Formal Education and Social Transformation A Study of Gujjar and Bakarwal Girls in Jammu and Kashmir

Abstract

Education today is globally regarded to be a system of social formation which has the newlineresponsibility of making individuals be productive not only to them but the society at large. newlineAlthough, the balance between these functions of education has extensively varied over time newlineand continues to vary across countries and regions of the world. No doubt, education played a newlinemajor role in reproducing the good and transforming the bad even though the question of newlinegood and bad is value judgemental and inherently political. In other words, the prevailing newlineform of government and power relations reflected in the educational system and the sociopolitical newlinesystem determine the context of education. However, twentieth-century has newlinewitnessed and recorded radical social transformations, thus this century has post an economic newlineorder in which knowledge has now taken the place of raw material or capital, a key resource newlineand social order in which inequality based on knowledge has now become a major challenge; newlineand a political system in which government can not be looked to for solving social and newlineeconomic problems. Formal education, purposed to prepare man for the good life, achieves this newlineby grooming students to acquire skills relevant to social life and the labour markets opined by the newlinefunctionalist that the primary role of education is to preserve and pass on knowledge and newlineskills, thus the key role of education as an agent of social transformation (Rogers, 1962). newlineSimilarly, Bourdieu states that various forms of capital tend to transfer from one generation newlineto the next through formal education, therefore, children of unprivileged backgrounds may newlinehave no education to equip them with these dispositions. However, as clearly highlighted by newlineDurkheimian and subsequent modern sociologists like Rogers, Bourdieu and Coleman. newlineEducation in modern society plays the vital role of both preserving and serving as an agent of newlinesocial and cultural change. The theorists believed that students progress through college and newlinebeyond, usually becomes increasingly liberal