Examine the role of education in cultural continuity. In the context of Indian society, how would you reconcile this with the demand for social change? (1988)
Education is conservative by design and transformative by consequence. Its first task is to carry a culture across the break between generations; its second, in a constitutional democracy, is to dismantle parts of what it carries. The Indian question is how one institution does both.
Education as the vehicle of cultural continuity
- Émile Durkheim held that the school fixes in the child the essential similarities collective life demands, and that history teaching in particular attaches the individual to a group larger than himself.
- Talcott Parsons locates this in pattern-maintenance, the function without which no social system endures.
- India’s record is one of education as memory: oral transmission of the Vedas, the guru-shishya lineage in music and dance, madrasa and monastic learning, craft knowledge passed within jatis. Robert Redfield and McKim Marriott‘s great and little traditions describe a two-way traffic that teaching institutions kept alive.
- Contemporary policy is deliberately continuist. An Indian Knowledge Systems division was created in the Ministry of Education in 2020 and University Grants Commission guidelines of 2023 ask universities to build IKS credits into degrees; NEP 2020‘s mother-tongue medium and material across the 22 scheduled languages defend linguistic continuity.
The demand for change
The same system is charged with ending what continuity preserved. Caste worked by monopolising letters, which is why B. R. Ambedkar made education the first act of emancipation, and why Article 21A, Article 46 and educational reservation exist. Article 51A(h) obliges citizens to develop a scientific temper — a constitutional duty to break with parts of inherited culture. Uma Chakravarti‘s account of Brahmanical patriarchy explains the risk: transmit tradition unfiltered and one transmits the subordination of women and of the lower castes along with the arts and the languages.
Continuity has a measurable cost. The PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024 found the highest-scoring children concentrated in households with educated parents and better-served districts, while the weakest results clustered in tribal-majority regions such as the Garo Hills — inherited advantage reproducing itself through the school.
Reconciling the two
- D. P. Mukerji‘s dialectics of tradition: change in India is durable when argued from within tradition rather than imposed on it; the reformer must speak the culture’s own language.
- Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) separates orthogenetic from heterogenetic sources and contextual from structural change, allowing tradition to persist at one level while structures modernise at another.
- Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) showed caste associations carrying modern democratic mobilisation — tradition as the vehicle of change, not merely its obstacle. M. N. Srinivas‘s Sanskritisation and Westernisation describe the same double movement.
- The workable principle is Ambedkar’s constitutional morality: continue the languages, arts, crafts and plural memories; discontinue hierarchy, exclusion and the ritual ranking of persons. The test of a curriculum is not whether it is traditional or modern but whether it is compatible with equal citizenship.
Conclusion
Education can hold continuity and change together because a culture is not a single block — a society may keep its idioms while changing its hierarchies. Indian education has managed this unevenly, expanding access far faster than it has revised content. The unfinished task is a curriculum both culturally rooted and constitutionally radical.