The Education Mirage: Unanswered Questions in India’s Schools

Vishal Vasanthakumar didn’t love school. Later as a teacher, he keenly observed parents’ faces. Whether they wheeled pushcarts or drove Mercedes-Benzes, their expressions radiated a similar mix of yearning and optimism. Formal schooling, they believed, was a ticket to greener grasses.

“It is what formal schooling promised: a method to access dreams that were once out of reach. But in writing this book, I began questioning whether this promise holds true,” Vishal writes. It was a question that gnawed at him, as education appeared increasingly less about leveling playing fields and more about guarding gates or heightening barriers.

Schools, with their shiny report cards, were meant to signify employability, even productivity. Yet, as sociologist Stephen Ball points out, the so-called knowledge economy belittles or excludes those who rely on their physical abilities. Education, once hailed as a great equalizer, has become an architect of inequality, reproducing the very hierarchies it purports to dismantle.

Vishal’s book unfurls seven stories from India—spanning Rajasthan, Manipur, and Tamil Nadu, among others—to raise unsettling questions: What is education really for? Whose needs does it serve?

The Girl Who Got Away

In the dusty, sand-filled expanses of Rajasthan’s Kishangarh, the Bagarias, a nomadic tribe, live in settlements without water, electricity, or even ration cards. Punaramji, a Dalit activist, helps them with essentials like water tanks. “Mein Dalit hoon, na!” he quips when people gawk at him.

One tank changed Nisha’s life. Freed from the daily drudgery of carrying water, she started attending night school. Married at 10 and divorced by 14, she was an anomaly—a girl determined to escape the suffocating maws of child marriage. Her resolve hardened as she watched her teachers, many of them single women. Unusually, her mother supported her. Her in-laws, stunned by the rebellion, were told the marriage was over.

Yet Nisha’s story is rare. In nearby villages, child brides giggle nervously as they eye photographs of grooms. Even as NGOs try to educate families about gender equity, deep-rooted traditions cling stubbornly. Schools, meant to liberate, become sites where a teacher’s authority clashes with a parent’s or grandparent’s. In general, progressive ideals remain reined in by oppressive customs. As Vasanthakumar puts it, these schools merely facilitate the “mechanical reproduction of knowledge” rather than critical thinking required to interrogate the past and present.

Guns and Grammar

In Manipur, the air brims with tension. Uniformed men with guns mingle uneasily with the cacophony of local markets. Insurgencies, old as independence itself, scar the state’s landscape and psyche.

Vishal arrived in Manipur on the invitation of a teacher running an NGO. He met Mrs. P, who recounted locking her children indoors while insurgents camped overnight in her home. “If the army had come while they were here, we’d all have been shot,” she said matter-of-factly.

Schools, ostensibly a refuge, are riddled with bullet holes. Insurgents hide in classrooms; the army follows. Meanwhile, children are expected to bury their trauma under equations and essays. Education here is both a lifeline and a battleground—a way to escape a fractured state but also a tool of assimilation into a national identity that ignores local cultures.

As anthropologist Kimberley Theidon observes, “Co-existence is based on a complete alchemy of remembering, forgetting and remembering to forget.” In Manipur, that alchemy is a daily grind. Education is shorn of magic and violence flattens school-kid aspirations into a shared yearning for escape.

Toddy, Trees, and Taboo

In Tamil Nadu’s Vembar, Kamaraj, a 60-year-old tree climber, taps sap from palmyra trees before dawn. The sap becomes jaggery or, if not for prohibition laws, toddy—a local drink banned since 1987.

Climbing palmyra trees is physically grueling, but could be lucrative. But the Government’s ban on toddy has forged climber dependence on exploitative traders, who buy their jaggery for a pittance. As Rajesh, Vishal’s guide, notes, “Why is studying engineering okay, but learning to climb trees isn’t?”

Ironically, engineering offers no guarantees either. Tamil Nadu alone boasts around 526 engineering colleges, many of them woefully mismanaged. A tree climber’s sons—one a commerce graduate, the other a dropout—struggle to find work. Education, instead of empowering them, has left them adrift.

As Vishal observes, at the precise moment when marginalized communities began accessing education, opportunities for them to benefit from it began to vanish.

Coaching Factories and Broken Dreams

Kota, Rajasthan, had already seeped into the public imagination before its ricocheting hope and despair were portrayed in Kota Factory, the Netflix series. Strewn across the city’s multiple coaching institutes, over 250,000 students, aged 15 to 18, cram for entrance tests to coveted seats in IITs and medical colleges. Here, discipline and docility are prized virtues.

Students are sorted into “star” and “normal” batches. Star students, plastered on posters, become idols. The rest—the vast majority—are left to gape in awe, labeled as dumb by omission. Even some hostels evict underperformers. Coaching institutes sign toppers as brand ambassadors, turning education into a spectacle.

But access has widened, if imperfectly. Institutions like Kota’s coaching factories have democratized opportunities for lower-caste and lower-class families. Yet, as Vishal questions, do these exams measure ability, or simply different kinds of privilege masquerading as merit? In general, students who have familial support or financial security tend to outshine the intensely distressed. After eluding impossible odds to cracking the JEE, they also confront another hurdle: paying college fees.

The Big Picture

Vishal’s grandmother used to urge him to study harder, a plea that often ended in his tears. As a teenager, he would retort, “What’s the point?” It’s the question that fuels his book.

What is the point of education? To impart skills? To forge productive citizens? Or to sustain cultures and challenge inequities? Vishal doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, he probes the uneasy interplay of education, culture, and politics. The book also delves into the manner in which mothers bear the brunt of nurturing special children; into the honing of cultural capital that bakes in caste and class privileges; or into the construction of histories that feed particular narratives.

For several decades, globalization peddled a shiny, universal dream—one that many aspired to but few attained. Education, ostensibly a bridge to that dream, has often been a toll road, exacting heavy costs from the already disadvantaged.

In Vishal’s stories, schools are neither saviors nor villains. They are battlegrounds, where aspirations collide with harsh realities. They create hope, but also perpetuate despair.

Perhaps, as Vasanthakumar suggests, it’s time to stop asking how many students can subtract three-digit numbers and start asking harder questions: What does education do? Whom does it serve? Above all, whom does it leave behind?

About the Author

Vishal Vasanthakumar, is a doctoral candidate and a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge. His academic journey includes a Master’s in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His doctoral research dives into private school education in India, exploring how it shapes caste and class identities – perhaps another incisive book in the making.

References

Vishal Vasanthakumar, The Smart and The Dumb: The Politics of Education in India, Viking, Penguin Random House India, 2024