Paper short abstract:

This paper catalogues how the ideologically neoliberal interventions of Teach for India and affiliate NGOs – especially their insistence on entrepreneurial selfhood – alienate children from low-income backgrounds from their own families and communities.

Paper long abstract:

In India, the central government and various states, and local governments have Memorandums of Understanding with private organisations who support in administering education provision. One of the largest of these is Teach for India, and the Teach for India network proliferates through alumni of the TFI teaching fellowship, who launch their NGOs. One problem is that many in the TFI community have expertise in economics and engineering but lack sociological, anthropological, and political understandings of inequality. As these graduates seek to influence education policy and practice through their NGOs, they design pedagogies and assessment tools that imagine students as individuals to measure and invest in, not as members of extant marginalised communities with their values and practical knowledge. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Delhi between 2016 and 2020 by a white male British anthropologist, and the lived-experience of a TFI alumna who continued to work in India’s education development sector post-fellowship. Since they met in 2016, Rich and Jasmine have shared their experiences of India’s education development sector and sought ways to critique and shift practices through their interventions. This paper catalogues how the ideologically neoliberal interventions of TFI and affiliate NGOs - especially their insistence on entrepreneurial selfhood - alienate children from low-income backgrounds from their own families and communities. By attempting to standardise English, competitiveness, and the value of the modern ‘individual’, these NGOs pedagogically underserved the marginalised communities they set out to support.