Write short note: Education as an instrument of social change. (2007)
To call education an instrument is to concede that it is wielded — by a state pursuing development, a market pursuing employable labour, or a movement pursuing emancipation. Its direction is therefore never given by the institution itself. R. M. MacIver treated social change as a response to altered conditions; education is the means by which a society consciously equips itself for that response.
How the instrument works
- From transmission to transformation. Émile Durkheim defined education as the socialisation of the younger generation, an institution that reproduces the collective conscience. Yet the moment schooling becomes universal and secular, it also teaches people to question what it transmits.
- From ascription to achievement. Talcott Parsons (“The School Class as a Social System”, 1959) showed the school judging children by universalistic and achievement standards, breaking the particularism of family and caste and supplying the value-pattern an industrial occupational order needs.
- Rationalisation of outlook. Schooling spreads a scientific temper and secular authority — an aspect of Max Weber‘s disenchantment — and creates literate publics able to claim rights.
- A route out of hereditary status. M. N. Srinivas identified English education as the principal channel of Westernisation, creating a caste-neutral criterion of standing alongside ritual rank and opening mobility that Sanskritisation could not deliver.
- Reconstitution of women’s position. This is education’s sharpest change effect in India. Women now hold 2.24 crore higher-education places, the Gender Parity Index stands at 1.08, and women are 44 per cent of enrolment in science and technology streams (2023-24) — a reversal of a century-old pattern, with consequences for age at marriage, fertility and workforce entry.
Education as a directed instrument in India
Independent India made education an explicit lever of planned change: Article 21A and the Right to Education Act, 2009 turned elementary schooling into a fundamental right; school meals, scholarships and reservation widened access; and the National Education Policy, 2020 restated the goal as a 50 per cent higher-education enrolment ratio by 2035. B. R. Ambedkar‘s “educate, agitate, organise” captured the same instrumentality from below — education as the equipment of assertion rather than the reward for it.
Why the instrument slips
- Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (Reproduction, 1970) argued that schools reward the cultural capital of dominant classes while calling it merit.
- The Indian system sorts rather than equalises: in rural India 66.8 per cent of children aged 6-14 attend government schools, where only 23.4 per cent of Class 3 pupils could read a Class 2 text in 2024, against 35.5 per cent in private schools. Access has been universalised; capability has not.
- Curriculum and medium remain contested, so what is transmitted can as easily entrench an order as change it.
Conclusion
Education is a powerful but dependent instrument. It changes society decisively where it accompanies redistribution of land, work and political voice, and merely certifies existing advantage where it does not. Whether it moves a society forward depends far less on how many are enrolled than on whether the schooling the poor receive is comparable to the schooling the better-off buy.