Schooling does not ensure upward mobility of all members of the society. Discuss with reference to class societies. (2018)
A class society justifies itself by the claim that position is won rather than inherited, and the school is the institution entrusted with making that claim true. Pitirim Sorokin (Social Mobility, 1927) called schools the principal “sieve” through which modern societies test and place individuals. Yet class societies remain open in form and remarkably closed in operation, and schooling is implicated in both halves of that fact.
The promise schooling is asked to keep
- Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore (“Some Principles of Stratification”, 1945) treated education as the mechanism that matches talent to functionally important positions, so that unequal rewards follow unequal ability.
- Human capital theory (Theodore W. Schultz, Gary S. Becker) restated this economically: schooling is an investment whose returns accrue to the individual who makes it.
- Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan (The American Occupational Structure, 1967) found education to be the main route by which sons escaped their fathers’ occupational rank.
Why the promise cannot be kept for all
- Cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu, with Jean-Claude Passeron (Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 1970), showed that the school presupposes a linguistic and cultural competence it never teaches, then rewards it as ability. Working-class children, foreigners in the institution’s own idiom, practise what he called self-elimination — they withdraw, and accept the verdict as their own.
- Correspondence. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (Schooling in Capitalist America, 1976) argued that the hidden curriculum reproduces workplace discipline, and that the myth of meritocracy is schooling’s real function: failure is individualised, so the loser blames himself rather than the structure.
- Resistance that reproduces. Paul Willis (Learning to Labour, 1977) found that his “lads” saw through the meritocratic promise — a genuine penetration of their real conditions — yet the counter-school culture they built delivered them to the factory floor. Not deception but agency produced the same destination.
- Credential inflation. Randall Collins (The Credential Society, 1979) showed that as certificates multiply they work as status currency rather than as measures of skill. Education is a positional good: when everyone climbs, nobody rises.
What class societies actually show
John H. Goldthorpe‘s Oxford Mobility Study (1972, published 1980) drew the decisive distinction. Absolute mobility rose in post-war Britain because the occupational structure itself changed, creating more professional room at the top; relative chances — social fluidity between classes — barely moved. Educational expansion relocated people without altering the odds.
India repeats the pattern. Sam Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin (2022), measuring “bottom-half mobility”, found that sons of parents in the poorest half of the educational distribution reached only the 37.7th percentile in the 1985-89 birth cohort, essentially unchanged across three decades of rapid growth. At the other end of the system, the Economic Survey 2024-25 reported that over 53 per cent of Indian graduates work below their qualification and barely 8 per cent in roles matching it — degrees without destinations.
Conclusion
Schooling redistributes life chances only where the class structure is itself opening, through new positions and curbs on inherited advantage. Where it is not, expansion converts a hereditary hierarchy into a certified one, which is more defensible but no more equal.