Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

216 B. LAKSHMI
high. 3 The lofty ideal of modern education in Mizoram has resulted in a
rapid expansion of schools all over the state, both private and government.
What went on inside the ‘black box’ of the school was a mystery till scholars
such as Michael F.D. Young and Karl Mannheim brought to our notice
that there is no objective way of evaluating knowledge. If any knowledge
is considered superior and worthy of being transmitted, it is primarily
because those with power have defined it as such and have imposed it on
the society, in a way in which the latter considers legitimate. Education,
in the hands of the dominant middle-class Mizo elite and, shall we say,
‘patriarchal elite’, serves to impose and inculcate the ‘cultural arbitrary’ of
gender stereotypes on the young generation that attends school. Although
modern education in Mizoram is ensconced in ideas suffused with
secularism and equality, in reality the school does not operate on an empty
canvas. Rather, it functions as a microcosm of society. Those who come
to school bring with them the stereotypes, including the gender stereotypes,
inculcated through primary socialisation in the context of the
family, the neighbourhood and the community. In turn, by valorising
women’s traditional domestic and nurturant roles of cooking, washing,
cleaning, childcare as so on, school knowledge aims to socialise girls in a
way that prepares them for their adult roles. Moreover, by emphasising
the virtues of docility and obedience for girls, the school attempts to socialise
girls through ‘canalisation’, ‘manipulation’, ‘verbal appellations’, and
also through different activities. Therefore, the school itself builds on the
primary ‘habitus’, to use Bourdieu’s term, even though it may deny this
in principle and practice by making the ‘school career a history with no
pre-history’. Bourdieu observes that ‘… the habitus acquired in the family
underlies the structuring of school experiences … and the habitus
transformed by schooling, in turn, underlies the structuring of all subsequent
experience’ (1977: 87). The school, thus, not only reinforces the
existing stereotypes, but also adds its own force to them by virtue of its
durability and legitimacy. Despite women’s dominant role in farming and
their responsibility for food production, the school system in Mizoram
nourishes and nurtures different qualities for boys and girls in consonance
with the perceived differential roles they are expected to play in their
adult lives. Boys are encouraged to be brave and adventurous to fulfil
their key role in the community and politics in later life, while girls are
encouraged to be passive, docile, demure and selfless in order to prepare