Culture and Education

The culture of a society has its inevitable impact on educational system. The educational system points to the various needs of the society concerned, because it is towards fulfillment of the same that education is organized. If the culture of the society is chiefly materialistic, the education system there is based on competition and efforts of the individual there, is directed towards the achievement of material goals, and not towards spiritual or aesthetic ones. If individualism is at the top in a culture, the educational system of the society too becomes colored by individualism.
Whatever we learn through education is immensely influenced by culture. Barlett says that social traditions influence ways of thinking, remembering, imagining and doing creative things. Whatever is considered as the most important aspect of culture, and accepting of which is likely to increase one’s prestige is learnt by an individual and he tries to forget other commonplace items. Thus culture not only goads him to learn certain things, but it also inspires him to retain certain things in the mind and forget others.
The educational system of a place is of a very ordinary standard, if its culture is not well developed, because then in the learning process very ordinary interactions are possible. In such a system formal education is very inadequate, because the purpose of education becomes generally limited to learning of very ordinary things pertaining to social life. In other words, the main purpose of life, then, becomes limited to protections of one’s society, carving out a living, safeguarding against evil designs of neighbors and other enemies and worshiping the accepted gods and goddesses. Formal education is not necessary for learning all these, because these things may be learnt through one’s own experiences. But when the culture becomes complex, then it is necessary to transmit the various elements of culture from one generation to another. For this, development of a specialized education is considered as a necessity. This specialized educational system is termed as ’school’.As we have seen, culture has its underlying impact on the development of one’s personality. Education is intimately related with development of personality. Therefore, the kind of education depends upon the nature