system reeling on its transnationalist heels. Equally important, the book provides readers with new vantage points from which a new system can be built. This stunning work will be of interest to critical educators worldwide.’ Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, The Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University; and Chair Professor, Northeast Normal University, China ‘The period 1990 to the present has seen a major neoliberal turn in public policy in India in all sectors of education. The policy shifts in elementary education have been of the greatest impact because these touch the very base of India's highly stratified society. There has been a dearth of competent documentations and analyses that set out the causes, trajectories and consequences of these major shifts. The present collection of essays attempts to fill this vacuum by bringing together the perspectives of several Indian and international scholars and practitioners on the contemporary realities of policy and practice in elementary education. This book promises to serve as an important resource world-wide for students and educators as well as for those who work in policy spaces.’ Shyam B. Menon, Professor of Education, Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi, Delhi; Founder Vice- Chancellor, Ambedkar University, Delhi, India ‘This is an important book that brings together a rich collection of essays on a range of issues that are critical to the present and future of education in India. The larger context is the neo liberal restructuring of education and its fallout as reflected in the changes we are witnessing in schooling especially in the last two decades. The themes dealt with relate to policy shifts in education, privatisation, transformations in curriculum and pedagogical practices, exclusion and discrimination in schooling and so on. There is also an engagement with education as a public good and the challenge of public education, social justice and democratic citizenship, concerns that are increasingly marginalized today. This makes the book a timely contribution as well.’ Geetha B. Nambissan, Professor of Education, Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India ‘At a time when discourse on the public education system is dominated by activist foundations and the pra