Youth, Skills and Education

R. Maithreyi is a critical childhood studies and education scholar, focusing on youth in the Global South. She currently works at Karnataka Health Promotion Trust, Bengaluru. Her previous books include Educating Youth: Regulation through Psychosocial Skilling in India (2021) and Modernity, Schooling, and Childhood in India: Trajectories of Exclusion (2022).

• Acknowledgements xii1 Introduction – Global Agendas Around Youth andNeoliberal Development 11.0 Conceptions of Youth 11.1 Harnessing the Youth Dividend: Regulation and ‘Responsibilization’ of Youth 51.2 Navigating Youthhood 71.3 About This Book 132 The ‘Psy Complex’ and Development Work with Youth 182.0 The ‘Psy-Sciences’ and New Forms of Governance 182.1 PYD and Entrepreneurial Youth 202.2 PYD and the Proliferation of Governance 253 LSE for ‘Enterprise’ or ‘Educational Reform’? 303.0 The Generalization of Psycho-Education and Youth Development: The Indian Context 303.1 LSE – A Genealogical Examination 333.1.1 The Self-Help and Skills Revolution within Psychology 363.2 Emergence and Circulation in the Indian Context 393.2.1 The Targets of Life Skills Interventions 424 A Range of Actors in Indian Education 464.0 A Range of Actors and the Intent of Life Skilling 464.1 Life Skills Programmes as ‘Global Middle-Class’ Cultural Capital 484.1.1 Imagine Possibilities 504.1.2 Viveka Youth Brigade 534.1.3 Media for Change Limited 555 Technologies of Self – LSE and the Shaping of the Entrepreneurial Self 60Diary Entry: February 17, 2012; 5:30–7:00 am, Eidgah Maidan, Bengaluru 605.0 A Pedagogy for Discipline 605.1 The Pedagogic Format of LSE 615.1.1 Participation, and the Practices of ‘Care’, Confession, and ‘Visibilization’ 635.1.2 Role of Language within the Programmes 675.1.3 Modulation of Body Rhythm, Mood, and Behaviour 716 Curricular Agendas, Classroom Transactions, and Social Reproduction of Youth Identities 77The Story of ‘Warm Fuzzies’ and ‘Cold Pricklies’ 776.0 Classroom Agendas and the Reconstruction of Youth Selves 776.1 Meeting the Expectations of Schools 786.2 Meeting the Ends of Donors and Funders 826.3 Meeting the Middle-Class Vision of Development 856.4 Meeting the Patriarchal Expectations of Society 886.5 The Entrepreneurial Self: Educated but De-Skilled and Malleable 917 Cultural Disconnects and Youth Formations Through Enterprise and Social Reproduction 957.0 Field Realities and the Outcomes of LSE Programmes 957.0.1 Students’ Account of LSE 957.0.2 LSE and the Affordances of Better Education 987.0.3 Facilitators and the Production of a New Professional Status 1017.0.4 ‘Managers’ and the Production of ‘Distinction’ 1078 Psycho-Regulation Programmes and ‘Strategic Opportunizing’: Theorizing the Possibilities: Youth Identity Formations 1138.0 Local Contexts, Global Discourses, and ‘Cultural Disconnects’: Understanding the Responses toPsychosocial Interventions 1138.1 LSE and Middle-Class Cultural Capital 1138.1.1 The TTP by IP 1148.1.2 Lava Pit and Fissures within Team Dynamics 1178.2 Class, Self, and Habitus 1218.3 Governmentality, Power, and the Possibilities for Resistance 1238.4 ‘Strategic Opportunism’ and the (Re)Production of Youth Identities 1259 Conclusion 1299.0 Developmentalism and Education 1299.1 Youth Aspirations, Appropriations, and Resistances 1309.2 Alternative Possibilities and Social Transformation Through LSE Programmes 132Appendices 137List of Abbreviations 143References 144Index 160

"Are 'skill-training' and 'personality development' programmes adequate to cater to youth who are caught in the interstices of disembedding societies and economies? Maithreyi's nuanced and critical study highlights the challenges of such education transactions and calls for the need for programs that combine individual needs with structural orientation. An indispensable book for all educators, trainers, administrators, and policy-makers."A R Vasavi (Prof. Retd.)Social Anthropologist"This incisive book offers a powerful critique of psycho-educational interventions that target marginalised young people, especially under the guise of ‘empowerment’. Showing how such education programmes travel from the Global North to the Global South, Maithreyi excavates their prevalence and workings in the Indian context through the case study of ‘life skills education’. Through original ethnographic research, the book reveals how such programmes expect young people to ‘work on the self’, and in doing so, fail to acknowledge, much less address, the structural nature of the injustices that young people face. This book offers compelling evidence for a radical rethinking of education reform – exposing the deep harms that underpin existing modes of so-called ‘empowerment’."Arathi Sriprakash (Professor of Sociology and Education)University of Oxford