Debating Education in India: Issues and Concerns by Maya John (published by Tulika Books in 2023) provides a historically informed analysis of the current education policy context in India and of probable futures, with a special focus on the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020. It is particularly relevant because it contextualizes and often challenges the dominant discourse on ‘disruption’ that has accompanied emerging trends in the marketization and digitization of education provision. This engagement with historical material additionally serves as a scholarly check on the increasingly prevalent common sense and policy discourse that nostalgically glorifies and homogenizes India’s educational past. The chapters are largely thematically discrete, but they are tied together by a consistent ideological core: a sharp focus on equity in education as conceptualized in the Common School System (CSS), publicly funded higher education, and humanistic pedagogy for nurturing critical and compassionate citizens.

The volume begins with a crisp, yet complex introduction to the history of education in India by the editor, Maya John. This overview not only sets the stage excellently for the more detailed debates that follow in the book, but it can also independently serve as an especially useful resource for education students. The various overviews of school education policy shifts in postcolonial India take a range of theoretical approaches, which affect the prioritization of issues and the segmentation of the narrative, revealing the productive power of multiple readings of the same events. Jyoti Raina traces the shifts from a political economy perspective, while Madhu Prasad takes a deep – and illuminating – dive into the individual intellectual genealogies of the worldviews underpinning dominant policy paradigms in Indian education policy. Md Bilal’s essay, which explains the role of colonial policies and anticolonial struggles in shaping histories of exclusion (and resistance) of the post-colonial education system, positions the narrative as an interplay between the ‘metropole’ (IIT, Kendriya Vidyalaya, gifted education) and ‘periphery’ (distance education, informal education, vocational education) of education access. Kumkum Roy treads new empirical ground in conducting a textual analysis of the NEP and contrasts it to previous policy texts to reveal a systematic shift away from constitutional values (e.g., social and economic democracy) towards more ‘traditional’ values (e.g., obedience to parents) drawing on a narrative of India’s ‘glorious’ educational past which is projected as exclusively Hindu and Buddhist. Geetha Nambissan on the trajectory of low-fee private schooling in India goes beyond just tracing ideological and material shifts in emergent forms of neoliberalism in the school education sector. As in her previous work on the subject, she also names the specific actors (national and transnational organizations, individuals) responsible for helming the changes, giving it a greater political potency. These essays, therefore, provide a useful perspective for viewing the contemporary moment as a ‘conjuncture’ of various material, cultural, and intellectual threads. LSR Lakshmi’s chapter on the other hand while also taking a historical approach provides a sharp contrast in being a micro-history of single community in a very particular location, as opposed to a broad sweep narrative.

Almost all the chapters on higher education discuss futures. Rohan D’souza draws on recent literature from the disciplines of critical technology studies and media studies to examine and critique the post-pandemic distance education format of the corporate university. Debaditya Bhattacharya takes on related questions, but his engagement is more discursive and affective. Saumen Chattopadhyay describes how the abstract articulations of institutional and student autonomy in the New Education Policy (NEP) are likely to translate against the hard realities of Indian universities. He cites concerns about increasing institutional precarity and worsening conditions for students’ academic choices despite an increase in available options. However, this essay makes a more even-handed critique, choosing to also attend to the potential benefits of the NEP vision. Anthony Joseph’ essay addresses into the important subject of teacher education – which falls between the domains of school and higher education- delving specifically into its dispositional aspects, through a critical pedagogy perspective. While a promising premise it leaves the reader wanting more policy contextualisation to the argument.

Apart from a couple of essays, this volume appears less invested in exhibiting new scholarship than in pulling together different threads, including forging important continuities across the usually siloed scholarship on school and higher education policy, to make a coherent ideological case. It also teases out how particular policy directions in education policy (e.g., class-based vocationalization, informalization, MOOCs, LFPS, etc.) are deviating from the goal of educational equity. Also, as ‘timely contribution’ is a cliché in book reviews I am reluctant to use the phrase, but unfortunately timing is in fact one of the most valuable attributes of the book given the contemporary socio-political context.

While some may disagree with the near-polemical tone of the writing, it dovetails well with the seeming goals of the book, which are not abstract, ecumenical scholarship. However, some of the drawbacks to this approach include the repetitiveness of both material and arguments and the heightened affective and experimental register in a few cases occluding readability. The book is nevertheless a valuable addition to the ‘historical turn’ in education studies scholarship that will benefit interdisciplinary readers, students of the discipline as well as lay readers.

***

Joyeeta Dey is a PhD Student at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) Bangalore.