Can education be considered as an agent of social change? In what manner can it establish a new social order? (1985)
The question has two parts, and the second is the harder one. That education accompanies social change is uncontroversial; whether it can found a different social order is a claim about pedagogy, curriculum and access, not about enrolment numbers. The thinkers who answered yes — Jyotirao Phule, B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, Paulo Freire — all argued that education transforms only when its content and control are themselves transformed.
Education as an agent of change
- Émile Durkheim saw education as the socialisation of the young, but the same institution also dissolves what it transmits: by making knowledge public and status winnable, it converts ascriptive societies into competitive ones.
- M. N. Srinivas identified English education as the chief channel of Westernisation, creating a criterion of standing independent of ritual rank.
- Max Weber‘s rationalisation works through schooling: a secular, scientific outlook displaces magical explanation and inherited authority.
- The Indian record is real: literacy stood at 80.9 per cent in 2023-24, and higher-education enrolment of Scheduled Castes has reached 69.72 lakh and of Scheduled Tribes 28.83 lakh, growing by 51 per cent and 76 per cent respectively over a decade — an influx of first-generation learners.
How education could constitute a new social order
- Redistributing the means of knowledge. Phule (Gulamgiri, 1873) opened schools for Shudras and girls from 1848 because he saw monopoly over learning as the foundation of the caste order. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936) treated education as the first term in “educate, agitate, organise” — not a reward for emancipation but its precondition.
- Changing the pedagogy. Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968) distinguished banking education, which deposits facts in passive learners and domesticates them, from problem-posing education, which produces conscientização — critical consciousness that treats the social order as changeable.
- Changing the school’s form. Dewey (Democracy and Education, 1916) made the classroom an “embryonic community” where democratic habits are practised rather than preached, so the new order is rehearsed before it is built.
- Changing entitlement. Article 21A and the Right to Education Act, 2009 converted schooling from charity into a right. Its Section 12(1)(c), reserving a quarter of private-school seats for disadvantaged children, is the boldest attempt at a common school; in 2026 the Supreme Court directed private schools to admit state-allotted children without demur, though a 2025 audit found fill rates as low as 27.5 per cent in some states.
- Changing the design. The National Education Policy, 2020 sets a higher-education enrolment ratio of 50 per cent by 2035, mother-tongue medium in early grades and vocational exposure within general education — a blueprint for a less segregated system.
Why education alone cannot do it
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron showed schools converting cultural capital into certified merit; Louis Althusser called the school the dominant ideological state apparatus; Krishna Kumar (Political Agenda of Education, 1991) showed curricula carrying political projects. A system segmented between under-resourced state schools and fee-charging private ones reproduces the order it claims to remake.
Conclusion
Education can be an agent of a new social order, but only as a co-agent. Ambedkar’s own conclusion holds: without social and economic democracy, political and educational forms remain a top dressing on unequal soil.