Equal Education

Abstract

In educational research literature the role of education as a means for social upward mobility is quite well accepted. However, there are examples where education conserves and perpetuates social class. Each year, after the campus placements, one comes across a familiar situation where some students get selected and some others with equal academic achievements get rejected. This event occurs when one has nearly completed one’s education. The problem that lies at the root of this observation is that students do not enter school/college with equal cultural, social and economic capital. Teachers with their egalitarian values treat them as equals, making no distinctions among them. They ignore the obvious distinctions among students rather than addressing them, thereby, helping preserve these differences. The school teachers ignore, the college teachers ignore and finally the professional teachers also ignore the differences. Consequently, the differential in the cultural and social capital of students continues. To find out whether education preserves or bridges these differences the author studied the impact of annual family income, level of father’s education, level of mother’s education, father’s profession, mother’s profession, area of location of school and the medium of instruction at school on the preparation and performance of students in three different types of engineering colleges. Her sample consisted of 740 students studying in the third year of their 4-year engineering degree course. She compared the performance of students from highest income group with the students from lowest income group, performance of students whose fathers were uneducated with students with professionally educated fathers, students with uneducated mothers and those with professionally educated mothers, students whose fathers were engaged in agriculture with those whose fathers were in profession, students whose mothers were not working and those with mothers in profession, students from rural schools with those from urban schools, and performances of students from English medium schools and students from regional language medium schools through independent sample t-tests and found that though the means of students from high income families, from English medium schools, from schools located in urban areas were higher on all subjects in class ten and class twelve board examinations and higher Semester Grade Point Averages but some differences were not statistically significant. The findings are discussed along with educational implications. The paper is concluded with suggestions for the educators and their renewed responsibilities in the light of findings.