R 1991a Review of Myron Weiner the Child and the State in India

8/10/2019 R 1991a Review of Myron Weiner the Child and the State in India

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Myron Weiner

The Child and the State in India:

Child Labor and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xiv + 213 p. $45.00; $14.95 (pbk.).

Many of today's developing countries, on gaining political independence, quickly moved toinstitute compulsory primary education, tracing out the route toward near-universal literacy taken

late last century by the West and Japan. People who have a passing acquaintance with India

knowing that it produces many eminent scientists and an abundant supply of engineers and other

professionals, and aware of the statist, interventionist inclinations of its governmentmight

assume that India had done the same. The intellectual elite would be the tip of a pyramid that

rested on a universalistic commitment to education at the base.

But that is not what happened. The 1981 census recorded that over half (52 percent) of India's 6-

14 age group in that year were not attending school. Forty-five percent of the 15-19 age group

were illiterate; while this figure has been falling (it was 62 percent in 1961) the pace of change

has been slow. In the absolute numbers that Indian demography offers on a spectacular scale, the

illiterate population at ages 10 and above grew by more than 40 million per decade in the 1960s

and 1970s, the total in 1981 reaching some 280 million. Early figures from the 1991 census

indicate the addition of another 20 million illiterates in the 1980s. Despite the apparently better

progress made in the past decade (including a faster rate of increase in female than male

literacy), India, as Myron Weiner remarks in the present study, is the largest single producer of

the world's illiterates.1

Children in India who are not attending school are likely to be working, typically in cottage

industries producing matches, cigarettes, carpets, and such like, or in shops and markets. There

are laws (weak ones) against child labor but they are not enforced. Officials, employers, and

parents in effect collude to preserve the system: a system, Weiner argues, that is not the

underside of early capitalism or industrializationsome equivalent of Lancashire's cotton millsor even Tokugawa Japan's filaturesbut is a peasant-economy survival. "It represents the

persistence of traditional pre-industrial conceptions of the child in relation to work and to

parents The family, not the individual, is the unit of social action" (p. 109).

The immediate explanation offered by both Indians and others is that these educational and child

labor outcomes reflect India's poverty. With economic growth and with the technological change

1 The book was completed before the 1991census. But even in 1981 the situation was not quite as grim as

Weiner portrays it. He follows the Indian Registrar General's past practice of recording literacy rates and

numbers of illiterates with no lower age-cutoff, with children in the 0-5 age group (appropriately) taken aswholly illiterate. The effect is to exaggerate the extent of illiteracy. The crude literacy rate for 1981 thus

defined is 36 percent, whereas the rate for the population aged 5 years or older is 41 percent and for thoseaged 10 years or older 42 percent. (Adult literacy, conventionally defined as referring to the population15+, was 40 percent.) In a similar vein, the figure Weiner cites of 437 million illiterates in India in 1981 (p.

4) includes some 157 million children below 10 years of age. The 1991 census, in a start toward dealing

with this statistical problem, excludes the population below age 7 from literacy estimates. Provisionalresults give a 1991 literacy rate for the population 7+ of 52 percent. (The age-specific data needed to

produce estimates with higher age-cutoffs are not yetavailable from this census.) Over 1981-91, the total

population aged 7+ rose by 140 million; the number of illiterates 7+, by 22 million6 million males, 16million females. (Census of India 1991:Provisional Population Totals. Series 1, India. Paper I of 1991.)


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that accompanies it, the demand for skilled labor will blossom and induce a comparable demand

by parents for schooling. The supply of child labor will dry up. Legislation on compulsory

education, as on much else, comes only as the behavioral change it refers to has virtually been

achieved.

Myron Weiner, in this strongly argued and persuasive book, disputes that sequence and the

implied explanation of educational development that lies behind it. Poorer countries than India(many African countries, for instance) have progressed much further toward universal primary

education. India's educational expenditure as a proportion of gross national product is not

exceptionally low: UNDP's 1990 Human Development Report puts it at 3.4 percent in 1986

compared to China's at 2.7 percent, Indonesia's at 3.5 percent, and the average for all developing

countries of 3.9 percentbut a smaller share of it goes to the primary level. It is not the capacity

to do more that is lacking, in Weiner's view, but the will. He locates the principal explanation for

poor performance in primary education in the belief systems of the state bureaucracy"a set of

beliefs that are widely shared by educators, social activists, trade unionists, academic

researchers, and, more broadly, by members of the Indian middle class" (p. 5).

An astonishing constellation of forces is seemingly arrayed against compulsory education, its

endorsement by India's Constitution notwithstanding. On the economic side, these include the

small businessmen who employ child workers, Gandhian supporters of cottage industry, upper-

caste groups fearing competition for jobs and the disappearance of a menial class, and often

parents themselves, whether in exigent need or believing in their right to their children's labor.

On the education side, opponents of compulsion include teachers (who benefit from large student

enrollment but low attendance), state education department officials (for reasons Weiner does

not make wholly clear), and Illich-style enthusiasts for "deschooling." Indeed, Weiner claims to

find no significant forces for compulsory education. (South India, and particularly Kerala, offer

exceptions: there he sees proselytizing Christian missions as pushing for wider education, and

some degree of defensive following suit by Hindu and Muslim authorities. In Kerala, a left-wing

government has continued the process, achieving close to full adult literacy. According to the

1991 census, 91 percent of Kerala's population 7 years and older are literate.) Characteristicviews held by members of these various groups are displayed in a fascinating series of

"dialogues" on child labor and education, excerpts of interviews conducted by the author.

Of great interest in the book, though necessarily highly abbreviated, are the case studies of

historical (England,2 Germany, Austria, the United States, Japan) and contemporary (China,

Taiwan, Sri Lanka, South Korea) experiences of state educational policies and achievements.

Weiner emphasizes the diverse patterns of political support and value systems that elsewhere led

to compulsory primary education and effective child labor laws (usually in that order). The

comparative materials are usefully distilled into a dozen or so propositions that would

collectively "constitute a policy for removing children from the labor force and placing them in

schools" (p. 194).

Given his lengthy interest-group analysis and identification of the fairly blatant class and caste

interests at work, it is slightly disingenuous for Weiner to say that his explanation of the Indian

case is rooted in beliefs. Belief systems are not free-standing cultural elements but tend to go

with tangible interests, or at least not to conflict drastically with them. Social mobility in India he

sees as a matter of the relative status of whole groups, particularly caste groups, rather than being

2 A minor point for the record: On page 121, Malthus (and some other distinguished interlopers) oddly find

themselves on a list of "Scots intellectuals."


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defined by individual opportunity, and mass education threatens the established intergroup

relativities. "Educators and officials do not regard education as an equalizer, as an instrument for

developing shared attitudes and social characteristics, but rather as a way of differentiating one

class from another Those who are educated have power over those who are not" (p. 190). Mass

schooling is subversive of the social order.

Schooling is also held to have ramifications for individual autonomy and efficacy and theirspinoffs in political and demographic behavior, and, in the aggregate, for economic development.

Of particular interest for PDR readers may be the consequences for fertility. This subject was

treated by John Caldwell in this journal ten years ago ("Mass education as a determinant of the

timing of fertility decline,"PDR 6, no. 2). Caldwell argued that education was a medium for the

supplanting of a family-centered economy and morality by more-inclusive social and cultural

systems, especially those organized or manipulated by the state. As schooling approached full

coverage of the population, the defensive power of patriarchal tradition was broken and child-

adult relations (and gender relations) were transformed. The family economy was changed "from

a situation in which high fertility is worthwhile to one in which it is disastrous" ("Mass

education," p. 228), precipitating a fall in birth rates. (Somewhat analogous consequences for

mortality are often claimed, although tied more to the shift in gender relations.)

Caldwell returned to the topic, with P. H. Reddy and Pat Caldwell, five years later ("Educational

transition in rural South India," PDR11,no. 1), investigating the reasons why parents do or do

not send their children to school in rural Karnataka and why those who do, very often, see them

drop out soon after. This covers part of Weiner's agenda, but omits much of his political analysis.

"Bottom-up" studies, valuable as they are, have limited purchase on a phenomenon that has a

major "top-down" component. The Caldwell-Reddy-Caldwell view of educational development

in South India, subtle and thoroughly grounded in field observation, is parent demand-driven, a

version of the modernization paradigm that Weiner rejects. (For a different critique of

mainstream educationfertility theorizing see Harvey J. Graff, "Literacy, education, and fertility,

past and present: A critical review,"PDR 5, no. 1.)

Myron Weiner is a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a

particular interest in Indian political demography. He has written in this journal on anti-

immigrant sentiment and action in Assam and on Indians in the Persian Gulf. The present study

is a fine piece of investigative social science and policy analysis, taking apart a seemingly

moribund policy thicket where India has contented itself with what has been disparagingly

termed a Hindu rate of growth. Yet, as with other dimensions of change in India, national

averages in measures of education and child welfare cover increasing interstate disparities. India

is "taking off" in bits and pieces, in typically disorderly fashion, no less in social than in

economic development. The situation is confirmed for literacy by the 1991 census: a second tier

of statesTamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Himachal Pradeshis moving up on Kerala;

the predictable laggards, far behind, are the swathe of northern states from Rajasthan to Bihar.

Arguments and analysis such as Weiner's are likely to be widely debated and influential in theformer group; whether they can do anything to jolt the laggards is doubtful.

Geoffrey McNicoll

Research School of Social Sciences

Australian National University

Documents

R 1991a Review of Myron Weiner the Child and the State in India