ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the institution of caste affects the schooling of Dalit children. It focuses on three aspects of schooling with a focus on Odisha, an eastern State of India: caste-based disparities in educational outcomes, caste biases in knowledge representation, and experiences of Dalit children attending schools. For the first aspect of schooling, it analyses selected educational indicators from different sample surveys and shows that within the domain of school education in different data sets, there is a caste-like hierarchy in educational outcomes. Secondly, it evaluates the contents of selected vernacular medium school textbooks used as part of compulsory school education in Odisha. It shows that upper-caste culture, history, and worldviews are presented as desirable while Dalit communities are invisible in such discourses and in textbooks. Thirdly, it studies the experiences of Dalit children attending schools and shows how day-to-day interactions, within the classroom and outside, reinforce caste identities denying equitable learning opportunities to Dalit children.
