Keywords

In my research with non-elite mothers in India, I used the term “aspiration shaming” (Mathew, 2018) to refer to two simultaneous emergences. Unlike in the previous generation,
non-elites in the post-liberalization decades were intensely invested in formal education and aspired for mainstream educational opportunities for their children (also see Jakimow, 2016). However, the state and the established middle-classes shamed aspiring non-elites and sought to direct them to marginalized educational spaces and trajectories.

Technical rationality manifests in multiple realms of society and human action. For example, in the realm of authority and domination, rationalisation entails the substitution of traditional and charismatic authority by legal-rational authority; in the religious realm, professionalisation of priesthood and spiritual knowledge; and in the realm of law, a shift from traditional common law into codified and universally applicable modern law (Atalay, 2007).

This article engages with the concept of an ‘apolitical campus’ or, in other words, a campus without student politics. It provides a brief history of the process of ‘depoliticization’ from governments and university administration towards attaining ‘apolitical campuses’ in India.

Education, although it does not facilitate the “most desirable possibility of forward movement”– salaried employment, education remains central to young people’s aspirations because it enables them to “reframe accessible viable futures”

Life skills education (LSE) refers to a kind of psycho-educational intervention for children and youth that has become popular since the 1990s. While it may take many forms, LSE curricula aims at teaching young people a set of personal, cognitive, interpersonal, social and affective skills to become resilient to everyday stressors and stay on a positive trajectory of growth (UNICEF, 2005).