Education is often viewed as an agency of social change. However in reality it could also reinforce inequalities and conservatism. Discuss. (2014)
Émile Durkheim defined education as the influence exercised by adult generations on those not yet ready for social life — a definition in which the institution’s first duty is transmission, not transformation. The tension the question names is therefore built into the institution: the same apparatus that equips a society to change is the one that hands on what it wishes to conserve.
Education as an agency of change
- Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) treated education as the chief carrier of modernisation in India, spreading rational-secular criteria of judgement into domains earlier settled by ritual status.
- Schooling converts subjects into claimants. Literacy underwrites the use of rights to information, work and food; it is the practical medium of entitlement.
- Its sharpest demographic effect is through women. Female schooling is the strongest single correlate of later marriage, lower fertility and improved child survival, which is why NEP 2020 created a Gender Inclusion Fund and proposed Special Education Zones for socio-economically disadvantaged groups.
- Expansion is real and recent: enrolment of three-year-olds in pre-primary education rose from 68.1 per cent in 2018 to 77.4 per cent in 2024, drawing the poorest children into institutional learning years earlier than before.
How the same institution reinforces inequality
- Change is delivered through a differentiated system, and differentiation is where advantage survives. Government schools’ share of rural enrolment fell from 72.9 per cent in 2022 to 66.8 per cent in 2024, as households able to pay exited into fee-charging schools and left a residual public system behind.
- Provision itself is unequal: UDISE+ for 2023-24 recorded 1,10,971 single-teacher schools serving nearly 40 lakh children — schools that exist on paper as the equal of any other.
- Pierre Bourdieu supplies the mechanism: the school rewards as talent the linguistic and cultural competence that only some homes transmit, so expansion enlarges the pool of candidates without disturbing the ranking.
How it reinforces conservatism
- Krishna Kumar (Political Agenda of Education, 1991) showed that the Indian classroom teaches obedience and hierarchy through its routine — the text as authority, memorisation as method, the teacher as unquestioned source — irrespective of the syllabus’s stated content. Recurring conflicts over textbook revision confirm that education is a site of ideological contest, not a neutral instrument.
- Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968) called instruction that deposits facts into passive learners banking education, which domesticates rather than liberates; Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1971) added that schooling chiefly teaches dependence on institutions and confuses process with substance.
- Everyday practice carries the same conservatism. Studies of the mid-day meal have repeatedly documented caste in seating, serving and the appointment of cooks, so the child learns the ritual order inside the institution meant to dissolve it. A gendered hidden curriculum works similarly through subject streaming and textbook imagery.
Conclusion
Education redistributes persons within a structure while transmitting the legitimacy of that structure. Which face dominates is not a property of schooling but a political question — of who writes the curriculum, and whether the state provides one school system or several.