‘Education is a necessary but not a sufficient basis for social mobility'

Interview with Craig Jeffrey, an Oxford academic.

May 16, 2011 11:10 pm | Updated May 24, 2011 05:18 pm IST

Has wider access to education increased social mobility in India? How much does the class still matter in India even though the constitution guarantees equality of opportunities to all? And what does the future hold for those who don't come from the “right” class or have the “right” connections?

Oxford academic Craig Jeffrey , who spent several years in India and has written a book Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford University Press, California) examining the lives of middle class Indian youth, answers these and a host of other questions in a conversation with Hasan Suroor .

The title of the book is a take on what he describes as “a prevailing culture of boredom” in Indian cities where young graduates “regard themselves as ‘timepass youth,' just waiting for something to happen.”

A fellow and tutor in Geography at St. John's College, Dr. Jeffrey speaks fluent Hindi and Urdu.

In Britain there's a debate going on about class and mobility and studies have shown that formal education has not necessarily led to mobility and that class still matters. What does your search say about India?

I argue that education is a necessary but not a sufficient basis for social mobility. Large numbers of young people acquire high school diplomas or degrees in India but not all of these youth can obtain the secure, salaried jobs that they have been led to expect. Education provides a sense of entitlement but not always the problem-solving skills that allow young people to start businesses. This is particularly a problem in north India, where education is widely available but opportunities for social mobility rather rare. People have in a sense “discovered” education at almost the precise moment at which formal schooling has ceased to be a passport to success.

Class is crucial. If you are from the right class, there is always a good “fallback job” available when you leave education. If you are from a poorer background, you are much less likely to be able to turn your university degree into a good job.

As a western academic from one of the world's most famous universities and being used to an academic culture which is very different from what obtains in India, what struck you as the most unusual feature or features of Indian academic environment?

Indian higher education suffers from a lack of continuous assessment and active learning. Teachers and students tend to focus on examinations and curricular review tends to be slow. These aspects of India's mainstream educational scene reflect colonialism. As Krishna Kumar (well-known educationist) has pointed out, the British introduced subjects and curricula that were alien to the Indian milieu, and teachers and students responded in part through adopting strategies of rote memorisation and by concentrating on exam success.

But it is important not to put the U.K., or Oxford, on a pedestal. We are facing our own problems: cuts in budgets, the bureaucratisation of the university, and pressure for academics to demonstrate how their research will contribute to the national economy. Reading the recent work of Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur on Indian higher education alongside commentaries on higher education in the U.K. is to become aware of some striking similarities between the two countries.

Some of the problems you raise in your book such as the often dubious teaching practices and what you describe as a “sense of ennui and disillusionment” among university students are a result of the massification of higher education in India in the 1970s . The insistence on a university degree was a clever political trick intended to keep the youth out of a tight job market for as long as possible. This led to a dumbing down of higher education and most universities ended up simply as factories to produce degree holders with no regard for academic excellence. Is Britain in danger of repeating the same mistake by encouraging everyone to go to university in the name of egalitarianism?

Some American scholars have argued that higher education serves to “cool out” the young. Students enter college imagining that they are going to become the President of the USA and leave accepting that they will acquire a low-paid clerical job in the retail sector. Colleges actually teach them to lower their ambitions. The same thing seems to be happening in India among some of the young men with whom I worked. Through acquiring a string of degrees, they slowly come to accept that their education is not going to provide a portal to riches or fame, and they ultimately return to a family farm or engage in low-paid white-collar work in the informal economy – “fallback jobs.” This is also happening in higher education in the U.K.

In your book you focus on a specific class of students from north-west U.P. but many of the issues that you identify with them — the notion of “timepass,” collusion between self-appointed student leaders and government and university officials and the phenomenon of student “fixers” — are a common feature of Indian campus life. Why did you choose the Jats for your research?

In the mid-1990s I came to India to study the Green Revolution, and academics in Delhi advised me to work with the Jats in western Uttar Pradesh. I settled on Meerut district as a base and started to conduct research on how rich Jat farmers were investing the profits they had obtained from the Green Revolution. I quickly became more interested in how rich Jat farmers were investing in their families, especially via education. Many rich farmers were channelling huge sums of money into obtaining private education for their children in urban schools. When I wanted to study urban unemployment in 2004-2005, it seemed obvious to return to Meerut. I was able to interview some of the Jat schoolboys I had met in 1996, who were now college youth in Meerut, often doing “timepass.” Understandably many of their parents perceived this timepass in highly negative terms — as the lack of a “return” on their investment.

On the basis of your research, how socially mobile does Indian society appear to you?

I am afraid I'm rather pessimistic about social mobility, both in terms of gender and caste/class. Wealthy Jats continue to outcompete poorer Jats, Dalits and women in the competition for prestigious educational qualifications, good jobs, and local political power. One interesting development, however, is the rise of Dalit youth who act as intermediaries for the poor and cultural brokers, politicising rural populations.

I have also seen that in universities young men often come together across religious and caste boundaries to develop youth cultures and protest about corruption and educational commercialisation. On street corners in Meerut I often saw higher castes and low castes, Hindus and Muslims, sharing snacks and cigarettes. This is hardly “mobility,” but it does suggest that youth are sometimes willing to challenge received ideas about caste and religion. “Timepass” is not just about hopelessness. Waiting may be the seedbed in which new cultural and political projects take root.

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