Heterogeneous middle-class and disparate educational advantage: parental investment in their children's schooling in Dehradun, India

TL;DR: The heterogeneity of the contemporary Indian middle-class has been discussed widely as mentioned in this paper, however, the effect of its internal differences on the distribution of educational resources needs to be examined, as well as the impact of the internal differences in education resources.

Abstract: The heterogeneity of the contemporary Indian middle-class has been discussed widely. However, the effect of its internal differences on the distribution of educational resources needs to be examine...

Summary

Introduction

• By showing similarities and differences in parental investment in an apparently homogeneous fragment of the Indian middle-class, the paper problematises, and aims to disrupt, the binary reification of social groups in the broader scholarship on education and society.
• In what follows, I first outline the expansion and the nature of contemporary middle-classes and provide the background to the middle-classes in India.

The study

• This paper draws primarily on in-depth interviews with parents in 53 families between December 2014 and December 2015 in Dehradun—a capital city of Uttarakhand State in northern India.
• First, I segmented and inductively coded the interview transcripts and field notes (based on informal conversations and observations).
• These themes are sequenced in order here—from parents’ understanding of their social class positioning and the educational strategies they adopted to provide their children with valuable educational resources to engaging in their children’s education—to offer a more meaningful, coherent, and comprehensive understanding of commonalities and differences in ways in which parents invest their capital to gain educational advantages.
• The participant families belonged to a section of the contemporary Indian middle-class that is characterised by internal migration from rural to urban regions and an occupational shift from a few had come from non-hilly regions.
• All parents invariably preferred private schools that use English for educational purposes over highly incentivised public institutions most of which use the vernacular language for instructional and assessment purposes—this is a typical school-choice across social classes (LaDousa, 2014; Srivastava, 2008).

The providers

• The providers represent those mothers whose primary contribution to their children’s education was to supply the materials that were either suggested by teachers or demanded by their children.
• Anjana was living with her two children in a 3BHK (three bedrooms, hall and kitchen) apartment.
• My parents wanted me to focus less on studying and more on learning household skills because they felt that those skills would be more useful when I take on the role of a wife and a mother.
• I turned to her daughter, a Grade VIII student, who was sitting beside me, and asked her about her studies at home and what she does when her mother invites relatives and family friends over.
• Anjana’s ignorance of the assessments her children were preparing for, the challenges they were facing, and their feelings about academic success and failure made her confused during parent-teacher meetings.

The partners

• Mothers who viewed themselves as partners took on the role of creating a home environment for their children that was conducive to learning and that complemented school activities.
• All parents purchase teaching and learning materials that the schoolteachers ask for, but it is not just about studying you know, nutrition and play are equally important.
• I may understand a few terms and concepts in the Hindi language, but maybe not in English.
• Rajni believed that her interactions with her children were critical in maintaining a productive relationship with their teachers and tutors in terms of meeting her children’s educational needs more appropriately.
• Hence, in addition to paying fees, the Partner mothers mobilise their economic capital to provide extra educational resources for their children and activate their social connections to source valuable teaching and learning material.

The Proactive agents

• On the other side of the continuum of parental engagement were the highly educated mothers who orchestrated their children’s schooling experience by helping them with their homework, participating actively in everyday curricular activities, and, at times, monitoring their learning progress in self-scheduled home-tests.
• Between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., Aditi sits with her children as they finish their homework and meet the daily study target that she sets out for her children.
• She helps her children to revise their classwork and to complete their homework.
• Her children’s education was central to Aditi’s recent life trajectory as well as her daily routine.
• In one of the PTMs, I observed her interaction with Rajeev’s (Aditi’s son) Biology teacher.

Conclusion

• The paper captures the complexity underlying the relationship between class privilege and educational advantage.
• This often results in the fragmented positioning of agents from different social groups (Bourdieu, 1987 p.13).
• While the mothers with higher academic qualification usually proactively engage in, or partner with, teachers in shaping their children’s schooling experience, and consequently strengthen the home-school relationship, those who lack this embodied and institutionalised form of cultural capital fail to translate the assembled educational resources into capital despite having common goals and adopting similar educational strategies.
• The intra-class difference in the mobilisation of capital within and across sections of social groups invariably intersects with other forms of social classifications such as gender, religion, region, and caste.
• Since the heterogeneity, produced through differential life trajectories, exists relationally across and within different sections of social groups, educational privilege cannot be categorised neatly between middle and working classes.

Full text

Heterogeneous middle-class and diverse educational advantage: parental
investment in children’s schooling in Dehradun, India
The heterogeneity of the contemporary Indian middle-class has been discussed widely.
However, the effect of its internal differences on the distribution of educational
resources needs to be examined systematically. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with
parents in 53 middle-class families in Dehradun, India, this paper explores three aspects
of the home-school relationship: how socioeconomic transformations shape parents’
aspirations for their children’s future, educational decisions parents make to realise
those aspirations, and mothers’ engagement in their children’s everyday schooling. The
tripartite analysis reveals that despite sharing common educational goals and strategies
with the population in general, middle-class families in India use their class privilege to
gain valuable educational resources. The paper argues that the discrepancy in the
mobilisation of accumulated resources in the heterogeneous middle-class results in
diverse educational advantages across families. It critiques the binary construction of
social classes when explaining the processes of social reproduction in contemporary
Indian society.
Keywords: Heterogeneous middle-class, capital, parental aspirations, school-choice,
parental engagement, educational advantage
Introduction
The family is a crucial site for social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1996). The formation of social
class can be understood in terms of the position that individuals, or agents, occupy in the
social field. Bourdieu (1985, p.724) conceptualises the relationship between social field,
capital, and position as follows:
The social field can be described as a multi-dimensional space of positions such that every
actual position can be defined in terms of a multi-dimensional system of co-ordinates whose
values correspond to the values of the different pertinent variables. Thus, agents are
distributed within it, in the first dimension, according to the overall volume of the capital they
possess and, in the second dimension, according to the composition of their capital - i.e.,
according to the relative weight of the different kinds of assets within their total assets.
In a specific field, such as education, power is distributed among agents according to
their possession of valuable resources. These resources, or capital in its multifaceted forms,

are not merely economic, they are also social consisting of social connections and networks,
cultural including ‘a broad array of linguistic competencies, manners, preferences and
orientations’ (Reay, 1998, p.26), and symbolic—‘the form the different types of capital take
once they are perceived as recognised as legitimate’ (Bourdieu, 1987, p.4). According to the
volume and the composition of capital, agents are ‘assigned a position, a location or a precise
class of neighbouring positions, i.e., a particular area within that space’ (Bourdieu, 1987,
p.4). Strategies of social mobility and reproduction are used to occupy a privileged position in
the social space. One of the crucial strategies that middle-class families use to retain their
privileged position in the social space is to invest in their children’s education and to cultivate
the home-school relationship (Bourdieu, 1990).
Studies on the home-school relationship offer intricate accounts of how middle-class
families solicit educational privilege. In her empirical study about families in the United
States, Annette Lareau (2011), for example, shows the case of ‘domestic transmission of
cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p.17). Lareau’s work illustrates how parents in middle-class
families ‘concertedly cultivate’ their children’s skills and talents (pp.363–364). These
investments benefit children scholastically and shape their wider social perspectives on
matters such as the organisation of daily life, the use of language, familiarisation of forms of
verbal interactions—all of which pave the way for attaining better life opportunities. Diane
Reay (1998), in her seminal work, shows how middle-class mothers in the UK exert their
class privilege by using language—a form of cultural capital—to strengthen the home-school
relationship. However, working-class mothers find themselves placed ‘outside on the
margins’ as they grapple with ‘a matrix of intersected positionings and classifications that are
embodied’ (O’Donoghue, 2013, p.190; also see Reay, 1998).
These studies and others of the home-school relationship that binarily compare the

experiences of working-class with middle-class parents and children offer illuminating
perspectives on educational practices. However, neatly defined categorical assessments fail to
capture the dynamics that emerge as families across segments of social groups exercise their
class advantage to fulfil common educational goals. This paper offers a comparative analysis
of the positions of parents in the education field in the empirical case of an economically
homogeneous fraction of the contemporary urban middle-class in Dehradun city in northern
India.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital as ‘thinking tools’ (Wacquant,
1989, p.50), this paper focuses on three aspects of the home-school relationship. First, it
explores the influence of socio-structural changes on parental aspirations for their children’s
future. Next, it examines the educational strategies parents adopt for meeting those
aspirations. Finally, it investigates parents’, especially mothers’, engagement in their
children’s everyday schooling. By showing similarities and differences in parental investment
in an apparently homogeneous fragment of the Indian middle-class, the paper problematises,
and aims to disrupt, the binary reification of social groups in the broader scholarship on
education and society. In what follows, I first outline the expansion and the nature of
contemporary middle-classes and provide the background to the middle-classes in India.
Then, I introduce the study before presenting and discussing the research findings.
Contemporary middle-class and the nature of its heterogeneity in India
The global middle-class population reached 3.2 billion in 2016; it is expected to grow by 140
million annually (Kharas, 2017). The global growth of the middle-class is centred on Asia, a
region expected to contribute about 88% of the next billion added to the economic group
(Kharas, 2017). The middle-class, as a group, has emerged from various historical contexts.
As a result, it is defined variously and characterised differently across socio-cultural settings

(Heiman, Freeman, & Liechty, 2012). A vast pool of research in China and India—the two
largest middle-class growth areas—reveals an extensively heterogeneous group (Brosius,
2014; Li, 2010).
In India, the contemporary middle-class arose primarily in the aftermath of economic
liberalisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Fernandes, 2006). During this period, the
social composition of ‘the advantaged group’ began a radical reconfiguration (Kharas, 2010;
Fernandes, 2006). Most scholars agree that the Indian middle-class comprises of an old inter-
generationally privileged, mostly upper-caste, self-sufficient group of families that played a
crucial role in post-independence economic development (Deshpande, 2003), and a new,
disparate but highly aspirational, upwardly mobile, and consumerist social group that
benefitted greatly from the expanded market economy and its labour demand (Baviskar &
Ray, 2011; Fernandes, 2006).
The second section of the ‘new’ middle-class, part of which is the focus of this paper,
is further divided along the parameters of income levels, educational credentials of family
members, main source of household income, and consumption patterns (Baviskar & Ray,
2011). Sometimes, it represents the IT professionals, who live in the metropolitan cities and
contribute to the global economy (Fernandes, 2006; Fuller & Narasimhan, 2006; Mathur,
2010). At other times, it consists of the families who have a steady income but who struggle
to secure their future financially (Donner, 2005; Ganguly-Scrase & Scrase, 2009; Waldrop,
2004). Arguably, this group also represents the Jats, a primarily rural-based socially
privileged group that invests generously to ensure their children’s future in the urban regions
(Jeffery, Jeffery, & Jeffrey, 2011).
Although there are internal differences, all socio-economic sections of the Indian
middle-class invest heavily in their children’s education (Dickey, 2012; Donner, 2005;

Fernandes, 2006; Ganguly-Scrase & Scrase, 2009; Jeffery, Jeffery, & Jeffrey, 2011; Waldrop,
2004). The nature of this investment has been discussed primarily regarding school choice,
obsession with engineering and medicine as future career fields, and readiness for the job
market in urban contexts (Nambissan, 2009).
Few contemporary studies provide rich details on parental attempts to reproduce
differences by comparing one fragment of the middle-class with another—for example, the
upper and lower tiers of the economic middle class (Gilbertson, 2014), and upper caste and
lower caste middle-class groups in rural India (Jeffrey, Jeffery & Jeffery, 2005). This paper
extends this body of literature by examining the social positionings of the families vis-à-vis
educational privilege in a single fraction of the urban middle-class.
The study
This paper draws primarily on in-depth interviews with parents in 53 families between
December 2014 and December 2015 in Dehradun—a capital city of Uttarakhand State in
northern India. The household income of the participant families ranged between INR
300,000 and 500,000 (USD 4,490 and 7,484), which places them in the income category of
contemporary Indian middle-class (Sridharan, 2011). These parents also identified
themselves were ‘in the middle’ of the social hierarchy, whereby they had sufficient
resources to survive and possibly build a secure future. However, they had to work hard to
make ends meet (cf., Dickey, 2012). The initial opportunistic contacts with families (Patton,
2002) facilitated further connections through snow-balling (Creswell, 2012). Interviews were
carried out in participants’ homes, and each interview lasted for about 1.5 to 2 hours. While I
proposed to interact with both parents, some interviews were with the father and mother
together, and a small number were with only the father. Most interviews were conducted only
with mothers.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Heterogeneous middle-class and diverse educational advantage: parental investment in children’s schooling in dehradun, india" ?

However, the effect of its internal differences on the distribution of educational resources needs to be examined systematically. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with parents in 53 middle-class families in Dehradun, India, this paper explores three aspects of the home-school relationship: how socioeconomic transformations shape parents ’ aspirations for their children ’ s future, educational decisions parents make to realise those aspirations, and mothers ’ engagement in their children ’ s everyday schooling. The paper argues that the discrepancy in the mobilisation of accumulated resources in the heterogeneous middle-class results in diverse educational advantages across families. 

Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "Heterogeneous middle-class and diverse educational advantage: parental investment in children’s schooling in dehradun, india" ?

It would be interesting to examine educational privileges in one or more dimensions of social classification with social classes intersectionally in future studies within India and beyond. This paper illustrates that the advantages that members of just one fraction of this group seem to have at their disposal can be quite diverse. 

Q3. What is the key strategy for middle-class families to retain their privileged position in the social?

One of the crucial strategies that middle-class families use to retain their privileged position in the social space is to invest in their children’s education and to cultivate the home-school relationship (Bourdieu, 1990). 

Q4. What was the role of education in the development of children?

The investment in children’s education was a critical way for parents to realise the intergenerational transfer of social privilege. 

Q5. What was her way of compensating for this hiatus?

Her way of compensating for this hiatus was to send her children to after-school tutoring classes for all their subjects and to enhance this with information gathered from her personal contacts. 

Q6. What did the availability of infrastructural facilities mean for the families?

The availability of infrastructural facilities and the experience of a specific lifestylenot only meant an improved quality of life for the families, but they also achieved crucial ‘material conditions of existence’ that positioned them ‘intrinsically’ alongside other ‘occupants of the same position in a space’ (Bourdieu, 1987, p.6), the urban middle-class. 

Q7. What was the perceived necessity of leaving the village?

This perceived necessity was in alignment with the parental desire for upward social mobility in the imagined socio-occupational hierarchy. 

Q8. What factors were likely to prevent mothers from attending school?

Most provider-mothers had never attended a school or had been forced to drop out prematurely due to factors such as family hardship or the prevailing gender norms against female education in their families. 

Q9. What did they think would have a significant impact on their children’s future outcomes?

In educational matters, middle-class parents made a series of decisions, discussed in the next section, that they believed would have a significant impact on children’s future outcomes. 

Q10. Why did Aditi choose to live in a two-bedroom apartment?

Even though the family had a house and property in a smaller town in the Garhwal region, Aditi chose to live in a two-bedroom rented apartment in Dehradun, primarily to provide her children with access to a better quality of education. 

Q11. Why did Anjana feel she had no reason to fail?

Anjana was disappointed with her daughter’s performance because she believed thatsince she provided everything for her daughter, she had no reason to fail.