Childhood and Schooling in an Indian Village

Abstract

This article explores the ideology of childhood and schooling in an Indian village primary school, in an attempt to understand the importance of authority in the relationship of the teacher to the student, and of discipline in the process of schooling. Ethnographic data from a village school and popular folk literature are analysed and interpreted. The identities of teacher and student are found to be elaborated to include traditional and everyday identities through which pedagogic authority becomes naturalized. The perceived need for discipline emerges from an understanding of childhood-as-play in opposition to adulthood-as-work. Schools are expected to discipline children’s playfulness. Yet the school is not a totalitarian, coercive institution. The children and teachers refer back to and recreate the local ideology while making sense of and giving meaning to their activities in school.