Distinguish between the process of formal education and socialization. Examine effectivity in formal education as an instrument of social change. (2001)
For Émile Durkheim, education is one province of socialisation; formal education is the province a society has deliberately institutionalised. The distinction matters because only the deliberate part can be legislated and funded as a policy instrument — and that is precisely what limits its reach.
Criteria-wise distinction
| Criterion | Formal education | Socialisation |
|---|---|---|
| Agency | School, college — a specialised institution | Family, peers, neighbourhood, religion, media, workplace |
| Intent | Planned, curricular, examined | Largely unintended and incidental |
| Duration | Age-bound and stage-wise | Lifelong, infancy to old age |
| Content | Codified knowledge and skills | Norms, values, language, gesture, emotion |
| Method | Instruction, testing, certification | Imitation, play, reward and sanction |
| Personnel | Trained, salaried, impersonal teachers | Significant others in affective relationships |
| Relationship | Universalistic, specific, achievement-based | Particularistic, diffuse, often ascriptive |
| Outcome | Certificate and measurable attainment | An internalised self — George Herbert Mead‘s generalized other |
The two are not sealed off. Philip W. Jackson (Life in Classrooms, 1968) named the hidden curriculum — punctuality, queuing, deference, competition — showing that the school socialises far more than it consciously teaches. Conversely, family and media now instruct deliberately, so the boundary is one of degree.
How far formal education changes society
- It redistributes opportunity. By judging on universalistic criteria it detaches standing from birth. B. R. Ambedkar made schooling the first term of “educate, agitate, organise”, and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 turned it into a justiciable right.
- It builds counter-elites and new vocabularies — of rights, citizenship and scientific temper — and, through women’s schooling, alters age at marriage, fertility and household authority.
- Kerala shows the mechanism at scale: early, near-universal schooling converted modest incomes into high life expectancy and low mortality.
Why its effectivity is limited
- Reproduction. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (Reproduction, 1970) showed schools rewarding inherited cultural capital as though it were natural ability, so expansion can legitimise inequality rather than reduce it.
- Socialisation outruns the school. Values learned at home are not dislodged by a syllabus. Successive CSDS youth studies record support for inter-caste marriage rising from 31 per cent in 2007 to 55 per cent in 2016, while only about 4 per cent of couples had actually married outside caste — attitude changing far ahead of practice.
- Quality caps the effect. The PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024 found only about 28-31 per cent of Class 9 pupils able to apply percentages or fractions, and ASER 2023 found a quarter of 14-18-year-olds unable to read a Class 2 text fluently.
- Credential inflation. The ILO’s India Employment Report 2024 records unemployment highest among educated youth — schooling that does not lead to work changes aspirations faster than life-chances, breeding frustration rather than mobility.
Conclusion
Formal education is a strong instrument for altering the distribution of opportunity and a weak one for altering values, because the informal socialisation surrounding it continues undisturbed. It becomes genuinely transformative only alongside change in the family, the labour market and the political order — an accelerator of change already under way rather than its author.