This book presents a detailed ethnographic study conducted in an urban slum in India. It explores how a State school, as a social and pedagogic institution, shapes the aspirations and worldviews of children in the urban margins.

The volume engages with the children's experience of marginality and exclusion as they negotiate the intersecting axes of caste, class, gender, and citizenship. It further explores how their everyday school experience is mediated by the power asymmetries between the teachers and the community. In this process, it makes-sense of the political dynamics between the State and its margins while highlighting the role of schools and locating childhood in this context.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book will be of interest to researchers, students, and teachers of education studies, sociology and politics of education, teacher education, childhood and youth studies, and urban studies. It will also be useful for education policymakers, and professionals in the development sector.