A timely enquiry into the disjuncture between schooling and society, this book aims to examine the specific spatialities and temporalities of modern schooling through which non-normative childhoods are constructed as the ‘provincial other’. A large body of critical scholarship has engaged with the ways in which modern schooling draws upon certain situated, normative ideals of child development and is uneasy in its attempts to accommodate childhoods that are situated outside of this normative framework. The COVID-19 pandemic, in fact, was a further reminder of how schooling, in its current form, is limited in its abilities to address childhoods that spatio-temporally disrupt the assumptions of the ‘normal’ and ‘stable’. Together, the authors of this edited volume examine the ways in which modern schooling, ‘excludes’, despite set policies for inclusion, and how ‘provincialized’ children respond to this. Cutting across a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to sociology and childhood studies, statistics and demography, and a range of research methodologies, from archival to ethnographic, the chapters draw upon these various disciplines in unpacking the structures of modern schooling. Modern Schooling and Trajectories of Exclusion will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of education, sociology, research methods, childhood studies and social sciences. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

Educating Youth: Regulation through Psychosocial Skilling in India studies the rise in skill-based developmental interventions for young people that aim to harness youth potential. Tracing these changes to the neoliberalization of education and training globally, this book discusses how a range of training programs, from social and personality development skills to employability and vocational skills, seek to cultivate an ethic of self-responsibility through skilling, to overcome structural disadvantage among the marginalized youth. Examining one such form of training in depth, Life Skills Education or LSE, that is advocated by international organizations, such as WHO and UNICEF, and popularized in India by various actors---from the state departments of education to local non-governmental organisations and middle-class citizens-this book shows how these programmes get adapted and modified within the Indian context. It demonstrates how authoritarian adult-child relations, caste inequalities and rote culture inflect the messages for self-development that the programmes transmit. Discussing the impact of these psychosocial skilling programmes observed in the Indian context, the book reflects on the cultural disconnects and internal limitations of liberal, progressive and experiential pedagogies in achieving intended outcomes.