The educational system tries to embrace almost all people where they are young and equip them with at least the minimum skills of literacy and numeracy education.
Following are the important functions of Education:
Preservative function: As the transmission of culture is needed for the preservation of social order, it is also called the preservation function of education. Social structure persists only with the aid certain values and these values have to be handed down to the next generation. When the values and skills become absolute with the passage of time replacing them with new vistas is also a major function of education.
With the growth of modern economy and the complexity of socioeconomic structure. This is usually achieved through the political and administrative apparatus. The knowledge, skill and values acquired through education not only meet the economic needs of society, but also permeated with a social content corresponding to the existing socio-economic and political structure and the consequent social stratification and distribution of power in society.
Allocative function: The education process, with its different specialization, different levels and certification process which goes along with it, allocates the younger generation to various roles in society according to their possession of or lack of appropriate diplomas and degree, specifying particular skills, abilities and values. Thus it legitimizes the existing distribution of position of socio-economic gains and power by convincing the losers or relative loss that their ** in life is due to their ** in education, which interim is due to their lack of abilities.
Moreover, this a locative function induces greater demands for more and more education and thus contributes to the expansion of education system and increase the common people’* dependence on and subjugation to, it is that some of the so called universal goals of education in a society articulate the thinking of philosophers and social reformers of the times.
Reformative function: Education is of fundamental significance to the development and progress of human society. Although education as a process of socialization. Education has also the capacity to liberate the human mind from shackles of the pass and the present. It has the potential to make men question the ruling values and norms in society, to make them rebel-against the existing social constraints and to solutions to the developed „ social contradiction and constraints outside the frame work of he established system. This we call the transformative, progressive or reformative function of education.
The **** sociologists Bowles and Gintis argues that the major role of education in modem world is the reproduction of labor power. The education system helps to achieve these objectives largely through the hidden curriculum. It is not the content of lessons and the examinations that pupils take which are important, but the form that teaching and learning take and the way that schools are organized. The hidden curriculum consists of those things that pupils learn through the experience of attending school, rather than the stated educational objectives of such institutions.
According to Bowles and Gintis, the hidden curriculum shapes the future workforce in the following ways:
it helps to produce a subservient workforce of uncritical, passive and docile workers. Far from living up to *** ideal of encouraging self-development.
Bowles and Gintis claim that the hidden curriculum encourages an acceptance of hierarchy. Schools are organized on a hierarchical principle of authority and control.
At school, pupils learn to be motivated by external rewards, just as the workforce in a capitalist society is motivated by external rewards. Because students have so little control over, and little feeling of involvement in, their school work, they get little satisfaction from studying.
