contemporary Educational Quality and Social Inequality: Reflecting on the Link

Abstract: It is argued that the perception of existing inequality within the field of school education gave rise to the language of rights, but that normative notions of childhood underpinning educational discourses have not been sufficiently problematised. The paper makes a case for productive convergence between the discourses of quality and inequality by drawing on the observations from a study of government schools in Andhra Pradesh. Specifically, the paper foregrounds the need for reflecting on the tacit agreement that exists within the education system about bracketing off questions of socio-cultural inequality when discussing issues of quality and learning goals on the one hand, and the compartmentalisation of the language of rights on the other hand such that adequate attention has not yet been paid to questions of educational quality. I n this paper we focus on two important aspects, i.e. quality and inequality, which shape our present understanding of school education. Furthermore, we seek to grasp the manner in which discussions of each of these relate to one another. Our contribution to the discussion on this subject draws on a study that we undertook at Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies, Hyderabad (Anveshi, 2003). This study, which extended over a two–year period (2000–2002), Rekha Pappu is an independent researcher based in Hyderabad and a researc