Growing up Poor: Early Family Life and Education

Children’s experiences in families, schools and neighbourhoods influence their childhoods as individuals learn to act in meaningful ways within social institutions. Many recent research works document challenges that economic and culturally disadvantaged students experience at colleges due to incongruence between their backgrounds and the culture at higher educational institutions. Rarely has early life experiences at one’s home and family been the focal point of inquiry. The present article explores the accounts of early family life provided by students first in their families to pursue higher education. It discusses the ways in which socialisation impacts one’s life trajectories related to education. Through emphasising on the process, the article focuses on the lived experiences of students marked by constraints due to poverty at home and its relation to the shaping of their academic decisions. In depth interviews with nine participants from Delhi studying in reputed colleges affiliated to a university at Delhi shows how one’s economic and cultural position affect one’s sense of belonging at home and educational spaces wherein students negotiate relationships and identity that are restructured and transformed while they navigate through them. Attempting to study student’s self-constructions, the article shows how formal education continues to function as a project of western modernity creating fragmented bourgeoisie subjects out of poor children.