Revolutions in Learning and Education from India

Christoph Neusiedl's Revolutions in Learning and Education from India details the promotion of inequality in development theory and education and offers a more egalitarian learning approach. Using India as a test case, he shows how the denial of local and egalitarian knowledges reinforce a hierarchical neoliberal order and then follows alternative educational practices that foster more flourishing lives. This book is an invaluable resource for understanding where we are and how we might resist neoliberal hegemony. - Todd May, Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities, Clemson University, USA This timely book joins the growing chorus of critical voices calling for a radical rethinking of our assumptions about how children should be educated, in the face of contemporary political, environmental and economic crises. In focusing on the artificial hierarchies created and sustained by our current systems, and weaving together insights from postdevelopment theory, anarchist theory and philosophy of education, the author offers an original perspective on these critical questions. These theoretical perspectives are combined with a fascinating analysis of neo-liberal education policy and resistant unschooling practices in India, offering an inspiring illustration of the political significance of grass-roots radical education movements. - Judith Suissa, Professor of Philosophy of Education, Institute of Education, University College London, UK Revolutions in Learning and Education from India is a fascinating exercise in rekindling hope, looking beyond our catastrophic present. Drawing on a number of different theoretical resources from postdevelopment thought to anarchism and the philosophy of Jacques Ranciere, Christoph Neusiedl focuses on some novel experiments in the field of 'education' and 'unschooling' in India, to tell an amazing story of finding pathways to the pluriverse. - Aditya Nigam, Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), India For too long, a certain conceptual paradigm, based on a neoliberal economic model of development, has dominated the world - what the author calls OWW or One-World world. This model is now breaking down in the wake of localized experiments in self-management, practices which have always existed but have been marginalized by Western-centric discourses. In this original and fascinating book, Neusiedl explores this emergent pluriverse in terms of autonomous forms of self-education or 'unschooling' in India, which he sees as an anarchistic practice based on the presumption of radical equality. - Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK