Indian Education Branding

Admission season is open now and parents are busily short-listing what is best for their children without digging a hole in their pockets. And schools are preoccupied with an image mediated re-branding. There are signboards of schools across the city and most of them are claiming to be ‘global’, ‘world-class’, or ‘international’. These images are committed to showcasing and reproducing the idea of ‘class’ and hierarchy with an exclusionary enthusiasm.

Education in the post-liberalization era and is just another precious commodity. School images are created to entice and be aspirational. These images gawk at you and also invite you to be indoctrinated, or inspire you to get admitted.

For instance, there is a forty-feet long school-ad which depicts ten-year-old playing golf. When ‘golf’ happens to be a major sign of ‘nurturing’, ‘learning’ and ‘excellence’, the targets of the school are well-known.

Another example is of an advertisement in which a child is spotted with an airplane – representing the pilot-ambition. ‘Flying’ here is considered as a metaphor for success. Holding the flying machine is taken as a symbol of affluence or a much-aspired takeoff, which could be accessed by a certain class. There is no confusion related to which strata of the society it wants to address or educate.

The name of a pre-school is ‘Little Illusions’ which welcomes everybody to the illusive corridors of schooling. One may read ‘Little Illusions’ as a ‘Freudian slip’, or more literally, as a ‘nomenclature is gone terribly wrong’, or as an ‘unintended pun’.

In fact, some errors are part of the ‘illuminating’ process which is called ‘learning’, aren’t they? The school I went to in Calcutta was a certain ‘Memorial Institute’. Currently, it acquired a new epithet and became a certain ‘Memorial International’.

Taken into consideration the shift in parental aspirations since the 90s, the ‘local’ was readily abandoned in favor of the ‘global’ – no matter the paradox and irony in naming it ‘Global India International School’.

These image-driven projections of schools as ‘global’, offering world-class-everything, is nothing but a visual strategy to attract parents. These are images of state-of-the-art infrastructure, montages of having centrally air-conditioned campuses, pictures of facilities and images of being secure through CCTV.

In fact, these are not very unique from advertisements for real estate. These are also sufficiently expensive. Both the spheres need massive investments and provide some returns in the future. Both arouse customers through images of global facilities in manicured built-environments which are isolated from their surroundings. Both offers assured homogenous social spaces, where children of a certain class can socialize with similar ones.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://thewire.in/education/indian-education-images