The volume under review is a compilation of much that has been published as research papers on Indian education since 2000. They have a very contemporary location in terms of the importance of ideas being discussed, and also the academic relevance of what has been included. Although put together as a reading in the disciplines of Sociology and Social Anthropology, much of the discussion in the introduction as well as in a variety of papers transcends disciplinary boundaries, and poses therefore the challenge of what the integrating framework should be like.
The volume editor’s introduction engages with conceptual issues of theory, and what therefore may be at this level an adequate conceptualization of the sub-discipline of the ‘Sociology of education’. Within the ambit of the study of society as a grand narrative, as also an analytical microscope on the everyday, the ‘sociology of education’ is concerned with ideas as well as practice. As a practice, it engages with and is intended to change the human subject—through socialization, norms and values, and ideas.
Of the ideas that Thapan analyses in some detail, she includes—classical political philosophers, whose thoughts embodied the ideas of the Enlightenment—John Locke and Rousseau, followed by liberal thinkers and founders of modern sociology—Weber and Durkheim, and finally Karl Marx, the philosopher who placed the idea of social inequality at the heart of thinking about modern society. In the works of all these philosophers, one can see the centrality of the human subject and his or her relationship to society, a dyad that Thapan considers central to the idea of sociology of education as a pursuit within the discipline. The real credit for establishing a discourse central and exclusive to the sociology of education is accorded to scholars Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu—in whose works the idea of education and the individual gets interwoven with central tenets of power—cultural power—and the manner in which schools worked to preserve and reproduce regimes of power. The editor rightly argues that the scholarship of these two was central in resolving the dilemmas between structure and agency that were the prominent preoccupation of social scientists, and give a centrality to the school as a site, and its practices in relation to the child (the human subject).
Thapan then considers the critical importance of the alternate thought process— of which the field and site were the opposition to the colonial in India. Here, the thoughts of Tagore, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and Krishnamurti find a mention.