Memorising no more: Redefining Education in cities

Abstract

Over the last year, India has borne extreme consequences of the great divide between poverty and prerogative, amidst a deft virus unleashing all kinds of irrational fears in general public. While the spread of virus was initially credited to the affluent people stepping down, with infection, from an international trip, it was always the “have-nots” who were found to be forcefully moving across states on foot, by the institutional violence made unprecedentedly obvious. The children, as a vulnerable group, felt the destruction closer than most others --losing parents, dining on footpaths in mass labour migrations, and totally disconnecting from schools. Education, then, appears as a privilege available only to those who have access to mobile phones, and no other circumstantial woes to take care of. On an intersection of receiving vulnerable outcomes is a sub-group of impoverished, adolescent girls living in Central Delhi slums, who not only stop receiving school education as their constitutional right, but also battle for space and time in the patriarchal backdrop of North India. This paper examines their fate, as oral narratives are combined with the visual representation of other similar children published across channels of mass media, and analyses the complication in interpreting Education as the most/sole important aspect of a child's life. It ranks low on the priority list of children and their parents, as bright futures and hope wistfully disappear in the chaotic hustles of being able to live past the present day. Restructuration is expected. Cities, in particularly departing from towns and villages, promise space for social mobility on the basis of opportunity and merit, while attracting a lot of underprivileged groups like the daily-wage workers (rickshaw-pullers, masons) to the national capital. It becomes crucial, then, to figure whether learning in cities has more demerits attached to it, than being advantageous as it is often imagined to be. New immediate memory is created in the “new normal”, rummaging through the undisrupted past of urban lived experience.