The Ontological Crisis of Schooling: Situating Migrant Childhoods and Educational Exclusion

Abstract

This article emphasises the discord between ‘mobile childhoods’ and ‘immobile schools’ as the fundamental problematic of educational inclusion of migrant children in India. Formal schooling system predicated upon static ideals of age, grade, learning, curriculum and language, fails to accommodate the lived realities of migrant children. By drawing upon field work narratives with migrant children in Bangalore, I show that migrant children’s educational exclusion cannot be understood in terms of their mobility alone, instead it needs to be problematised in the context of dominant spatio-temporal ideals of childhood and schooling.