‘Kindness isn’t important, we need to be scared’: disruptions to the praxis of peace education in an Indian school

ABSTRACT

There is a dearth of research on the frustrations, moral dilemmas and challenges non-Western teachers might face in the everyday praxis of peace education. To address this gap, this study analyses how violence is negotiated and understood in an Indian school seeking to build a culture of peace. Interviews with eight teachers and four students are analysed using grounded theory. Firstly, the study discusses a teacher’s response to a student witnessing domestic violence. Thereby, it explores the limits of peace education in the face of home-school boundaries and societal stigmas. Secondly, the study discusses a teacher’s attempt to help an abused child labourer. It questions the extent to which peace education can tackle systemic inequalities and the danger of the field reproducing exclusionary structures. Thirdly, the study discusses the intergenerational politics of children endorsing corporal punishment. It seeks to demonstrate how socio-economic pressures and historical legacies might lead to children legitimating violence against their own bodies. By exploring the fractures and gaps within peace education in an understudied non-Western context, the study aims to raise larger questions about the structures and norms hindering ideals of peace and the need for peace education to prioritise criticality, context and reflexivity.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• equality/equity
• social justice
• violence
• oppression

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Dr. Hilary Cremin for her invaluable guidance throughout the fieldwork for this study, and for the constant inspiration Dr. Cremin provides through her pathbreaking work in peace education.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest occurred during this research.

Notes

1. Although not applicable to this school, a key additional reason for corporal punishment in Indian classrooms is overcrowding. See Morrow and Singh (2014) for an example of teachers trying to physically discipline classes of up to 125 students. Overcrowding sustains the normalisation of corporal punishment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nomisha Kurian

Nomisha Kurian, the 2018-19 Charles and Julia Henry Fellow at Yale University (Department of Sociology) is a doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, researching the wellbeing of children in poverty. Her research interests lie in peace education, the sociology of education, human rights, children’s wellbeing and international development. Her most recent publications are in the Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education, the Journal of Peace Education and the International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning. Previously, she read both an MPhil in Education and a BA in Education at the University of Cambridge. Nomisha recently presented findings from the study supporting this paper at the 2019 Comparative and International Education Society Conference in San Francisco and was awarded, ‘Best Student Award’ by the Peace Education Special Interest Group.