Education and Social change

Meaning and Classical Definitions of Education

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• The word education comes from the Latin educare — “to bring up, to lead out, to develop” — and in its simplest sense refers to the process of bringing up and developing an individual into a mature, functioning member of society.
• Plato held that the aim of education was to develop, in both body and soul, all the perfection and beauty of which the pupil is capable.
• Aristotle defined educating as developing man’s faculties — above all his mind — so that he becomes capable of contemplating truth, beauty and goodness.
• William Graham Sumner defined education as the attempt to transmit to the child the mores of the group: what conduct is approved and disapproved, how to behave in different situations, and what to believe and reject.
• Émile Durkheim gave the definition that has shaped the sociological study of education ever since: education is “the socialisation of the younger generation.”
  • He added that this is not spontaneous but imposed: it is “a continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing and acting which he could not have arrived at spontaneously.”
  • Francis J. Brown framed it in similar functional terms — education is the process that brings about changes in the behaviour of a society, and equips every individual to participate effectively in social life and contribute positively to its progress.
  • MacIver connected education to social change directly: change happens as a response to shifts in the social and non-social environment, and education contributes to it by first altering outlook and attitude, which in turn reshapes patterns of social relationship.

Education as Agent versus Instrument: A Historical Arc

• For most of human history, education worked to preserve a given way of life rather than to change it — teachers and institutions handed down a fixed pattern of belief and conduct suited to a static, unchanging society, making education primarily a means of social control.
• Modern education inverts the emphasis: it aims at imparting knowledge and analytical capacity rather than a fixed way of life, which is what allows it to function as an instrument of social change rather than only of continuity.
• This shift tracks a long secularisation of education across three broad phases.
  • In preliterate societies, education was informal and orally transmitted — siblings and adult kin passed on folkways and mores through observation and direct participation, alongside practical skills and techniques.
  • The medieval period institutionalised education, though its content still varied by civilisation: the Greek curriculum centred on literature, music and gymnastics (later adding mathematics and history), while in India the Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas formed the core content — in both cases restricted to a small minority.
  • The Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, together with the growth of science, commerce and industry, began the secular turn, though it was only in the nineteenth century that secular education became widely accepted — and secularisation went hand in hand with popularisation, as schooling stopped being the preserve of the few.
• Education had long been bound up with religion; its gradual separation into an independent, secular institution is itself one of the clearest instances of education being changed by, and then in turn accelerating, the development of science and technology in society.

Thinkers on the Aims and Functions of Education

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the object of education is to direct the child’s natural inclinations wisely rather than suppress them, and was an early advocate of popular (mass) education.
• Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi held that education should aim at the harmonious development of all human faculties, with the ultimate goal of improving the condition of the masses.
• John Dewey, the central figure of the progressive-education movement, insisted that education is not preparation for life but is the living of life itself.
• Auguste Comte wanted education to cultivate sympathy for, and understanding of, one’s fellow human beings.
• Herbert Spencer treated education as preparation for a well-rounded life in society.
• Lester F. Ward regarded education as a direct means of social progress.
• Sumner, beyond his definition of education above, wanted schooling to build “well-developed critical faculties” in the individual — enough to prevent uncritical adherence to tradition and enable rational, judgement-based action — though he stopped short of treating education as a cure-all for social ills.
• Franklin Giddings wanted education to build self-confidence and self-control, emancipate the individual from superstition and ignorance, and produce knowledgeable, realistic, enlightened citizens.
• Johann Amos Comenius argued that methods of instruction must match the child’s stage of mental development and that subject matter should be adapted to the child’s own interests.
• John Locke wrote that education should aim at mental discipline and should be secular rather than religious in character.
• Read together, these converge on a short list of functions: completing the process of socialisation, transmitting cultural heritage, reforming attitudes, conferring occupational standing, and instilling a norm of achievement through competition.

Perspectives on Education and Social Change

The debate over what education actually does splits cleanly into two traditions. Functionalists treat education as the great equaliser — the engine that sorts people by merit and thereby produces mobility. Conflict theorists treat it as the most effective machinery yet built for reproducing inequality across generations, precisely because it dresses inherited privilege up as individual merit.

Education as Equalizer: The Functionalist Account

• Durkheim gave the founding functionalist account, developed most fully in his lectures on moral education and on education and sociology.
  • Education transmits the collective conscience and attaches the child to society, producing the secular morality that a complex, differentiated society needs to hold together.
  • The school is “society in miniature” — the first setting in which a child learns to obey an impersonal rule rather than simply a person, which is training for life in an institutionally governed society.
  • It transmits two things at once: general values that supply the homogeneity every society needs to survive, and specialised skills that supply the diversity a complex division of labour needs to function.
  • Durkheim also introduced an important qualification to his own theory: he held that education essentially reflects rather than transforms society — it imitates and reproduces the social order rather than creating it, so that education can only be reformed once society itself is reformed. “It is actually a continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing and acting which he could not have arrived at spontaneously.” — Émile Durkheim
  • A standing objection to Durkheim’s account is that in a genuinely multicultural society there is no single, shared culture left to transmit — what schools actually transmit tends to be the culture of the dominant class, serving that class’s interests rather than society’s as a whole, and schools emphasise individual competition through examinations rather than the social solidarity Durkheim wanted them to build.
• Talcott Parsons made the school the crucial bridge between family and the wider society.
  • In the family, the child is judged by particularistic, ascriptive standards — evaluated as this specific child, on grounds like birth and relationship.
  • In school, for the first time, the child is judged by universalistic, achievement standards applied equally to everyone — the same standard a modern, impersonal society will use to judge him for the rest of his life.
  • Alongside religion and law, the school functions as a site of secondary socialisation that stabilises the adult personality system.
• Davis and Moore added the theory of role allocation: education sifts, sorts and grades individuals, matching talent to the positions society considers functionally most important, and in doing so legitimates the unequal rewards those positions carry.
• Human capital theory, developed by economists Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, restates the same claim in economic terms — education is an investment in the individual’s productive capacity, and its returns accrue both to that individual (higher lifetime earnings) and to the economy as a whole (aggregate growth).
• Karl Mannheim argued that sound education must train people to be consciously aware of their own social situation and able, after careful deliberation, to make their own choices — education for flexibility and adaptability, producing individuals whose general cultural level lets them adjust as economic and social conditions change.

Put together, the functionalist position is that education is a meritocratic mechanism which allocates people to social positions by ability and effort, and therefore promotes both mobility and equality of opportunity.

Education as Reproduction Machine: The Conflict Critique

Conflict theorists accept that education sorts people — and argue that what it actually sorts on is inherited class advantage, not raw ability, while dressing the outcome up as merit.

Bowles and Gintis: The Correspondence Principle

• Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), argued that the social relations inside a school mirror the social relations of the capitalist workplace — a correspondence that does the real work of preparing children for their eventual place in the labour force.
  • A hierarchy of authority in the classroom mirrors the hierarchy of authority on the shop floor.
  • The fragmentation of the curriculum into disconnected subjects mirrors the fragmentation of tasks under a minute division of labour.
  • Extrinsic rewards — grades — stand in for wages, teaching children to work for an external payoff rather than for the intrinsic satisfaction of the task itself.
  • The result is alienation from one’s own work and a habituation to competition rather than cooperation.
• This correspondence is carried by the hidden curriculum — not the stated syllabus, but the very structure and organisation of schooling, which produces obedience, punctuality and docility as a by-product without ever teaching them as subjects.
• Bowles and Gintis’s sharper claim is that manufacturing belief in a myth of meritocracy is arguably what schooling is really for: once a student’s failure gets pinned on their own measured lack of ability, the inequality that follows looks earned rather than imposed, and the person who loses out has only themselves to blame.
  • Their supporting evidence: differences in measured IQ account for only a modest share of the differences in adult earnings, while family class background accounts for considerably more — a gap between the story (ability decides outcomes) and the data (origin decides outcomes) that is exactly what makes it fair to call meritocracy a myth.
• Because schooling in a capitalist economy is geared to reproducing a compliant labour force, education is treated as subservient to the interests of those who control that workforce — the owners of capital — rather than as a neutral, general-purpose social good.

Bourdieu and Passeron: Cultural Capital, Habitus and Symbolic Violence

• Pierre Bourdieu, working with Jean-Claude Passeron in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture and The Inheritors, gives the deepest account of how schooling reproduces class advantage — and the one that repays the most careful attention.
• Cultural capital is the set of dispositions, language, tastes, confidence and familiarity with “legitimate” culture that a child absorbs from an educated, cultured family background.
  • The school does not actually teach this cultural capital — it presupposes it as a starting condition, and then rewards it as though it were individual talent or aptitude.
• The mechanism that transmits cultural capital across generations is habitus — a settled set of bodily manners, tastes and unconscious dispositions instilled by growing up in a given class position, so durable that it shapes how a person sits an interview or answers a teacher’s question long after any formal lesson is over.
  • Because the school’s own manners and expectations are drawn from the same upper-middle-class world that produced them, a child raised in that world experiences the classroom as an extension of home, while a child from a different class background has to consciously learn rules that others never had to think about at all.
• Bourdieu calls the school’s imposition of the dominant culture as though it were the only legitimate culture symbolic violence — a form of domination accepted as natural, even by those it disadvantages, precisely because it does not look like force.
  • The school’s institutional authority to impose this dominant culture, and to make that imposition seem neutral and natural, is what Bourdieu calls its pedagogic authority.
• The overall effect is a two-step conversion: the school first turns inherited cultural capital into certified educational capital (degrees, marks, credentials), and then that certified capital converts into occupational position — so an advantage a child never earned re-emerges, one generation later, looking exactly like individual merit.
  • The examination is where this conversion actually happens: it is the point at which an inherited head start gets stamped with the appearance of an objective, individually earned result.
• Working-class children, confronted again and again with a system in whose idiom they are not fluent, tend to eliminate themselves — drop out, track themselves into lower streams, opt out of ambition — well before any explicit barrier is placed in their way; Bourdieu calls this self-elimination, and it is this quiet, apparently voluntary consent that makes the whole reproduction process durable rather than requiring constant overt coercion.
• This differs from Durkheim’s account in a specific and important way: for Bourdieu, the school does not transmit the culture of society as a whole, as Durkheim believed — it transmits and legitimates the culture of the dominant class specifically, which is then read back as though it were simply “culture” in general.

Bernstein’s Language Codes

• Basil Bernstein located the mechanism of reproduction at the level of everyday speech itself, distinguishing two linguistic codes.
  • The restricted code is context-bound and particularistic — it assumes a great deal of shared, unstated understanding between speakers, and is common in working-class speech communities.
  • The elaborated code is context-independent, universalistic and explicit — it spells out meaning fully rather than relying on shared background, and is the code middle-class children typically arrive at school already speaking fluently.
• Because schools teach, test and reward almost entirely in the elaborated code, children who arrive already fluent in it hold a real advantage before a single lesson has been taught.
• Bernstein insisted, against a common misreading of his own work, that the restricted code is not linguistically deficient — it is simply differently valued by an institution built around the elaborated code’s own norms.

Willis: Learning to Labour and Partial Penetration

• Paul Willis, in his ethnography Learning to Labour (1977), complicates the reproduction story by showing working-class boys who are not passive dupes of the system at all.
• His “lads” see straight through the school’s promise that effort and merit will be rewarded with mobility — a genuine act of penetration into the real conditions of their own class position.
• Yet the counter-school culture they build in response — one that prizes manual work, an aggressive masculinity, and “having a laff” at the school’s expense — is exactly what channels them straight onto the factory floor, since it leads them to reject the qualifications that might have offered an alternative path.
• Willis calls this outcome partial penetration: the lads are not fooled by the meritocratic myth, and yet the very culture of resistance they construct to reject it ends up reproducing their own class subordination anyway.

The Radical Wing: Illich, Freire and Gramsci

• Ivan Illich, in Deschooling Society (1971), argued that schooling teaches passive consumption rather than active learning, and confuses the process of attending an institution with the substance of being educated — a critique radical enough that his proposed remedy is not reforming the school but abolishing it as an institution.
• Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), attacked the “banking model” of education, in which the teacher simply deposits ready-made knowledge into a passive student who is expected only to receive, store and reproduce it.
  • His alternative is problem-posing, dialogic education, in which teacher and student jointly investigate reality rather than one transmitting fixed content to the other.
  • The goal of this dialogue is conscientização (“conscientisation”) — a critical awareness of one’s own social conditions that turns education from an instrument of reproduction into an instrument of liberation.
• Antonio Gramsci held that the possibility of social change depends heavily on the education of the working class, since political revolutions are always preceded by the creation of a new cultural climate — which is why he insisted so strongly on the need to educate workers rather than treat culture as secondary to organisation.
  • He described people in capitalist society as carrying a kind of dual consciousness: partly indoctrinated, through the state, the education system and religion, into accepting the capitalist order as legitimate, but also shaped by a daily lived experience of exploitation that contradicts that indoctrination — which is why the ruling ideology is never fully or permanently secure.
  • This is the seed of his later concept of hegemony: dominance secured mainly by manufacturing consent and common sense, rather than by force — and education is one of the principal sites where that consent is either manufactured or, potentially, unsettled.

Credentialism and Other Conflict Voices

• Randall Collins, in The Credential Society (1979), argued that as certificates proliferate they function as currency in a status competition between groups rather than as accurate measures of skill — a job’s credential requirement inflates even when the actual content of the job has not changed at all.
  • This is why an economy can see steadily rising average years of education without a matching rise in social mobility: more schooling, chasing the same fixed number of desirable positions, only pushes up the credential threshold rather than opening genuinely new room at the top.
• Louis Althusser described education as an Ideological State Apparatus — an institution that, unlike the repressive apparatus of police and courts, secures compliance by shaping consciousness itself, turning the individual into a willing carrier of the dominant ideology’s own version of mass culture.
• Jürgen Habermas argued that formal education can produce a kind of “unhappy consciousness” in the educated individual, aware enough to feel the gap between social ideals and social reality but not empowered to close it.
• Some critics go further and argue that the more educated a person becomes, within a system built around narrow technical specialisation, the more they can find themselves cut off from genuine participation in the wider public sphere rather than better equipped for it.

The Feminist Critique: Schooling and Gender

• Feminist sociologists Angela McRobbie and Sue Lee examined schooling as a site that reproduces feminine roles rather than a neutral or purely meritocratic sorting mechanism — subtly steering girls toward domesticity-compatible subjects, behaviours and expectations, and thereby perpetuating gender stereotyping across generations even where formal access to education is equal.

Functionalist and conflict readings of education, side by side:

Key terms at a glance:

• Cultural capital — Bourdieu’s term for the dispositions, language, taste and cultural familiarity a family transmits, which schools presuppose and then reward as though it were ability.
• Correspondence principle — Bowles and Gintis’s claim that the social relations of schooling mirror those of the capitalist workplace, producing a compliant future workforce.
• Hidden curriculum — the values, habits and hierarchies transmitted through the organisation and structure of schooling, rather than through its stated content.
• Symbolic violence — Bourdieu’s term for the imposition of the dominant culture as the sole legitimate culture, accepted as natural even by those it disadvantages.
• Habitus — the durable, class-shaped dispositions and ways of seeing that make some children “at home” in school and others foreigners in it.
• Credentialism — Collins’s term for the inflation of certificate requirements as a form of status competition, without a matching change in the actual skill a job requires.
• Conscientização — Freire’s term for the critical awareness of one’s own social conditions developed through dialogic education.
• Hegemony — Gramsci’s term for domination secured through manufactured consent and common sense rather than through coercion alone.

Synthesis: Reproduction and Mobility in Tension

• Education is neither purely reproductive nor purely transformative — it is better understood as the actual site where the two logics contest each other, with the outcome varying by context rather than settled once and for all.
• The case for education as transformation is real: mass literacy and mass schooling have historically enabled genuine upward mobility, drawn women into public life at a scale unimaginable in earlier eras, and broken up older, purely ascriptive monopolies on knowledge held by narrow elites.
• The case for education as reproduction is equally real and operates simultaneously: differentiated quality between elite and mass institutions, the hidden curriculum, credential inflation, and the conversion of inherited cultural capital into certified merit all work together to let the underlying social hierarchy survive even rapid educational expansion.
• The practical upshot is worth stating plainly: simply enrolling more people does not, by itself, touch the sorting logic that decides who ends up where. Unless expansion is paired with a genuine redistribution of resources — better-funded schools for the poor, not just more schools — a bigger education system can end up reproducing the same hierarchy at a larger scale rather than dismantling it.

Education and Social Change in India: A Historical and Contemporary Trajectory

Kamat’s Four Positions and Three-Stage Periodisation

• A.R. Kamat identified four broad positions on how education and social change relate to one another.
  • Education exists for its own sake and has no necessary relationship to social change at all.
  • Education is wholly determined by social factors and can therefore only follow social change, never lead it.
  • Education is an autonomous, or at least relatively autonomous, factor that can and does actively induce social change.
  • Educational change and social change must occur simultaneously, each conditioning the other.
• Kamat went on to periodise education’s actual role in India into three stages.
  • The early British period (up to the end of the nineteenth century) established a colonial socio-economic and political structure, but the same colonial education also played a liberating role by breaking down older feudal norms and values, while simultaneously sowing the seeds of a new bourgeois, nationalist consciousness.
    • This liberating influence worked in two directions at once: a critical scrutiny of indigenous social systems and culture that produced reform and protest movements such as the Satya Shodhak Samaj, and a parallel process of self-discovery that fed directly into the anti-imperialist movement for national liberation.
  • The interwar period gave education a genuinely mass character for the first time, as it percolated down from the upper castes and urban upper strata to the middle castes and middle strata of society.
    • This carried the process of national awakening further, into the urban working class and the rural peasantry, considerably strengthening both the freedom movement and the wider movement for social change.
    • It also generated its own contradictions — large-scale unemployment among the newly educated, on the one hand, and a militant, politically engaged student and youth movement, on the other, sharpening the underlying contradiction between colonial rule and Indian society.
  • The post-independence period, up to the mid-1960s, continued this dual process of social and political awakening, with conformity and liberation operating together, even as the contradiction between the education system and the wider socio-economic structure deepened further.

Olive Banks and the Difficulty of Isolating Education’s Effect

• Olive Banks cautioned that the precise relationship between the education system and social or economic change is extremely complex, and that firm, non-misleading conclusions are almost impossible to draw with confidence.
• This is because the education system is itself embedded in, and changing along with, the very society it is supposedly acting upon — so the real analytical problem is the inter-relationship between educational institutions and the rest of society, not a simple one-way causal arrow from one to the other.
• This inter-dependence is exactly what makes it so difficult to use education as a lever for deliberate, planned social change — educational reform is not, on this view, a universal panacea, though that does not diminish its genuine importance.

Education and Privilege: Bhattacharya’s Three Modalities

• Sociologist Bhattacharya, examining how previously disprivileged groups relate to institutionalised education in India, identified three distinct modalities.
  • Education can reproduce and perpetuate the existing gap between the privileged and the disprivileged, preserving the status quo.
  • Education can enable upward mobility for a section of the disprivileged, without disturbing the underlying system of privilege as such — co-opting the upwardly mobile into an otherwise unchanged structure.
  • Education can play an adversarial or even subversive role, directly challenging the system of privilege and inequality itself rather than merely helping individuals escape it.
• Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan captured why education has become so central to Indian social change specifically, arguing that functions once performed by the family and by religious, social and political institutions in simpler societies now have to be performed by educational institutions instead. “Education is an agent for social change; what in simple societies was done by the family, the religious, social and political institutions has to be done by the educational institutions today.” — Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Grassroots Innovation: The Barefoot College, Tilonia

• The Barefoot College at Tilonia, Rajasthan, offers a concrete, non-elite model of education-driven change, set up in 1972 as the Social Work and Research Centre by a group of university students working under Gandhian principles, led by Bunker Roy.
• Rather than relying on credentialed professionals from the formal education system, the college works by identifying and building on the villagers’ own existing skills, knowledge and practical experience — using this to meet basic needs like drinking water, health care, employment, fuel and schooling.
• Its “barefoot” technologists have solar-electrified thousands of homes across several Indian states, installed hand pumps in the Himalayas, and built piped drinking-water systems, while its barefoot educators run more than a hundred night schools serving thousands of children who would otherwise be excluded from formal schooling.
• The model resonates with Illich’s suspicion of institutionalised, credential-based schooling and with Freire’s insistence on starting from people’s own lived knowledge, while remaining grounded in a specifically Indian rural-development context.

Contemporary Anchors: NEP 2020 and the Persistence of Educational Inequality

• The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 frames itself explicitly around equity and social mobility — restructuring school stages, expanding vocational and multidisciplinary options, and setting an ambitious target for the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education, alongside dedicated provisions such as gender-inclusion funding and special attention to socio-economically disadvantaged regions and groups.
• Assessments of its implementation point to a gap between this equity ambition and delivery on the ground.
  • The policy calls for raising public spending on education to a substantially higher share of GDP than India currently spends, and the persistence of that funding gap constrains exactly the equity-focused provisions the policy is built around.
  • Rollout of the restructured school stages and curricular framework has been uneven across states, with training and capacity bottlenecks slowing implementation more in resource-poor states than in better-resourced ones.
  • Linking higher-education fees more closely to institutional quality risks treating higher education as more of a positional, status good than a public good, which could sharpen rather than soften existing access gaps unless matched by real scholarship and inclusion safeguards.
  • Awareness of the policy’s own scholarship and inclusion measures remains patchy among lower-income households, which blunts the equalising effect those measures are designed to have.
• Recent ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) survey data illustrate the reproduction argument with current evidence rather than an abstract claim: enrolment among rural children is now near-universal, yet foundational learning has remained largely stagnant — roughly half of Std V children still cannot read a Std II-level text or reliably perform basic division, showing that access and actual learning outcomes have decoupled from one another.
  • The same data show a sharpening digital divide within schooling itself: government schools lag well behind private unaided schools in the availability of computers for teaching, and rural children show a persistent gender gap in smartphone ownership and digital-safety skills — new terrain on which older inequalities of caste, class and gender are being reproduced.
• Higher-education enrolment data from the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) show real, sustained gains for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students and for women over the past decade, yet the Gross Enrolment Ratio for SC and ST students continues to trail the general-category average, and representation remains skewed away from the more prestigious technical and professional streams — confirming that access has genuinely widened even as a distinct, quality-based and stream-based form of exclusion persists within an expanded system.