What is it like to be a dalit child in school today?
What does it really mean to be a dalit child in school today? Is social opposition to dalit schooling an aberration of the past? In the absence of systematic research we do not have definite answers to these questions. Still, available studies provide clear evidence that schooling can be quite a traumatic experience for a dalit child. School textbooks are, by and large, silent about the dalit experience of social oppression. A study of textbooks for classes 4,5 and 6 of government schools in Madhya Pradesh, for example, shows that not a single character can be identified as coming from a scheduled-caste background. Yet a large proportion of students in these schools are from erstwhile untouchable communities. Dalit students, however, find the silence about dalit experience in the official school curriculum less threatening than the power of the hidden curriculum of norms, values, attitudes and expectations. Some dalit students who went to school just three decades ago quoted several ex
