ABSTRACT

This Introduction sets up a binary framing between the ‘marginal child’ and the ‘subaltern student’ to help contextualize this Special Issue’s efforts to frame educational exclusions in India within a longer history of modernity, childhood and the democratization of schooling. Broadly speaking, the ‘marginal child’ refers to discourses that focus on the ‘victimhood’ of particular populations of children while leveraging their hypothetical schooled futures as the ideal solution to their current situation. In contrast, the ‘subaltern student’ embeds a more historicized framing that draws our attention to first-generation students’ cautious hopefulness around formal education as that which coexists with, and is shaped by, their parallel recognition, navigation and experiences of school spaces as sites that devalue their identities as learners. Each figure, one discursive and the other real, aids in disclosing how recent efforts to realize all ‘children’s right to education’ contain distinct techniques of knowledge production, particular understandings of schooling’s spatial and temporal norm, and contrasting ideas around children’s value and futurity, i.e. practices that have significant ethical and political ramifications in shaping contemporary conversations around educational inequities in India.

摘要

本导言在“边缘儿童”和“底层学生”之间建立了一个二元框架，以帮助将本期特刊在现代性、童年和学校教育民主化的较长历史中界定印度教育排斥的努力背景化。从广义上讲，“边缘儿童”指的是关注特定儿童群体的“受害者身份”，同时将他们假设的受教育的未来作为解决他们当前状况的理想解决方案的话语。相比之下，“底层学生”嵌入了一个更加历史化的框架，该框架将我们的注意力吸引到第一代学生对正规教育的谨慎希望，因为这种教育与他们对学校空间的平行认识、导航和体验共存并受其影响，因为贬低他们作为学习者身份的网站。