Polished Person or Parasite? The Implications of Education for Social Identities and Self Concepts and the Culturally Diverse Emotional Consequences. An Indian Example

Abstract

Education is not only an innocent tool but leads to many conflicts all over the world as well. For an analysis of these conflicts one has to keep in mind that education as a concept is a culturally diverse construction with very different connotations in theory as much as in the everyday world. Taking the example of an empirical study on concepts of education and educated persons in an Indian urban middle class sample, the implications of cultural constructions of education for self concepts, social identities and therefore for social inclusion and exclusion will be discussed. Following the figure of Sanskritization by Srinivas, the founded pattern of argumentation in the data is called educationalization.