It seems like a chicken and egg problem: caste determines the education you receive, so education can’t free you from your caste. The current implicit constitution of education promises otherwise, but it is a false promise.
Because education is more than just school, however, there is a way out of this chicken and egg problem through youth knowledge work.
Every middle-schooler will have the expectation that when they are in high school, they will have a good-paying job, sharing knowledge or skills with younger children, peers, or other people in their community.
We draw attention to middle-schoolers expectations to emphasize that we are talking about how children grow up, that is, education in the broadest sense. As significant as or more significant than parents’ influence on adolescent development is the influence of other adolescents. Teenagers help each other grow up.
Therefore, not schools but peer groups, preferably in tandem with schools, have the potential to disrupt caste formations.
Most parents and teachers focus on the potential of peer groups to drag down their children in the caste hierarchy. “Hanging with the wrong crowd” or “peer pressure” are dangers. And, of course, no one wants their 12- or 13-year-old to be spending time with smoking, drinking, or sexually active 15-, 16- or 17-year-olds. Children’s lives can be ruined, which means that they may be forced to forego the privileges of their caste, limited and fragile though those may be. Even high-caste families, with all their resources, fear this danger.
But the reality of the danger should alert us to the reality of a corresponding opportunity. Young people who take on positive roles not normally assigned to their caste also have the potential to disrupt caste-formation. This potential is not only a positive as opposed to a negative peer pressure. It is also the potential to make people suspicious of caste assignments in general.
Picture a school of teenagers where each one is paid for sharing knowledge and skills with peers—before, during, and after the school day. What do middle-schoolers in the neighborhood see? They don’t see winners and losers, the essential hierarchies of a caste system. They see instead a structure of collaboration and mutual aid supported by significant public approbation and investment. Each particular enterprise that the young people are involved in—a team of tutors, a league of coaches, a drama or dance troupe, a network of oral historians, a camp of debaters—constitute a mini-society with ways of acting and doing that the middle-schoolers can picture themselves growing up into. And the high-school tutors, mentors, coaches, and leaders can see themselves as responsible for helping those middle schoolers or younger high school students or their own friends and peers to grow up.
Bob Moses calls these structures “crawl spaces.” They are crawl spaces because they are in a way hidden and protected from the larger society. They have their own collectively agreed-on ways of relating, doing, and communicating, their own purposes. They are not necessarily caste-free, but they can be caste-free in the sense that younger people entering the crawl space can either be nurtured to think of themselves as emerging into a kind of democratic equality with the other people present, or the younger people can be pressed into evaluations of status and various modes of subordination. A later post will discuss this problem more carefully.
Youth knowledge work structures are also crawl spaces because they are grounds for play and experimentation. The stakes are not yet adult stakes, which does not mean that the work is unserious, only that mistakes, errors, difficulties and troubles, stumbling and falling, are expected and accommodated.
No one gets angry with a child who crawls across the floor, gets to their feet, takes a few steps, topples, and crawls again. No one gets angry with a three-year-old’s grammatical errors. But their learning to talk and walk is monumentally serious in the long run, because they must become skilled in these crucial areas of life.
The crawl-spaces of youth knowledge-work should be thought of similarly. It is crucial that young people learn to grow up to apply their minds, bodies, and spirits to the collective needs of their community. It takes practice. They will make mistakes. But our world will be better if we project confidence to adolescents that they can become excellent at community-based knowledge work in the same way we project confidence to toddlers that they can become excellent at walking and talking.
Creating these crawl-spaces for young people to grow up into, preferably in concert with schools, is therefore a way out of the chicken-and-egg problem posed by caste-based education. Currently, caste determines education and education fits you to your assigned caste. With crawl-spaces for youth knowledge-work as parallel structures to grow up into, it is possible, but not inevitable, that young people will learn to live together caste-free.