Normative development in rural India: ‘school readiness’ and early childhood care and education

Global education agendas frequently draw on the construct of
‘school readiness’, indexing the developmental trajectories of
children to the expectations of school systems. Through in-depth
ethnographic research in a village in Bihar, India, this paper
examines how normative discourses of ‘school readiness’ govern
family strategies for early childhood care and education (ECCE). To
navigate the demandsof a competitive and socially stratified
school system, marginalised families saw it as crucial for their
young children to access multiple forms of educational capital:
written literacy, discipline, and dominant caste-class codes. In the
absence of functioning provision of ECCE by the state, the low-fee
and low-quality private market of early childhood education was
seen as a key site through which ‘school readiness’ could be
secured. The paper illustrates how normative developmentalism in
education, and the ‘hegemonic aspirations’ it enshrines, has
entrenched the marketisation of ECCE and reinscribed forms of
caste-class domination.