The Role of Education in Modern Society

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The Role of Education in Modern Society

The role of education in modern society is to pass on knowledge and skills, prepare people for work, give them a route to a better life than the one they were born into, and help them live together as citizens. It now has one more job: skills go out of date within a few years, so education has to continue long after school ends. Below you will find the roles of education in points, how sociologists explain them (critics included), the four purposes most often cited, and what current government and international data say about the benefits.

What is the role of education in society?

Education is how a society hands its knowledge, skills and values to the next generation, and to adults who need new ones. In points, its main roles are:

  1. Passing on knowledge and skills. Reading, writing, math, science and the habits of thinking that all later learning builds on.
  2. Socialization. Learning the norms of your society, how to work with others and how to deal with authority.
  3. Preparing people for work. The skills and credentials employers pay for. In the US, earnings rise and unemployment falls with each level of education (data below).
  4. Social mobility. A path to a different job and income than your parents had, although, as critics point out, not an equally open one.
  5. Citizenship. Understanding how your country works and taking part in it. Voter turnout in the US rises steeply with education.
  6. Health and a longer life. Americans with a four-year college degree can expect more years of life between ages 25 and 75 than those without one.
  7. Lifelong adaptation. In a fast-changing economy, learning has to continue through a working life, not stop at graduation.

The first five are the classic roles you will find in any textbook. The last two are where the evidence has grown fastest, and where the idea of “modern” education really differs from the schooling of a century ago.

How sociologists explain the roles of education

Most US students meet this topic through sociology. The open textbook Introduction to Sociology 3e from OpenStax groups the main views into four perspectives.

Functionalism: manifest and latent functions

Functionalists see education as one of the most important institutions in a society. Its manifest functions are the intended ones: socialization, passing on culture, social control, social placement (sorting people toward careers) and cultural innovation. Émile Durkheim, who founded sociology as an academic discipline, described schools as places that teach children to get along with others and prepare them for adult economic roles.

Its latent functions are the unintended ones: dating and courtship, the social networks people build, practice working in groups, a gap between generations, and a first step into political and social life.

Conflict theory: schools can reproduce inequality

Conflict theorists argue that schools often preserve inequality rather than reduce it. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described cultural capital: the knowledge and habits that children from better-off families bring to school, and that school then rewards. The hidden curriculum (what students learn informally, beyond the official lessons) and tracking students into advanced or low groups can widen those gaps.

Feminist theory and symbolic interactionism

Feminist theory looks at gender inequality in education and what it costs women and girls. Symbolic interactionism looks at daily life in classrooms: a student labeled a low achiever may come to live down to the label, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Credentialism, the weight placed on degrees and certificates as proof of skill, belongs here too.

For an essay, one way to hold the four together: functionalists describe what education does for society, conflict and feminist theorists ask who it serves best, and interactionists show how it feels from inside a classroom. That framing is ours, not the textbook’s.

What are the four main purposes of education?

There is no single official list, but two frameworks are cited again and again.

Four pillars of learning. In 1996 the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, chaired by Jacques Delors, reported to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Its report, Learning: The Treasure Within, built on four foundations: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together and learning to be.

Four basic purposes. In a 2022 excerpt from their book Imagine If, published by Edutopia, Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson set out four purposes:

  • Personal: helping young people engage with the world within them as well as the world around them.
  • Cultural: understanding your own culture and respecting the diversity of others.
  • Economic: becoming economically responsible and independent.
  • Social: becoming active and compassionate citizens.

So what is the most important role of education? The Robinsons call education “an essentially contested concept”: like democracy or justice, it means different things to different people. The closest thing to a global answer is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says education “shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Ken Robinson’s case for moving schools beyond the industrial model toward a more personalized approach is in Creative Schools.

What the data show about education’s role

Work and earnings

The clearest numbers come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For people aged 25 and over in 2025:

Highest level of education Median weekly earnings (full-time) Unemployment rate
Less than a high school diploma $770 6.1%
High school diploma $966 4.3%
Some college, no degree $1,062 3.8%
Associate’s degree $1,135 3.0%
Bachelor’s degree $1,578 2.8%
Master’s degree $1,876 2.6%
Professional degree $2,294 1.9%
Doctoral degree $2,307 1.8%

By our arithmetic, a bachelor’s degree holder’s median week pays about 63% more than a high school graduate’s. Two notes from BLS: the 2025 figures average 11 months, because October 2025 data were not collected during the federal government shutdown, and the categories ignore apprenticeships and on-the-job training, which also affect pay.

Does education drive economic growth?

Economists measure the payoff to schooling as a rate of return. A World Bank review by Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2018), built on 1,120 estimates from 139 countries, found that one extra year of schooling pays the individual about 9% a year on average. That is a return to the person, not a measure of national growth, but it is the main reason governments treat education as an investment rather than only a cost.

Health and length of life

In a 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton measured how many of the 50 years between ages 25 and 75 Americans could expect to live. At 2018 death rates, people with a bachelor’s degree could expect 48.2 of those years; people without one, 45.1. After 2010, the figure kept rising for degree holders and fell for everyone else. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found a similar pattern for skills: adults with high numeracy were 11 percentage points more likely to report very good or excellent health than those with low numeracy.

Civic life

In the 2024 US presidential election, 65.3% of the citizen voting-age population voted. By education, the US Census Bureau reports turnout of 82.5% among people with an advanced degree, 77.2% among bachelor’s degree holders and 52.5% among high school graduates. These are survey answers, and the Census Bureau notes they can differ from official counts.

Correlation is not causation

People who stay in school longer differ in many ways: family income, health, ability and ambition among them. The gaps above are real, but they do not prove that school alone causes them. The World Bank figures rest on human capital theory, the idea that education raises pay by building skills. The economist Bryan Caplan argues in The Case Against Education that much of the payoff is signaling instead: a degree shows employers traits they value, more than it teaches the skills they need. If you are writing an essay, this debate is the strongest counterargument to include.

Is education a human right?

Yes. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, opens: “Everyone has the right to education.” It adds that education “shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages” and that elementary education “shall be compulsory.”

The gap between that promise and reality is still large. In 2025, UNESCO estimated that 272 million children and young people were out of school: 11% of primary school age (78 million), 15% of lower secondary age (64 million) and 31% of upper secondary age (130 million). That is 21 million more than the previous estimate, mainly because new population figures raised the number of school-age children.

Two memoirs show what is at stake. In I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai tells how she campaigned for girls’ schooling in Pakistan under the Taliban and survived being shot for it. In Educated, Tara Westover describes leaving a survivalist childhood in the mountains of Idaho for Cambridge and Harvard.

Why education matters even more in modern society

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 asked employers what will change by 2030. On average, workers can expect 39% of their existing skills to be transformed or to become outdated over 2025 to 2030. If the world’s workforce were 100 people, 59 would need training by 2030, and 11 of them would be unlikely to get it. Analytical thinking is the core skill employers want most, essential for seven in ten companies, and curiosity and lifelong learning are rising in importance.

At the same time, adult skills are slipping in many countries. The OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills 2023 covered 31 countries and economies. Over the past decade, average literacy improved only in Denmark and Finland and stayed flat or fell everywhere else; among university graduates it fell or stagnated in most countries. On average across OECD countries, 18% of adults did not reach even the most basic level in any of the three skills tested. In the US, the share of adults at the lowest literacy level (Level 1 or below) rose from 19% in 2017 to 28% in 2023, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Singapore, the only Southeast Asian participant, slipped 3.1 points in literacy but gained 16.7 points in numeracy, level with Finland for the largest numeracy gain.

Put together, this is the modern part of the role of education: learning has to continue for decades after the last diploma. Michelle Weise’s Long Life Learning looks at how education and careers must change as automation and longer lives stretch the working years, and Salman Khan’s Brave New Words offers a hopeful view of how artificial intelligence (AI) can personalize learning.

Learning after school ends

If education has to last a working life, much of it happens outside a classroom: on the job, in short courses and in the books you choose. What regular reading does for vocabulary, knowledge and an aging brain is the subject of our look at the benefits of reading. Two things make that learning stick.

The first is knowing how learning works. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? explains why traditional schooling often clashes with how the brain learns, and which strategies work better, and our guide on how to remember what you read covers the techniques with the strongest evidence: testing yourself and spacing out your reviews.

The second is breadth. David Epstein’s Range argues that people with wide experience often solve complex problems better than narrow specialists, which fits an economy where skills change quickly. The Learn Faster and Navigate a Career Change goals, and the Adapt and Thrive: Learning for a Changing World path, put the books in a useful order.

Quick answers

What is the role of education in modern society?

To pass on knowledge, skills and values, prepare people for work and citizenship, and widen opportunity. In a modern economy it also has to keep people learning as their skills go out of date.

What is the most important role of education?

People disagree, which is why sociologists describe several roles. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts “the full development of the human personality” first.

How does education affect economic growth?

For individuals, each extra year of schooling pays about 9% a year on average across 139 countries. Better-educated workers also earn more and are unemployed less, though part of that gap reflects who stays in school, not only what school teaches.

Is education a human right?

Yes. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has the right to education, free and compulsory at the elementary stage. Even so, UNESCO estimated 272 million children and young people out of school in 2025.

Sources

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