ABSTRACT
Though parents increasingly recognize that even for the poorest some kind of schooling has become necessary, most do not feel that working interferes with children’s ability to perform well. School and work are indeed not perceived as being incompatible, though schools do give rise to competing attitudes towards the behaviour expected from children. While schools have increasingly opened up to children avenues to advance themselves, local society still views them as a source of free labour and security and as instruments of family aggrandizement. Local society itself is, however, composed of heterogeneous social reference groups, ranging from the household, which is the immediate society in which children grow up, the family circle, which links the joint interests of related households, up to complex structures that articulate communities, castes and classes. It is in the ever-changing field of interaction between these reference groups, as the recent history of Poomkara shows, that children are gradually finding a space to assert their individual needs. I begin by mapping the relatively abstract field of class relations, which in the rural society of Poomkara is reflected in land relations.
