Understanding Education’s Role as a Subordinate Social System in India

Education is rarely a standalone enterprise. It exists within a web of social, political, economic, and cultural forces – shaped by them, and in turn shaping them. In India, this relationship has been especially pronounced. From the gurukulas of ancient times to the centralized school system of today, Indian education has consistently functioned as what sociologists call a subordinate social system – one that derives its purpose, direction, and very form from the dominant structures of the society around it. Understanding this dynamic is key to making sense of how Indian education evolved, why it looks the way it does today, and what tensions continue to define it.

What does it mean to be a subordinate social system? 🔗

In sociological terms, a social system is a set of interrelated and interdependent parts – institutions, norms, roles, and individuals – that work together as a functioning whole. Within any society, there are multiple such systems: the family, religion, the economy, the political order, and education. These systems do not operate in isolation; they constantly influence one another.

Education, however, occupies a particular position among them. It has linkages with the economic, political, religious, and other sub-systems, which exert a powerful influence on the goals and instrumentalities of the educational sub-system on the one hand, and on its autonomy on the other. In other words, education does not set its own agenda freely – it responds to, and is frequently subordinated to, the priorities of the dominant systems around it. Resources, legitimacy, and direction flow from those dominant institutions. Education exists, in large part, to serve purposes determined externally – socializing individuals, reproducing culture, and allocating people into occupational roles that society needs filled.

This subordinate positioning doesn’t make education unimportant. Quite the opposite: it makes education one of the most powerful instruments available to any society for maintaining or transforming itself.

The two core functions: socialization and occupational role allocation 🔗

Two functions stand out as central to education’s role as a subordinate system. The first is socialization – the process through which individuals internalize the norms, values, and behaviours their society expects of them. Education socializes students by teaching them the norms, values, and behaviors required to be productive members of society. It transmits a society’s culture from one generation to the next. Through classroom routines, textbooks, teacher-student relationships, and peer interactions, students absorb far more than academic content – they learn how authority works, what kind of person they are expected to become, and where they fit in the broader social order.

The second function is occupational role allocation – matching individuals to the economic roles that a society’s division of labour demands. As scholar B.R. Clark noted, the education system has a definite bearing on the society which possesses it – the economy, political organization, social stratification, culture, kinship and social integration of any society are closely linked with education. In practice, this means that educational institutions – through curricula, examinations, and credentialling – sort individuals into futures: who becomes a professional, a technician, a labourer, or a bureaucrat.

Both functions reveal something important: education does not merely serve the individual learner. It serves the society that funds, designs, and deploys it.

Indigenous education: subordinate to caste and community 🔗

Before British colonization, India had a rich and diverse educational landscape. Traditional Indian education was far from uniform but generally followed community-specific patterns that had evolved over centuries. Hindu education typically centered around pathshalas and gurukuls, where students lived with their gurus and learned Sanskrit texts, mathematics, astronomy, and other traditional subjects. Muslim education occurred in maktabs and madrasas, focusing on Persian, Arabic, and Islamic studies.

These systems were deeply embedded in their social contexts – and subordinate to them. Knowledge was not universally accessible. What a child learned, where they learned it, and for how long depended largely on their caste and community identity. The caste system was highly exclusionary. An essential feature of an institutionalized form of inequality in the caste system has been the concept of “purity and pollution,” which kept the low-born both socially and economically constrained, as they were not allowed to change their occupations. Education, then, was not a leveller – it reinforced the very social stratification that structured Indian society. The gurukul prepared future priests and scholars; the pathshala prepared those who needed arithmetic for trade. Occupational destiny was largely pre-assigned, and education confirmed rather than challenged it.

Historical research by scholar Dharampal, based on early British administrators’ reports, provides evidence of widespread indigenous educational institutions in Bombay, Bengal and Madras Presidencies, as well as in Punjab, teaching a sophisticated curriculum with daily school attendance by about 30% of children aged 6-15. Yet despite their reach, these systems remained structurally tied to existing hierarchies.

Colonial education: subordinated to imperial interests 🔗

The arrival of British colonial rule transformed Indian education fundamentally – and made its subordinate nature more visible and more consequential than ever. The colonial government did not invest in Indian education out of philanthropic concern. Its motives were administrative and economic.

The most important reason was the government’s concern for reducing the cost of administration by obtaining a cheap supply of educated Indians for the large and growing number of subordinate positions in the administration and British commercial concerns. Education was quite literally a tool for staffing an empire at reduced cost.

The ideological dimension of this project was spelled out in Thomas Macaulay’s Minute on Education of 1835, which established English as the medium of instruction for higher education and promoted Western subjects. Macaulay’s aim was to produce a class of cultural intermediaries – people who would be administratively useful to the British while being disconnected from their own knowledge traditions. The curriculum deliberately emphasized the superiority of Western civilization, history, and knowledge systems. Indian students learned extensively about British monarchs, European history, and Western literature while their own rich heritage was marginalized or portrayed as backward and superstitious.

The policy was further formalized through Wood’s Despatch of 1854, often called the “Magna Carta of Indian Education,” which placed the full responsibility for Indian education on the colonial government and called for a graded network of institutions – from vernacular elementary schools at the village level up to English-medium colleges and universities in the presidency towns. Three new universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established by 1857 as a direct result.

The impact on indigenous education was severe. The gurukula system, which emphasized holistic learning, spiritual development, and moral education, was depicted as outdated. Traditional learning institutions that had operated with community support for centuries were deprived of state funding and recognition. Education had been realigned – now subordinate not to caste and community, but to imperial power.

Nationalist resistance: reclaiming the subordinate system 🔗

The growing nationalist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recognized that education, as a subordinate system, could be reclaimed and redirected. If colonial education served British interests, the argument went, a reformed education system could instead serve Indian cultural and political self-determination.

Swadeshi-era leaders established national educational institutions outside colonial control. Mahatma Gandhi’s Nai Talim (Basic Education) proposed grounding learning in productive handicrafts and local economic realities, directly challenging the colonial model of producing clerks for distant offices. Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan offered a more holistic, aesthetically rooted alternative. These movements did not simply reject the idea that education should serve social goals – they contested which social goals education should serve, and whose interests should be prioritized.

In each case, education remained subordinate – but the master had changed. Nationalist educators were consciously trying to subordinate education to Indian social needs, cultural revival, and political aspiration rather than imperial convenience.

Post-independence: aligning education with a new social order 🔗

After independence in 1947, India faced the challenge of reshaping an education system built for colonial purposes into one capable of serving a democratic, developing nation. The task was immense: literacy was low, access was unequal, and the system’s structures still bore the imprint of colonial objectives.

A series of commissions attempted to reorient education. The Kothari Commission (1964-66), under the chairmanship of Daulat Singh Kothari, was set up to examine all aspects of the educational sector and develop a general pattern of education for India – the first commission with such comprehensive terms of reference. Its report addressed education’s subordinate role squarely: the Commission viewed education as an instrument of social transformation, national integration, and modernization, rather than merely an administrative or academic reform.

The Kothari Commission adopted a “manpower approach” to the enrolment issue and declared that the principal purpose of higher education was to cater to the needs of industrial and other sectors, even as it acknowledged education’s role in promoting social transformation. This was a direct attempt to align the educational subsystem with the economy – to ensure that what students learned matched what the growing nation needed them to do. It recommended integrating vocational education into the mainstream curriculum, a restructured 10+2+3 pattern, and a focus on removing disparities in access based on gender, location, and social background.

Yet aligning educational objectives with societal needs is easier as a policy aspiration than as a practical reality. The Commission urged India to allocate at least 6% of its GDP to education – a benchmark that continues to influence national policy frameworks but has rarely been met in practice. The gap between recommendation and implementation – between what commissions envision and what actually reaches classrooms – has been a defining tension in Indian educational history.

The persistent challenge: education caught between forces 🔗

What the history of Indian education reveals is that a subordinate social system is always caught between competing forces. Education does not simply reflect one social agenda – it reflects the outcome of struggles between multiple agendas, each trying to bend the system in a different direction.

Society and culture determine the system of socialization and the nature of education. On the other hand, education prepares individuals to perform different social roles. This reciprocal relationship means that when society changes – politically, economically, culturally – pressure mounts on education to change too. And conversely, when education changes, it can ripple through the social fabric in ways that are difficult to predict or control.

Colonial India showed that education can be a tool of suppression. Nationalist India showed it can be a tool of resistance. Post-independence India has shown that even with the best-intentioned policies, delivering on education’s promise requires more than commissions and frameworks – it requires sustained political will, equitable resource allocation, and a clear-eyed reckoning with the social hierarchies that continue to shape who gets what kind of education, and to what end.

Socio-economic background continues to influence higher educational attainment, with membership in a socially disadvantaged class, gender, type of educational institution, and household expenditure acting as determinants of unequal access. The subordinate system, in other words, still mirrors the inequalities of the dominant system it serves.

What do you think? If education is always shaped by the social forces around it, can it ever be a genuinely independent force for change – or is it inevitably a mirror of the society that creates it? And given India’s layered history of indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial educational shifts, which values and purposes should guide the design of education systems today?

References

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