The educational discourse is a potential site to capture the rationalities and the practices through which the margins that are rife with illegalities and informalities are disciplined and ordered in the ways of the urban. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a Jhuggi-Jhopri cluster in Delhi examining how education unfolds for children living in basti (slum), to understand the mechanisms that determine not only how urban is ordered, but how this order making function of the state is realized. By also drawing from the everyday life of a state-run school where children of the slum go, the paper argues that on one hand, the lives of children living in the informal settlements take the shape of illegality for the teachers and the bureaucracy that runs the education institutions, and on the other hand the parents and the children find school as a point that legitimizes their right to the city. While constitutional liberal forms of citizenship are one among many different claims that the poor make on the state, nature of education is such that it gets entangled in managing the exclusionary pressures shaping the city. Thus, with education being at the fulcrum in which the disciplinary and biopolitical characteristics of the state meet, an urban order emerges that is built through the categories of beauty, hygiene, efficiency, discipline and class assessments. In this urban order, the informal lives of margins get translated into illegal lives, and in this transition, the bourgeois gaze of the city capitalizes on the aesthetics that is sustained as an empty signifier. Thus the technical rationality is sustained by ‘how things appear’, and the aesthetics that governs the rationality becomes foundational through which schools discipline its children, and orders the larger population.
