Religion and education

Religion. Sociology does not ask whether a religion is true or false, or rank religions. Its study of religion is empirical (how religions actually work in society), comparative (across societies) and looks at how religion is linked to other institutions, without prejudice.

Religions, though very different, share some features:

• a set of symbols that invoke feelings of reverence or awe;
• rituals or ceremonies (praying, chanting, singing, special foods, fasting);
• a community of believers.
• Rituals are often performed in special places and separate the sacred from everyday life. Following Emile Durkheim, sociologists distinguish the sacred realm, set apart and treated with reverence, from the profane (ordinary) world. Often the sacred is linked to a supernatural force, but not always: early Buddhism and Confucianism had no conception of the supernatural, yet showed reverence for things and persons they held sacred.

Religion and other institutions. Religion has had a close relationship with power and politics. In history there have been religious movements for social change, such as anti-caste movements and movements against gender discrimination. Religion is not only private belief: it has a public character.

• Secularisation is the process by which religion becomes less influential in various spheres of life. Yet religion clearly still plays a role in many aspects of society today.
• Max Weber showed how sociology studies religion in relation to economic life: he argued that Calvinism, a branch of Protestant Christianity, had an important influence on the rise of capitalism.
• Religion also shapes and is shaped by economic change. The book's study of Nasik, a pilgrimage town in Maharashtra, shows priests' sons and daughters going to school and training for new jobs, and craftspeople who once made brass and copper goods for pilgrims moving into other work.

Education is a lifelong process involving formal and informal institutions of learning. It transmits a group's cultural heritage from one generation to the next.

• In simple societies, children learned customs and skills by taking part in adult life; there was no separate school.
• In complex societies, with a division of labour and separation of work from home, learning became formal and explicit, in schools. Modern schools rest on universalistic values (the same rules for all, abstract reasoning) rather than the particularistic values of family, kin, tribe, caste or religion. Things like a school uniform promote uniformity and standardised aspirations.
• Durkheim argued that no society can survive without a common base, shared norms and values, which education helps provide. Functionalists see education as maintaining and renewing the social structure and selecting people for future roles.
• Conflict views see education as stratifying: which school a child attends depends on family background, and schools can widen the gap between elites and the masses. Many children cannot attend or drop out: one study reports almost zero attendance of SC and ST children in the cultivation season, as they take on household work, and girls from these communities seldom attend because they do domestic and income-earning work.

Example (new): in a city, children from well-off homes may attend a private school with labs and computers, while a few kilometres away children from poorer homes share one teacher between two classes. Both are 'in school', but their life-chances already differ.