Dyer, C orcid.org/0000-0002-9227-7554, Sriprakash, A, Jacob, S et al. (1 more author) (2022) The Social Contract and India’s Right To Education. Development and Change, 53 (4). pp. 888-911. ISSN 0012-155X
Abstract
India's 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act presents an idealized social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors to uphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children's access to a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract assumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutual responsibilities as well as actors’ agreement to do so. Qualitative data from Bihar and Rajasthan show how state actors, parents, community groups and teachers negotiate and contest the RTE Act norms. The analysis illuminates the unequal conditions and ever-present politics of accountability relations in education. It problematizes the idealization of the social contract in education reform: it proposes that if the relations of power and domination through which ‘contracts’ are entered into remain unaddressed, then expressions of ‘mutual’ responsibility are unlikely to do other than reproduce injustice. It argues that policy discourses need to recognize and attend to the socially situated contingencies of accountability relations, and that doing so would offer an alternative pathway towards addressing structural inequalities and their manifestations in education.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. Development and Change published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Institute of Social Studies. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) ES/P005802/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Mar 2022 12:02 |
Last Modified: | 17 Mar 2023 08:02 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/dech.12715 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:184607 |
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