Write short note: Education and culture. (1998)
Culture is a society’s learned and shared design for living; education is the institution through which it is learned. The relation runs in both directions and then doubles back: education transmits culture, culture decides what education is, and education in time remakes the culture that produced it.
Education transmits culture
- Émile Durkheim held the major function of education to be the transmission of society’s norms and values, fixing in the child the essential similarities collective life demands.
- Anthropologically this is enculturation — the acquisition of language, cosmology, etiquette and technique. In small-scale societies it happened through participation in adult work; a specialised teaching role appears only with complex, literate societies.
- In India, McKim Marriott (Village India, 1955) mapped the traffic between great and little traditions — the universalisation of local practice and the parochialisation of textual practice — in which teachers, priests and schools were the carriers. M. N. Srinivas showed Sanskritic learning supplying the very idiom of mobility.
Culture shapes education
What counts as knowledge, who may receive it and in which language are cultural decisions before they are pedagogic ones. Vedic learning was ritually restricted, which is why B. R. Ambedkar treated the denial of letters as the mechanism of caste itself. Basil Bernstein showed that the school’s elaborated code is continuous with middle-class speech and discontinuous with the restricted code of working-class homes, so identical instruction yields unequal results. Medium of instruction, festivals observed and even the school’s food and seating arrangements carry the same cultural freight.
Education reshapes culture
Mass schooling spreads literacy, secular rationality and achievement norms, and in doing so generates new cultural forms — an examination culture, English-educated professional strata, a distinct student and youth culture. William F. Ogburn‘s cultural lag is the necessary qualification: values move more slowly than the institutions carrying them, so schooled populations can occupy modern occupations with unreconstructed attitudes.
Whose culture? The live tension
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (Reproduction, 1970) argued that every pedagogic action imposes a cultural arbitrary as if it were legitimate culture — symbolic violence dressed as merit. In plural India the point is immediate:
- Articles 29 and 30 protect the right of minorities to conserve their script and culture and to run their own institutions.
- Odisha’s mother-tongue multilingual education in tribal languages such as Ho, Juang and Soura improved enrolment and retention precisely because instruction in the dominant regional language had been culturally alien to the child.
- NEP 2020‘s promotion of Indian Knowledge Systems and its three-language formula are welcomed in some states and read as imposition in others; Tamil Nadu chose in 2025 to forgo about ₹2,152 crore of central school funding rather than adopt the formula.
Conclusion
Education is the principal institution by which a culture reproduces and revises itself, which is why control over curriculum, medium and textbook is always political. In a plural society the syllabus is never a neutral inventory of culture but a settlement about whose culture will be treated as everyone’s.