“Education is one of the basic activities for the continued existence and development of a society.” Elaborate this statement. (2006)
Every society is mortal in its members and continuous in its culture; education is the bridge between the two. Émile Durkheim called it the methodical socialisation of the younger generation, and Talcott Parsons placed it in the pattern-maintenance and integration cells of his AGIL scheme — functional prerequisites without which no social system persists. The statement therefore has two halves, survival and development, and education discharges them unequally.
Education and continued existence
- Cultural transmission. Knowledge, language and technique are social, not biological, inheritance. Without deliberate instruction each generation would begin again from nothing; schooling converts accumulated culture into a transmissible curriculum.
- Solidarity and social control. By internalising rules the school makes order rest on conscience rather than coercion — Durkheim’s “first initiation into the austerity of duty” — and produces the homogeneity that collective life requires.
- Differentiation and role allocation. Parsons saw the school selecting and allocating human resources to the adult role-structure through universalistic tests, so that a complex division of labour can be staffed at all. Durkheim added that industrial society, unlike a peasant one, cannot leave occupational skill to be passed from parent to child.
Education and development
- Human capital. Theodore W. Schultz (“Investment in Human Capital”, 1961) established that schooling raises productivity as surely as physical investment does.
- Capability. Amartya Sen treats education not as an input but as a constitutive freedom, enlarging what people can be and do, and underwriting the social citizenship that T. H. Marshall (Citizenship and Social Class, 1950) described.
- Demographic and health effects. Maternal schooling remains the most consistent correlate of later marriage, lower fertility and child survival — development running through the household rather than the firm.
The latent side
Robert K. Merton‘s distinction is indispensable here. The manifest functions are literacy, skills and certification. The latent ones include child-minding that releases adults for paid work, the age-segregation that generates a distinct youth culture, friendship and marriage markets, and the postponement of labour-market entry. Some latent effects are dysfunctional: Randall Collins (The Credential Society, 1979) argued that degrees ration access to jobs more than they raise competence, so expansion can inflate credentials without adding capability.
The Indian record
Survival is largely secured. NIPUN Bharat has reached roughly 4.2 crore children across 8.9 lakh schools, and primary gross enrolment stood near 97.8 per cent in 2023-24. Development is another matter. The PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024 found only about 38 per cent of Class 6 pupils able to solve everyday arithmetic and only 29 per cent competent with fractions, while the ILO’s India Employment Report 2024 found roughly one in three young Indians neither in employment nor in education or training, with unemployment highest among the educated.
Conclusion
Education is a functional prerequisite for a society’s existence and a necessary but insufficient condition for its development. A society reproduces itself through schooling almost automatically; it develops only when quality, equity and employment absorb what schooling produces. That gap — mass schooling without mass learning or work — is the central sociological problem of Indian education today.