According to Durkheim, “The major function of education is the transmission of society’s norms and values.” Discuss. (2020)
Émile Durkheim defined education in Education and Sociology (1922) as the methodical socialisation of the younger generation — the means by which society creates in the child the being it needs. Elaborated in Moral Education (first published 1925), the claim makes the school the successor to religion as the workshop of the collective conscience. It is a powerful thesis; its weakness is the assumption that a society has one set of norms to transmit.
What Durkheim argued
- Homogeneity is the condition of survival. Society can survive only if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity, and education fixes in the child from the beginning the essential similarities that collective life demands.
- Attachment to the group. The child must find in society “something real, alive and powerful”. The teaching of history does this work, linking the individual to a whole larger than himself.
- Discipline through impersonal rules. The school is society in miniature. Membership of the family rests on kinship and of the peer group on choice; only the school obliges the child to cooperate with those who are neither kin nor friends, under a fixed rule. Respecting school rules, Durkheim wrote, is “a first initiation into the austerity of duty”.
- Specialist skills. Beside general values the school transmits the specialised competences that organic solidarity requires — the necessary diversity for social cooperation.
Illustration
Modern states school in exactly this manner. India’s Article 51A makes it a fundamental duty to value the composite culture and to develop a scientific temper; the school assembly, the national anthem, and the civics and history syllabus are Durkheimian moral education under another name, as is NEP 2020‘s insistence that constitutional values be embedded in the curriculum.
The critiques
- Whose norms? Louis Althusser treated schooling as the leading ideological state apparatus, and Antonio Gramsci saw the classroom manufacturing consent to hegemony. What Durkheim calls society’s values is, on this reading, a class selection presented as everyone’s.
- Transmission is resisted, not absorbed. Paul Willis (Learning to Labour, 1977) found working-class “lads” constructing a counter-school culture that inverted the school’s values while still landing them in manual work.
- Modern schools may not integrate at all. David Hargreaves (1982) argued that examination-centred schooling cultivates individual competition rather than solidarity — the reverse of what Durkheim expected.
- Plural societies have no single culture. India constitutionalises this: Articles 29 and 30 protect minority cultural and educational rights. The 2025 conflict over NEP’s three-language formula, in which Tamil Nadu forwent about ₹2,152 crore of Samagra Shiksha funds rather than comply, shows “society’s norms” to be themselves contested.
- Transmission is uneven. The PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024, released in July 2025, found only around 54 per cent of Class 9 pupils reading with comprehension. A curriculum that is not learnt cannot socialise reliably.
Conclusion
Durkheim named the function correctly and described the mechanism precisely: no society reproduces itself without institutionalised moral instruction. His error was to treat culture as singular and consensual. Recast, the insight stands — education transmits a normative order, and the sociologically decisive questions are whose order, how contested, and with what success.