In Jammu and Kashmir, education no longer merely reflects inequality; it authorises it. The classroom has ceased to be a neutral space of learning and has instead become a quiet theatre where social hierarchy is rehearsed every morning with the discipline of routine. What makes this hierarchy particularly grotesque is not simply poverty or infrastructural neglect – these have long histories – but the moral duplicity embedded within the system itself. A government teacher, salaried by the state to uphold public education, entrusts their own child to a private institution while standing daily before children whose parents have no such choice. This act, repeated across towns and villages, is not a personal failure of conscience alone; it is the symptom of a deeper structural rot. To read this condition through Karl Marx and John Rawls is not to impose theory upon reality, but to allow reality to speak in a language that exposes its injustice without euphemism.

Marx would have been unimpressed by the sentimental language often used to defend government schooling in Kashmir-talk of “constraints,” “background issues,” or “parental illiteracy.” For Marx, institutions do not fail accidentally; they function precisely as designed within a given social order. Education, in this sense, is not an equaliser suspended above class relations; it is one of the primary sites through which class relations are reproduced and normalised. The government school in Jammu and Kashmir functions less as a ladder of mobility and more as a mechanism of containment. It educates just enough to discipline, just enough to credential, but never enough to threaten the social distance between those who govern and those who are governed.

The decision of a government teacher to send their own child to a private school is often defended as rational individual choice. But Marx teaches us to be suspicious of choices that are socially patterned. When thousands of similarly placed individuals make the same “choice,” it ceases to be personal and becomes structural. This is not preference; but a class instinct. The teacher recognises, often intuitively, that the government school does not provide the linguistic capital, cultural exposure, pedagogical intensity, or competitive orientation required to survive in a marketised future. The teacher therefore exits the system privately while continuing to inhabit it professionally. This duality produces a peculiar form of alienation: the teacher is physically present in the government school but existentially absent from its promise.

Alienation here operates at multiple levels. The teacher is alienated from the product of their labour, no longer imagining their students as future equals but as permanent dependents of a compromised system. They are alienated from their own moral agency, forced to reconcile a public role with a private rejection of the institution they represent. Most devastatingly, the student is alienated from the very idea of education as emancipation. The child learns early-through gestures, silences, and unspoken comparisons-that even the teacher does not believe this space is sufficient for success.

What emerges is not merely poor education but stratified education. Two children, both technically within the public system of the state, occupy radically different educational universes. One child studies in classrooms equipped with digital tools, English fluency, competitive benchmarking, and aspirational narratives of success. The other studies in overcrowded rooms where expectations are lowered in advance, where syllabi are “covered” rather than taught, and where success is framed as survival rather than excellence. To describe this disparity as unfortunate is to evade responsibility. It is, in Marxist terms, the reproduction of class relations under the guise of public welfare.

Rawls enters this picture not as a revolutionary but as a moral accountant, and even his restrained liberalism finds the system indefensible. Rawls’ theory of justice is premised on a simple but demanding intuition: social and economic inequalities are permissible only if they are arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and if positions are open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. The education system of Jammu and Kashmir violates both conditions with remarkable consistency.

The notion of fair equality of opportunity collapses the moment we ask an uncomfortable but necessary question: can a child studying in a government school realistically compete with the child of a........

© Greater Kashmir