Education and Social Change in India

Education as an Agent of Social Change

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• Education is the process of facilitating the acquisition of knowledge, skill, values, beliefs, and habits — but its sociological importance goes beyond transmission alone.
  • Education does not merely respond to social change, it actively initiates it, inculcating in the younger generation whatever changes a society considers desirable for its own rebuilding.
  • It also cultivates the intellectual and emotional readiness a population needs to actually deal with the challenges that change brings.
• Education is, in this sense, one of the primary instruments of modernisation.
  • Modern values in the social, economic, and political spheres — equality, liberty, scientific temper, humanism, and a disposition against blind faith — have to be instilled in people’s minds for modernisation to take hold, and education is the institution best placed to perform this task.

Education in Traditional and Colonial India

• In ancient India, education was first provided informally, through the family, the kin group, and society as a whole, via participation in daily life.
  • As needs grew more complex, a specialised occupational group of teachers emerged, with Brahmans acting as formal teachers and repositories of knowledge.
  • Teaching centred on individual scholars in Gurukulas and Vidyalayas, emphasising life over rote instruction — but access to this system remained confined to a small section of the population at the upper layers of the Varna hierarchy.
• Modern education appeared in India only with the establishment of British rule.
  • The British initially supported traditional schools, but by the mid-nineteenth century, colonial policy shifted decisively toward introducing European literature and science, with English as the medium of instruction in higher learning.
  • This policy concentrated almost entirely on the education of the upper and middle classes; primary education was left to languish — by one 1881–82 estimate, only 1 in 10 boys and 1 in 250 girls aged 5 to 12 attended school, and roughly 90% of the population remained illiterate even in the early twentieth century.

Limitations of Colonial Educational Policy

• Priority was given to higher education over primary education, with enrolment in colleges and universities growing faster than enrolment in schools.
• Modernisation through education remained confined to educated elite groups, ordinarily drawn from the upper castes, and barely touched the mass of the population.
• Even so, the system had some enduring positive legacies: it gave Indian education a fundamentally different, liberal and modern orientation, introduced new branches of learning such as science, technology, and medicine, and established the professional institutional structure — primary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities — that continued to organise Indian education after Independence.

The Post-Independence Expansion of Education

• After Independence, education was recognised as a vital aspect of the modernisation process, and a comprehensive constitutional and policy framework was developed to expand it, with successive Five Year Plans launching programmes of educational development.
• At Independence, only about 14% of the population was literate, only one child in three was enrolled in primary school, and low enrolment and literacy were compounded by sharp regional and gender disparities.

The Growth of Literacy

• Literacy rose from 18.3% in the 1951 Census to 52.2% in 1991, 65.38% in the 2001 Census (male 75.85%, female 54.16%), and 74% in the 2011 Census — with female literacy growing faster than male literacy across this entire period, narrowing but not closing the gender gap.
• Two factors are usually credited for this growth: a government-sponsored, decentralised national literacy campaign with improved local accountability, and the increasing involvement of NGOs, which made literacy work more flexible and locally responsive.
• The most recent PLFS 2023–24 data put India’s overall literacy rate (age 7+) at 80.9%, with the urban–rural gap still substantial (88.9% urban vs. 77.5% rural) and the gender gap still at 12.6 percentage points (male 87.2% vs. female 74.6%).
• India has not had a fresh decennial Census since 2011 — the 2027 Census (house-listing from April 2026, population enumeration from March 2027) will be the first time since Independence that a full census cycle has been missed, meaning the true, ground-level literacy picture has had to be inferred from survey data like the PLFS for an unusually long stretch.

Universalisation of Elementary Education

• Universalisation of Elementary Education (UEE) was adopted as a national goal, built around three components: universal access, universal retention, and universal achievement.
• Enrolment at the primary stage rose from 42.6% in 1950–51 to 94.9% by 1999–2000, alongside a corresponding expansion of primary and upper-primary schools from 2.23 lakh to 8.39 lakh over the same period.
• The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), launched to pursue universal elementary education in mission mode, set out to bring all children aged 6–14 into school, complete five years of primary schooling, and complete eight years of schooling within a defined timeline.
• Despite this expansion, actual progress fell short of the National Policy on Education’s goal of free and compulsory education for all children up to age 14 — a target that took the subsequent Right to Education Act to legally guarantee, and that remains only partially realised in outcome terms even today.

Expansion of Secondary and Higher Education

• Secondary and senior secondary institutions expanded from a modest post-Independence base to over a lakh institutions by the late 1990s, enrolling tens of millions of students, with vocationalisation of secondary education formally introduced from 1998.
• Higher education expanded even more dramatically — from just 18 universities at Independence to several hundred, alongside a similarly steep rise in colleges and in technical and professional institutions (engineering, medical, management, and teacher-education colleges).
• Special emphasis has also been placed on educating women, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes, treating the girl child as a specific target group on the understanding that women’s empowerment through education is a precondition for their fuller participation in development.

Social Change Brought About by the Spread of Education

• The transition from “class education” (education for the few) to “mass education” (education for all) has widened entry into the educational system beyond anything the colonial system allowed.
• Groups and communities historically deprived of access to education have progressively joined the national mainstream of development.
• Education has disseminated universal values such as equality and humanism, and transmitted a scientific worldview — arguably its single most important contribution to transforming public outlook and attitude.
• The growth of female literacy and education has radically transformed women’s status within and outside the family, expanding their economic contribution and opening occupational spheres that were once closed to them.
• The expansion of education has increased mobility among Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, though the overall picture is mixed — their presence in higher education remains comparatively low, and upper castes continue to dominate most areas of higher education, even as literacy and school enrolment among these groups has genuinely improved.
• Rising aspiration among the deprived and downtrodden is itself a form of social change, and it places a fresh responsibility on the education system to design for talents and needs different from those of the upper and middle classes it originally served.
• Studies suggest that mobility tied to education mostly operates at the individual and family level in the socio-cultural domain — not always producing large-scale change in the structure of stratification, but gradually spreading outward from the individual to the group.
• The steady increase in caste-free occupations is substantially a result of educational progress, since education plays a major role in determining both the occupation a person can access and, through it, their income level.

Ambedkar on Education and Social Change

• B.R. Ambedkar believed education would contribute decisively to the improvement of the condition of untouchables, repeatedly exhorting his followers to pursue excellence in knowledge as a liberating force.
• He held that education makes a person enlightened, gives them self-respect, and enables a materially better life — and identified the denial of education as one of the central mechanisms of untouchables’ historical degradation.
• Ambedkar criticised British colonial policy for failing to adequately encourage education among the lower castes, arguing that education under British rule remained substantially an upper-caste monopoly.
• He mobilised the lower castes and untouchables directly, funding centres of learning, and as a Labour Member on the Governor-General’s Executive Council, was instrumental in extending scholarships for both liberal and technical education abroad to untouchables.
• He was particularly opposed to education conducted under religious auspices, warning that only secular education could instil the values of liberty and equality in students.

Contemporary Reforms: NEP 2020 and the Foundational Learning Push

NEP 2020: Implementation Status

• The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 completed six years of implementation in 2026, and school-level curricular reform has, on the whole, moved ahead of higher-education regulatory reform.
• The 5+3+3+4 curricular and pedagogical structure has been substantially rolled out across CBSE and state boards for the 2025–26 academic year, alongside NCERT’s revised, competency-based textbooks for Grades 7, 9, and 11.
• Digital initiatives such as NDEAR and expanded smart classrooms, and platforms like DIKSHA and SWAYAM, are being scaled toward covering roughly half of government schools and tens of millions of students.
• Mandatory vocational training across secondary schools remains a target for 2027–28, not yet achieved.
• Higher-education regulatory restructuring is significantly behind schedule — the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) Bill, meant to replace the UGC, AICTE, and other separate regulators with a single body, was introduced in 2024 but lapsed without enactment, leaving the older fragmented regulatory structure intact.

The Foundational Learning Crisis: Evidence from ASER

• The ASER 2024 survey, covering roughly 6.5 lakh children across 605 rural districts, found real but still inadequate improvement in foundational learning: the share of Class 3 government-school children able to read a Class 2-level text rose from 16.3% in 2022 to 23.4% in 2024, the highest recorded since ASER began in 2005 — yet 76.6% of Class 3 children still cannot read at that basic level.
• Arithmetic outcomes show a similar pattern: the share of Class 3 children able to do subtraction rose from 28.1% (2018) to 33.7% (2024), while roughly two-thirds of Class 3 and 70% of Class 5 children still cannot perform simple arithmetic.
• Regional variation is stark: Kerala leads the country, with over 64% of rural Class 5 students able to read a Class 2-level text, attributed to strong parental involvement and vernacular-medium instruction, while Uttar Pradesh recorded the sharpest gains of any large state (a 15-point rise in reading levels among government-school students between 2018 and 2024) — evidence that the “social change through education” link remains real, but highly uneven across regions.

Critique: The Limits of Education as an Instrument of Change

• Sociologists such as A.R. Desai, S.C. Dube, M.S. Gore, K. Ahmad, and A.B. Shah have all questioned how far education actually functions as an instrument of social reconstruction, once the initial post-Independence gains are set aside.
• K. Ahmad distinguishes between two levels of change: formal education can play a genuine role in ideational change — transforming knowledge, attitudes, and values — but its effectiveness in producing structural change is severely limited, because existing educational practices remain linked to vested interests that benefit from the status quo.
• A.R. Desai goes further, arguing that education in independent India has not been purposively geared toward the changes it was meant to achieve; he points to the continuing failure of education to uplift the status of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, women, and minorities, and to the persistent unemployment and under-employment of educated youth, as evidence that policy, funding, and financing have not matched the stated goal of social mobility and equality.
• M.S. Gore locates the problem more specifically in content and method — real improvement in education’s developmental effectiveness requires change not just in what is taught, but in the environment in which it is conducted and in the conviction and commitment of the teachers and administrators responsible for delivering it.
• Jean Dreze identifies caste disabilities, gendered patterns of parenting, and poverty as persistent impediments to equitable access — and argues that by impeding equitable access in this way, education can end up exacerbating inequality and strengthening the position of already-privileged elites rather than levelling the field.
• Coomaraswamy frames education’s contribution differently again, arguing that education is required specifically to build religious tolerance in a plural society — a dimension often missed when education’s role is discussed only in economic-mobility terms.
• An empirical NCERT study across eight states, using an adaptation of Alex Inkles’s modernisation scale to measure the attitudes, aspirations, and outlook of school and college students and teachers, found only a low effect of education on modernisation — students continued to display traditional attitudes on matters such as family life even after years of formal schooling.
• Yogendra Singh’s study of Rajasthan University teachers examined the relationship between teachers’ own aspiration, commitment, morale, and authoritarianism and their capacity to act as agents of modernisation for their students, finding a significant relationship between the two — in other words, teachers cannot transmit modern values they do not themselves hold.
• The Education Commission’s report, Education and National Development, captured the underlying tension well: “Education cannot be considered in isolation or planned in a vacuum. It has to be used as a powerful instrument of social, economic and political change.”