Pedagogy and Prescribed Capabilities: Redefining Quality of Education in India

This book questions the validity and reliability of conventional measures of quality education, such as enrolment ratio, retention rates, pupil-teacher ratio, drop-out rates, learning outcomes of children in foundational literacy and arithmetic and availability of infrastructural facilities, henceforth demanding its re-calibration. It moves away from easily commensurable indicators and actively pursues descriptive indicators of quality, which directly focus on educational processes taking place within the classroom and the factors influencing them.

By interacting with the two primary stakeholders, i.e. teachers and students, this book draws a link between what is happening within classrooms vis-à-vis the macro-level governmental policies. The strength of the book lies in its methodological approach to understanding whether students and teachers are able to actualize their capabilities, as pledged to them under official educational programmes. By doing so, the author deems to alter the narrative of how quality of education is visualized, hoping that these revelations have developmental implications for not only India but also the entire international community engaging with the questions of ’what’ and ’how’ of quality in school education. In a nutshell, the book endeavours to find out how teachers and students fare in terms of realization of their prescribed capabilities.

This book would be useful to students, researchers and teachers working in the fields of education, psychology, development studies, policy studies, social work and sociology. It would also be an invaluable companion to policymakers and professionals, from governmental and non-governmental organizations, working in education and social development.

Charusheel Tripathi is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UPES, Dehradun. She has a bachelor’s in Political Science from Lady Sri Ram College for Women in Delhi University and has received her doctorate from Centre for Political Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, for her work on social justice and education policy. Her newfound love for problems associated with quality of school education and teaching-cum-learning, has propelled her to bridge studies on educational programmes and processes with politics. However, her research interests also entail domains like comparative politics, political philosophy, public policy and governance. Lately, she has pledged to monomaniacally work on ’quality’ concerns ailing education.