“Instead of promoting equality in society, the present system of education itself has contributed to increased socio-economic disparities.” Comment. (2022)
The statement claims more than the familiar complaint that education has failed to equalise: it says the system has become a producer of disparity. So read, the proposition is largely defensible for India — though the fault lies in a stratified education system, not in education as such.
The position the statement denies
Émile Durkheim (Education and Sociology) treated education as transmitting the collective conscience and the competences an organically solidary society needs. Talcott Parsons made the school the bridge from family to society, the first arena where the child is judged by universalistic, achievement criteria rather than ascriptive ones. Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore added role allocation: schooling sifts talent and legitimates unequal reward.
India’s record gives this real support. Literacy rose from 18.3 per cent (1951) to 74.04 per cent (Census 2011). AISHE 2023-24 records 4.50 crore in higher education, with Scheduled Caste enrolment up 51.4 per cent and Scheduled Tribe enrolment up 75.7 per cent since 2014-15. From Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule’s schools of 1848 to B. R. Ambedkar’s “educate, agitate, organise”, schooling has been the chief instrument of assertion for excluded groups.
Why the statement nevertheless holds
- Pierre Bourdieu, with Jean-Claude Passeron (Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture), shows the school does not teach cultural capital; it presupposes it and rewards it as talent. The examination launders inherited advantage into certified merit — symbolic violence — and those it fails consent to their own self-elimination.
- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (Schooling in Capitalist America, 1976) locate the real work in the correspondence principle and the hidden curriculum; the myth of meritocracy makes the loser blame himself.
- Basil Bernstein finds the mechanism in speech: the school works wholly in the elaborated code that privileged children arrive already speaking.
- Randall Collins’s credentialism explains how more education coexists with no more mobility.
The Indian mechanism: a tracked system
- The CMS Education Survey 2025 (National Statistical Office, 80th round) finds 55.9 per cent of students in government schools — 66 per cent rural, only 30.1 per cent urban — against 31.9 per cent private unaided. Annual household spending per student is Rs 24,788 for an urban boy and Rs 7,660 for a rural girl, and 27 per cent take private coaching.
- UDISE+ 2024-25 shows government schools losing 5.9 lakh students in one year while private unaided schools gained 5.8 lakh — exit by those who can pay.
- ASER 2024 finds only 30.7 per cent of rural Class 5 children able to divide; AISHE 2023-24 puts Scheduled Caste gross enrolment at 27.8 and Scheduled Tribe at 22.8 against 30.0 overall.
- The digital layer repeats the older one: an Oxfam India study (2022) found computers in 8 per cent of general-category households, 2 per cent of Scheduled Caste and under 1 per cent of Scheduled Tribe homes.
Krishna Kumar shows curriculum and classroom themselves teaching hierarchy; Satish Deshpande argues that “merit” naturalises an upper-caste inheritance.
Conclusion
The indictment holds against this system, not against education. André Béteille insisted that equality of opportunity is hollow where starting conditions differ. The common school proposed by the Education Commission (1964-66) was never built, and J. P. Naik’s “elusive triangle” of equality, quality and quantity remains unresolved: expansion without redistribution has widened the gap it promised to close.