In the Name of Education: Reproducing Social Stratification through Schooling in India: An Analysis of the Tomorrows Foundation

This paper investigates the implementation of mandated Education for All (Millenium Development Goals and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan) policies in relation to the conditions of displaced communities that are expanding as a result of neoliberal globalization by analyzing the work of the Tomorrows Foundation in Kolkata, India. It is a critical ethnography utilizing surveys, focus groups and extensive literature review.Approximately sixty-one guardians from two historically and communally significant communities were selected to compile their perception and experience of the purpose of education, the barriers to “achievement” and their own educational history. It is within understanding the conditions of the people living and struggling here that one can begin to understand the contradictions in maintaining the current globalized system of education.Most importantly this capstone will critique the overall message the education programs send to the people living in these communities, rendering them individually responsible in a systematically exclusionary situation. As Paul Potter, a former president of the Student Democratic Society once stated, “We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it and change it!” (Dohrn, 2006, para. 4)