The “Global Learning Crisis”: The Classroom View from Kanchipuram, India

Thangaraj, Miriam (2025) The “Global Learning Crisis”: The Classroom View from Kanchipuram, India. Comparative Education Review. ISSN 1545-701X

Text Download (139kB)

Abstract

“Global learning crisis” narratives, in focusing on the “proximate determinants” of the crisis, represent a welcome “classroom turn” in international education and development. Extant learning crisis literatures are problematic, however, as their homogenizing gaze distorts how teachers and students co-constitute classrooms as locally meaningful learning spaces. Drawing on anthropological approaches in comparative education, this article addresses the “learning crisis” in a middle-school classroom in a weavers’ neighborhood in Kanchipuram. Constituted in an elaborate “notebook economy,” this classroom was an inventive response that not only accommodated students’ material cultures and social-educational disadvantages but also affected their belonging in a resource-scarce public education system. If the learning it afforded was disdained in “learning crisis” narratives, it was nevertheless relevant for students, readily translated into educationally unintensive assembly-line jobs. In producing contempt for such classrooms, “learning crisis” narratives merely distract from—and thus entrench—the deeply unequal economic and educational development that necessitated the notebook economy in the first plac

Item Type:	Article
Authors:	Thangaraj, Miriam
Document Language:	Language English
Subjects:	Social sciences > Education
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Education
Full Text Status:	Public
Related URLs:	DOI
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/6116
Publisher URL:	https://www.journals.uchicago.edu

Actions (login required)

View Item