SMALLER CITIZENS: WRITINGS ON THE MAKING OF INDIAN CITIZENS Krishna Kumar ORIENT BLACKSWAN Rs.395 Pages 149 The author’s insights help to locate the child within socio-political complexities while understanding education in India and its intersection with citizenship KRISHNA Kumar’s deep and critical engagement with education and its impact on the child is clearly reflected in this slim volume of 18 collected essays, Smaller Citizens: Writings on the Making of Indian Citizens. Collating these essays in a single volume signifies the common theme that binds them together. The author — a highly respected former professor of education at Delhi University — explores with a critical lens, themes of education and citizenship, marginalised childhoods and schooling. He examines policy documents that focus on flexibility and contextualisation of curricula, standards, assessment as well as the manner in which discriminatory practices define Indian education, and how educationists and practitioners merely pay lip service to far-sighted policy documents. With a fine pencil, Kumar highlights systemic bias that makes institutions resistant to change. The insights developed help the reader in locating the child within socio-political complexities while understanding education in India and its intersection with citizenship. The year of publication of the book (2021) is significant from two perspectives. First, this is a period post the two tumultuous waves of the pandemic that has made pursuing life and education difficult for young citizens of India. Existing disparities have deepened as a large section of children have been pushed out of formal education. Many of them have been forced into labour and/or child marriage while others have become rudderless after the loss of family and livelihood. The pandemic has again highlighted the disparities that have always existed in Indian society. The essays throw light on the limitations and biases that are a hallmark of our society. Second, this is also the period when the process of translating the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 into reality has been initiated. This is a policy document that visualises massive reform of Indian education, bringing pre-primary to higher education within its ambit. In this context, the insights built through a perusal of the essays equip the reader with the critical ability to review NEP 2020 from diverse perspectives. The prologue sets the tone of the book as the writer explores major paradoxes that lie at the heart of modern education — on the one hand, encouraging the young to think freely and apply their critical faculties to contemporary problems while on the other, educational practices train them to become loyal citizens, obeying authorities representative of the state. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 and its narrow interpretation, is the focal point of some of the essays included in this compendium. The Act’s potential to reform elementary education making it more equitable through access, has been implemented. Yet another dimension to the legislation is acceptance of the child’s agency and the need for teachers to appreciate and translate it in actuality remains an unfulfilled goal. The…
