Picturing education, poverty and childhood from the perspectives of yak herder children in Bhutan

As Sriprakash's chapter has demonstrated, dominant discourses of education and poverty eradication within the developing world work to tie the construction of the child subject to ideas of national identity, national progress, and modernisation. Such discourses position the educated child subject in terms of a future citizen subject – a modern, urban, white collar worker – whose responsibility it is to ‘remake’ or ‘reform’ the nation (Burman 2008). Placed in hierarchical opposition to this ideal subject is the ‘poor’ child: this child, often positioned as rural and uneducated, is constructed in terms of narratives of lack, deficit and failure.