Mapping the challenges of educational foundations at primary level: Historical debates to current challenges

Abstract

From the very end of 18th century, in hierarchical Indian society mastery of religious literature was considered as quality learning. Post World War II debates emphasised the freedom of choice. The quality discourse started taking shape with J.P. Naik's identification of a vicious circle where, 'the pursuit of quality has often linked itself with privilege and has become inimical to that of quantity, the pursuit of quantity in its turn has often lead to the deterioration of standards; and the pursuit of equality has often found to be inimical to that of quality', Krishna Kumar's 'universality', 'equality' 'quality' triangulation, to Christopher Winch way of looking at the commercial side of the quality through quality control and total quality management, and James Tooley' path breaking 'low cost private schooling'. Choice and diversity debates popularised the importance of parental choice in choosing schools for their children. Sociologists like Bernstein (1971) and Bourdieu (1970), looked into the dynamics of classroom and at pedagogic relations. The quality discourse that is intended to be developed in this work can be based on Bourdieu's Capital. Nevertheless, all the theorists have developed their arguments keeping in mind the child's wellbeing and in today's date it is more important to nurture these ideas to come up with a foolproof system which surpasses all the challenges and build today's children into tomorrow's leaders. The study has been done purely on the basis of review of secondary literature and attempts to do a Historical Sociology covering articles from journals and books from libraries. Textual analysis of some major critical debates on quality has been conducted by highlighting ideologies of different scholars and thereafter understanding of what can be considered as essential to produce our 'child of substance'. But it is to be noted that it also not possible to point out a single theory/perspective that can be applied to the concept of quality education.