Digitalised childhood and the Gandhi-Tagore Legacy

Every major technological shift makes an impact on the social fabric, influencing relations between men and women, adults and children, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the oppressed. For better understanding of education today, different formations of digital technology, including artificial intelligence, need to be examined in the context of adult-child relations. The pervasive presence of computers and other digital devices in schools and homes has transformed childhood and our view of children’s learning. The dictionary meaning of the term ‘virtual’ is: ‘made to appear to exist by computer’. This ‘reality’ interferes with and manipulates the child’s own construction of reality. The implications of this process are far-reaching and, though the phenomenon is now entrenched in systems of education world-wide, governments are just waking up to it, that too reluctantly.

The nature of this new landscape of children’s education can be grasped by referring to the pedagogic legacy of two modern Indian thinkers: Gandhi and Tagore. Their pedagogic legacy draws ideas from their political and social engagement. They enable us to view children’s education in the wider contemporary context of democracy and violent national conflicts. At a time when digital technology is decisively shaping the global political economy and children’s education, these two critical modernists and their pedagogic legacy offer us a rare perspective and also a direction for contemplating our response to digitalised childhood.

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This event is organised by the Critical Childhood Studies Centre. The Centre is a home for world-leading scholarship about childhood as a socio-political, cultural, and historical phenomenon in diverse global contexts. The Centre provides a focal point for faculty and students at all levels in UCL to engage in innovative and multi-disciplinary research, teaching, and public engagement geared towards achieving social justice with and for children and young people.

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Honorary Professor at Panjab University, Chandigarh

Krishna Kumar did his Ph.D. in Educational Theory at the University of Toronto and taught during most of his career at Delhi University. He was Director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, (NCERT), New Delhi from 2004 to 2010. He was awarded an Hon. D.Lit by the Institute of Education, University of London in 2011.

Professor Kumar has been a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Oriental Studies, Berlin, and at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. He has delivered the Gladwyn lecture in the House of Lords, the J.P. Naik lecture at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, the Hiratsuka lecture in Tokyo, the Maulana Azad lecture in Calcutta, the IP Desai lecture at Surat and the Malcolm Adiseshiah lecture at MIDS, Chennai.

Krishna Kumar is a bilingual author. Among his various books, the best known are Politics of Education in Colonial India; Prejudice and Pride; Battle for Peace; Education, Peace and Conflict; What is Worth Teaching; and Smaller Citizens. He has edited several volumes, including the Routledge Handbook of Education in India. Several of his best known works are in Hindi. He is a columnist and also writes for children. His latest book is Thank You, Gandhi (Penguin Random House).

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