This week saw the launch of an exciting book entitled ‘The Poor Child’: the cultural politics of education, development and childhood, edited by Lucy Hopkins and Arathi Sriprakash.
The book is a collection of 10 chapters, and explores the ethics and impact of educational policies in contexts of poverty – in ‘advanced’ nations, UK and Australia, and ‘developing countries’, India, Kenya, Bhutan, Benin, Mexico. One chapter, by Alexandra McCormick, unpacks policy constructions of childhoods and sets out the effects of multi-level education and development policy processes in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.
I have really enjoyed reading the book, and want to just pick out why it is so relevant and timely for thinking about children and youth at this moment in time, and going forwards, and why it connects so well to Young Lives. We have been researching the lives of ‘poor’ children in Ethiopia, Peru, Andhra Pradesh, and Vietnam over the past 15 years. The book is very much like looking at the other side of the coin of Young Lives, because it provides a theoretical framework for what we see happening. The book - in true sociological fashion - wants to challenge and ‘unsettle’ dominant assumptions and ideas about the universal nature of childhood - specifically, the category of the ‘poor child’.
The authors emphasise how ‘deficit models’ of poor children are used – for example, by teachers (in the case of Arathi’s chapter, based on her ethnographic research in a school in Karnataka). In Young Lives, we find very similar patterns – of the wholesale acceptance of the normative message that education is the way to lift children out of poverty - not just among policy actors, practitioners (teachers) but, crucially, among parents and children too. The book constitutes a theoretically-informed critique of normative discourses of childhood – and how the ‘poor child’, or in the Young Lives case, ‘poor children’, are measured against (and measure themselves against) an idealised, globalised and normalised child subject constructed through global policy interventions like the MDGs and EFA – leading to the devaluing of poor children’s everyday lives and those of their parents.
So the global debates in policy uncritically talk of deficits - ‘unsuccessful transitions’, ‘dropout’ from school, being ‘left behind’ in development – language that emphasises individual failings, not institutional or social structural failings that are historically and culturally situated. So for example, failing exams at age 15, means that young people cannot continue in school leads to a devaluing of lives that don’t fit the model – as one young man in Andhra Pradesh told our researchers, having failed his Grade 10 exam, - ‘I will be a waste’. The normative, universal model places a burden of expectation on children to succeed at school. This leads to disappointment when educational qualifications do not lead to the desired outcomes.
In Young Lives, we’ve undertaken four rounds of longitudinal qualitative research in each country, so we can explore how children experience and live through these policy debates. Lucy Hopkins’ chapter in The ‘Poor Child’ describes her research with yak-herding children in Bhutan. The children mostly knew that they should be at school, but found a way to construct yak-herding in terms of modernity, instead of existing outside it – because it had monetary value. So, ‘when invited to reflect on their own lives and schooling,... children are able to render the relationship between education, poverty, modernity and subjecthood in far more complex ways than is permitted within the binary thinking of dominant development discourses’ (p168). We see similar patterns in Young Lives, over time. In all four countries, in the first three rounds of our qualitative research (2007, 2008, 2010) very few young people wanted to be farmers. Farming was universally disliked:
We’re not going to suffer like this in the mud ...it’s better that I go and study. (Marta, 15 years, Peru) If one can learn and study hard, they will always have a good job at the end that can change their family’s life. (Fatuma, 15 years, Ethiopia) We see our parents working, they work in the fields, and work hard daily… and we feel that we should not be like that…. (Harika, 16 years old, rural Telangana)
But a couple of recent examples ‘unsettle’ this. At the final round of data gathering in 2014, things had changed in two of our rural communities in Ethiopia. Irrigation had been introduced, harvests had been good, and people were no longer hungry. A 12 year old boy, in rural Oromia, explained that the family no longer relied on rain-fed agriculture alone and started engaging in irrigation farming and vegetable cultivation (selling vegetables). He aspired become a farmer who uses modern inputs – technology and fertilizers – and he was optimistic about the possibility of getting rich in future by farming. A young man, aged 20, in rural Tigray, said that the biggest development in the community has been the introduction of the irrigation which allows people to produce more, and to market part of the harvest for sale, for instance, onions. Hadush said that his life has improved because of irrigation, and he has been able to assist his family. He clearly enjoyed farming and has, over the period of time Young Lives has been visiting him, always been busy on the family farm. He did not seem to have any particular problem with not having been to school, or with working in the fields. Instead, he wanted to learn in the evenings and acquire some business skills and new farming techniques.
Erica Burman's chapter on imagery - carefully unpacking a UK-based Save the Children anti-poverty campaign ‘It shouldn’t happen here’ - helps to explain how children (and young people) uncritically take on the dominant discourses themselves – both at the local level; and internationally – and the ways in which poor children are ‘othered’ or treated as something unknowable and different. This ‘othering’ makes it very difficult to nuance the debates about for example, child labour, poverty, quality of schooling, and it becomes very challenging to suggest for example, that children learn useful and valuable skills through their work.
In the final chapter, the editors of The Poor Child argue for a relational understanding of poor children, and suggest that ‘A relational understanding of childhood and poverty can eschew a deficit view of the ‘poor child’ by shifting the frame from normative ideals to issues of distribution and justice. ...a relational view is one that takes into account temporal processes, constructions of meaning, social and cultural situated-ness, material conditions, and interpretation’ (p195). They suggest that ‘the challenge for those working in the spheres of development research, policy and practice is to recognise and respond to the contingencies and relationalities of children’s life-worlds’ – in order to avoid ‘ethical violence’ – in other words, to recognise how an abstract universality ‘ignores the existing social conditions under which it might be appropriated’ (p202).
They also point out that: ‘we need not just an account of how things have come to be, but also how they can change. This is the political value of a relational approach; - it unsettles the universality of ‘the poor child’ and follows the conditions, contingencies, practices and consequences of inequality in children’s lives’ (p202)
In Young Lives too we find children ‘resisting’ as well as ‘acting in accordance with discourses of childhood that exist in school environments, community practices, and development policy frameworks’ (p193). By viewing ‘the child from the margins’, and by bringing differing disciplinary insights together, we can hopefully get away from binary/normative thinking about what children should be doing, and the concomitant devaluing of what they (and their parents) are doing, thus avoiding ‘ethical violence’.
This week saw the launch of an exciting book entitled ‘The Poor Child’: the cultural politics of education, development and childhood, edited by Lucy Hopkins and Arathi Sriprakash.
The book is a collection of 10 chapters, and explores the ethics and impact of educational policies in contexts of poverty – in ‘advanced’ nations, UK and Australia, and ‘developing countries’, India, Kenya, Bhutan, Benin, Mexico. One chapter, by Alexandra McCormick, unpacks policy constructions of childhoods and sets out the effects of multi-level education and development policy processes in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.
I have really enjoyed reading the book, and want to just pick out why it is so relevant and timely for thinking about children and youth at this moment in time, and going forwards, and why it connects so well to Young Lives. We have been researching the lives of ‘poor’ children in Ethiopia, Peru, Andhra Pradesh, and Vietnam over the past 15 years. The book is very much like looking at the other side of the coin of Young Lives, because it provides a theoretical framework for what we see happening. The book - in true sociological fashion - wants to challenge and ‘unsettle’ dominant assumptions and ideas about the universal nature of childhood - specifically, the category of the ‘poor child’.
The authors emphasise how ‘deficit models’ of poor children are used – for example, by teachers (in the case of Arathi’s chapter, based on her ethnographic research in a school in Karnataka). In Young Lives, we find very similar patterns – of the wholesale acceptance of the normative message that education is the way to lift children out of poverty - not just among policy actors, practitioners (teachers) but, crucially, among parents and children too. The book constitutes a theoretically-informed critique of normative discourses of childhood – and how the ‘poor child’, or in the Young Lives case, ‘poor children’, are measured against (and measure themselves against) an idealised, globalised and normalised child subject constructed through global policy interventions like the MDGs and EFA – leading to the devaluing of poor children’s everyday lives and those of their parents.
So the global debates in policy uncritically talk of deficits - ‘unsuccessful transitions’, ‘dropout’ from school, being ‘left behind’ in development – language that emphasises individual failings, not institutional or social structural failings that are historically and culturally situated. So for example, failing exams at age 15, means that young people cannot continue in school leads to a devaluing of lives that don’t fit the model – as one young man in Andhra Pradesh told our researchers, having failed his Grade 10 exam, - ‘I will be a waste’. The normative, universal model places a burden of expectation on children to succeed at school. This leads to disappointment when educational qualifications do not lead to the desired outcomes.
In Young Lives, we’ve undertaken four rounds of longitudinal qualitative research in each country, so we can explore how children experience and live through these policy debates. Lucy Hopkins’ chapter in The ‘Poor Child’ describes her research with yak-herding children in Bhutan. The children mostly knew that they should be at school, but found a way to construct yak-herding in terms of modernity, instead of existing outside it – because it had monetary value. So, ‘when invited to reflect on their own lives and schooling,... children are able to render the relationship between education, poverty, modernity and subjecthood in far more complex ways than is permitted within the binary thinking of dominant development discourses’ (p168). We see similar patterns in Young Lives, over time. In all four countries, in the first three rounds of our qualitative research (2007, 2008, 2010) very few young people wanted to be farmers. Farming was universally disliked:
We’re not going to suffer like this in the mud ...it’s better that I go and study. (Marta, 15 years, Peru) If one can learn and study hard, they will always have a good job at the end that can change their family’s life. (Fatuma, 15 years, Ethiopia) We see our parents working, they work in the fields, and work hard daily… and we feel that we should not be like that…. (Harika, 16 years old, rural Telangana)
But a couple of recent examples ‘unsettle’ this. At the final round of data gathering in 2014, things had changed in two of our rural communities in Ethiopia. Irrigation had been introduced, harvests had been good, and people were no longer hungry. A 12 year old boy, in rural Oromia, explained that the family no longer relied on rain-fed agriculture alone and started engaging in irrigation farming and vegetable cultivation (selling vegetables). He aspired become a farmer who uses modern inputs – technology and fertilizers – and he was optimistic about the possibility of getting rich in future by farming. A young man, aged 20, in rural Tigray, said that the biggest development in the community has been the introduction of the irrigation which allows people to produce more, and to market part of the harvest for sale, for instance, onions. Hadush said that his life has improved because of irrigation, and he has been able to assist his family. He clearly enjoyed farming and has, over the period of time Young Lives has been visiting him, always been busy on the family farm. He did not seem to have any particular problem with not having been to school, or with working in the fields. Instead, he wanted to learn in the evenings and acquire some business skills and new farming techniques.
Erica Burman's chapter on imagery - carefully unpacking a UK-based Save the Children anti-poverty campaign ‘It shouldn’t happen here’ - helps to explain how children (and young people) uncritically take on the dominant discourses themselves – both at the local level; and internationally – and the ways in which poor children are ‘othered’ or treated as something unknowable and different. This ‘othering’ makes it very difficult to nuance the debates about for example, child labour, poverty, quality of schooling, and it becomes very challenging to suggest for example, that children learn useful and valuable skills through their work.
In the final chapter, the editors of The Poor Child argue for a relational understanding of poor children, and suggest that ‘A relational understanding of childhood and poverty can eschew a deficit view of the ‘poor child’ by shifting the frame from normative ideals to issues of distribution and justice. ...a relational view is one that takes into account temporal processes, constructions of meaning, social and cultural situated-ness, material conditions, and interpretation’ (p195). They suggest that ‘the challenge for those working in the spheres of development research, policy and practice is to recognise and respond to the contingencies and relationalities of children’s life-worlds’ – in order to avoid ‘ethical violence’ – in other words, to recognise how an abstract universality ‘ignores the existing social conditions under which it might be appropriated’ (p202).
They also point out that: ‘we need not just an account of how things have come to be, but also how they can change. This is the political value of a relational approach; - it unsettles the universality of ‘the poor child’ and follows the conditions, contingencies, practices and consequences of inequality in children’s lives’ (p202)
In Young Lives too we find children ‘resisting’ as well as ‘acting in accordance with discourses of childhood that exist in school environments, community practices, and development policy frameworks’ (p193). By viewing ‘the child from the margins’, and by bringing differing disciplinary insights together, we can hopefully get away from binary/normative thinking about what children should be doing, and the concomitant devaluing of what they (and their parents) are doing, thus avoiding ‘ethical violence’.