ABSTRACT
The school system is a deliberate attempt to maintain the normative and action patterns of society by influencing its new entrants. The 'inculcation of culture' idea has now become more complicated because of the need to consider what we mean by culture. Education is beginning to look like a conserving institution which can only follow social change and never initiate it. This chapter describes the functions of education by making an important distinction between two ways of describing the consequences of action. Social mobility may be reduced in its simplest terms to the picture of a child born in one stratum finishing its life in the one above or below it. The concept of 'meritocratic' selection derives from a notion that access to the most important, most prestigeful and best paid occupations in society should be reserved for the most intelligent.
