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Perhaps school education has one of the largest number of stake holders and that is why a lot has been written on schools and schooling. Unfortunately, most of it is about the curriculum, type of infrastructure, quality of teachers and the problems of students and parents. Very little has been researched and written about what goes on inside schools and classrooms. The question, "What is the basic purpose of school education?" has been debated often in all kinds of forums by politicians, academicians and education-managing bureaucrats, without finding any satisfactory answers that meet the needs of our social existence of the day.
In the teaching-learning process, the focus has always been on the learner, the teacher and a particular subject who requires to be taught. What goes on in this basic triangle of education within an institution has hardly been debated. This book edited by Meenakshi Thapan, a professor of sociology at Delhi School of Economics and coordinator of D.S. Kothari Centre for Science, Ethics and Education at University of Delhi, is an effort to get a deep insight into the heterogeneity of school culture. The editor has carefully selected the issues to cover a broad spectrum of schools and schooling in contemporary India; government, private, minority, only boys’ or only girls’ schools and in the last chapter, she appropriately rounds it off with an autobiographical approach.
School culture is transforming and that too at a fast pace. Important factor that contributes to this culture is a particular type of ethos adapted by various types of schools. In schools, children have fluid identities, which are shaped by number of factors such as discipline and control, emphasis on Indian culture and heritage, instilling certain historical facts, familial beliefs, interaction with teachers, policies or ideals of a particular school, various activities and events as they unfold and most importantly by the peer groups in which they operate. Many schools are cloaked in tradition while educating children about new technologies and skills. Minority institutions have entirely different perspective of nationalism and patriotism as these tend to link religious identity with education. Some schools lay a lot of emphasis on citizenship and man-making, while others are sticklers for ways that ensure that maximum number of students pass the examination. Meenakshi Thapan emphasises the need for education policy-makers to acknowledge the past, while constructing the present and the future to be able to understand schools and schooling in the interest of education. The book is a compilation of comprehensive anthology of essays on schooling experiences. It can serve a good source of relevant information for teachers and educators to improve the quality of teaching-learning process in schools.
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Post Independence, huge
expansion in the education system at primary and secondary levels has
taken place, not withstanding the lop-sided view of successive
governments of what should a student learn at different levels. Basic
purpose of school education, primary and secondary, is to provide
suitable foundation to the student so that she is ready for higher
education in the due course of time. However, due to the text-book
culture, a good student is not expected to judge the content of a book
and hence passing the examination and securing good marks is the
hallmark of teaching-learning process in schools, and perhaps in
institutions of higher learning as well.