- Common sense tells us: if a learner goes to school and studies diligently, they will succeed in life. This belief underpins the promise of school education as a pathway to social and economic mobility, yet it masks the many contradictions and shortcomings of the system - Schools reproduce social and cultural inequalities and invisibilise birth-based advantages and, in some cases, reinforce birthbased disadvantages. In the words of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu: “The educational system, an institutionalised classifier... transforms social classifications into academic classifications, with every appearance of neutrality.” - They did not need to prepare meticulously; they walked onto the stage and stole the show. I remember students from a school adjacent to mine, one that “catered to poorer segments of society”, and they occasionally turned up for some of these debates. The fact that their English seemed laboured, their speeches on stage reflecting days and nights of preparation, immediately put off the judges. My peers and I almost always walked away with the win. Many years later, and many interventions to common sense notwithstanding, Bourdieu’s notion that the perception of success is very much a factor of the structural location of the perceiver rings true in my ears. - As “everybody” gets qualified, dominant educational institutions move to other criteria—ease, style, and other such embodiments of caste and class—to continue to ensure the reproduction of their domination. As other caste and class groups, historically marginalised for centuries, enter the school education fold, a variety of linguistic, epistemic, and material tools are employed to perpetuate the distinction between social groups. - what a school does, how it is supposed to function, how schools can subvert exploitative relationships, whether access to schooling is enough, and what quality education means, do not feature in political discourse. The school, its purposes, and its stakeholders continue to be taken for granted. - What we have seen for decades now is a tragic relegation of school education as primarily a subject of implementation science, left to the bureaucracy. This shift takes away school education from what it is, a profoundly political question. This relegation takes the institutional framework of a school as a constraint, and subsequently turns questions of school education into input/output questions. - Education, in this model, is treated as a technical or managerial problem to be optimised for efficiency, rather than as a foundational site for shaping democratic values, addressing social inequalities, or imagining more just futures. - Many spirited debates between practitioners of education and theorists often fall into a familiar tailspin. The practitioner says: “You theorists keep complaining and critiquing; what are you doing to change the system?” The theorist says: “You practitioners don’t look at the bigger picture, and reproduce old problems in new ways.” This debate is but another manifestation of the inherent contradictions of education, and we seem to be lacking the appropriate tools to tackle this contradiction - In his 1869 speech titled “On General Education”, Karl Marx pointed out that “there was a peculiar difficulty connected with this question. On the one hand, a change of social circumstances was required to establish a proper system of education; on the other hand, a proper system of education was required to bring about a change of social circumstances; we must therefore commence where we are.” --- (Vasanthakumar, n.d.)