Can Education Change Society?*

Abstract

Investment in human capital - that is, in education - was the key to economic, and so to social advance. Education, in this interpretation, was the tool for social change, though, it should be noted, without disturbing basic structural features of the economy. In Training the Nihilists, Daniel Brower analyses this striking social phenomenon, showing clearly that the radicalised students came roughly equally from all the privileged social classes, including the nobles. In 1961, for instance, there appeared a well known reader in the sociology of education, Education, Economy and Society, edited by A. H. Halsey, Jean Floud, and C. Arnold Anderson; a popular and massive textbook for students at least in the English-speaking countries. Modern education systems, are an area where the interests and objectives of different social classes, strata and even groups meets and very often clash. Hence contradictions develop within these systems which have a degree, as is now generally accepted, of relative autonomy.