The uses of equality in an elite school in India: enterprise and merit

Abstract

This article examines the different uses of equality in one elite international school in India. We focus on how conceptions of equality can be enrolled into particular scripts of benevolence and gifting through which elite distinctions are constituted and enacted. Our analysis of interviews with students, teachers and parents in the school highlights three dominant and interrelated uses of equality that are examined with respect to entrepreneurial social ideals in contemporary neoliberal India: equality for profit; equality as deferred; and equality as a differential inclusion of the poor. We call this concept ‘enterprise equality’ and consider its performative effects, namely in reconstituting and justifying normative inequality. Enterprise equality does two related things which have significant global consequences: it can function as a process of ‘decontestation’ – a way to ‘block hearing’ about alternative political/economic arrangements of equality; and it can reaffirm the cultural rhetoric of the elite as meritorious in their privilege.

Keywords:

• Equality
• entrepreneurialism
• elite schooling
• global citizenship
• community service
• privatisation

Notes

1.  Pseudonyms are used for school institutions and individual participants. We conducted interviews with 37 participants in Indian Academy, including 10 students, 19 teachers and eight parents.

2.  See, for example, Mehendale et al. (2015) for a discussion of the growing significance of middle-class parent lobby groups in India; Vidya and Sarangapani (2011) on the disproportionate reporting of middle-class interests in education in English-language newspapers; and Vincent and Menon’s (2011) discussion of middle-class school choice and educational strategies.

3.  Similarly, Reay (2012) interrogates the ways in which discourses of ‘social justice’ have been appropriated in British political discourse without attendant egalitarian principles or commitments to redistribution. She examines how contemporary educational discourses of diversity, choice and social justice in Britain, ‘whilst sounding progressive, positive and beneficial, have worked to sanction and exacerbate inequalities’ (2012, 592).

4.  The first IB school in India was established in 1976. By 2006, only 30 IB schools operated in the entirety of the country. This number has increased sharply to 123 IB schools in India by 1 June 2016. See http://ibo.org/programmes/find-an-ib-school/?SearchFields.Country=IN (accessed June 28, 2016).

5.  It is beyond the scope of this article to offer a detailed analysis of the school’s aesthetic, spatial and cultural production of elite distinctions. For ethnographic insights into the contemporary social aesthetics of elite schooling, see Fahey, Prosser, and Shaw (2015).

6.  International mindedness is a core notion in the IB educational philosophy and the curriculum frameworks of IB programmes. Our previous study (Sriprakash, Singh, and Qi 2014) shows that IB schools interpret and incorporate international mindedness in diverse ways. The six IB schools in our study recognised ‘service’ to local and global communities as a practical implication of international mindedness. Across all schools, the IB’s Community, Action and Service (CAS) programme provided an important structure for international mindedness as service. However, the extent to which these programmes supported sustained change-oriented forms of service varied from school to school, and seemed much dependent on how integrated CAS was across the school’s ethos and other activities. In the case of Indian Academy, service was strongly integrated throughout the school curriculum. Here leadership is foregrounded in academic achievement, but also in arts, sports and community service. The narrative of service leadership is communicated strongly to students, and informs the school identity, from the school song to house-activities, subject areas and, in particular, the outreach school. As our discussions also show, teachers demonstrated difference in how they interpreted concepts of equality, international mindedness and service leadership. These led to different pedagogic approaches, and the IB as well as Indian Academy emphasise the need for such teacher autonomy within their frameworks, via the notion of ‘Creative Teacher Professionalism’ (IBO 2009).

7.  We do not quote the mission statement in full here, in order to preserve the anonymity of the school.