Education refers to any transmission of knowledge and practical skills. Based on how institutionalized it is, education can be divided into formal education (schools, colleges, and universities), non-formal education (courses, seminars, private lectures, language schools, etc.), and informal education that happens through learning from experience. Pedagogy is the scientific study of education.

Durkheim promoted moral education as a way for individuals to socialize, integrate, and adopt shared values of larger society, which would lead to fewer conflicts and more solidarity. The human capital perspective argues that investment in education pays off through expanding knowledge and skills, leading to increased productivity and economic growth.

Multiple studies, such as Randall Collins (The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification, 1979), Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (Schooling in Capitalist America, 1976), James Coleman (Equality of Educational Opportunity, 1966), Raymond Boudon (Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality, 1973), Basil Bernstein (Class, Codes and Control, 3 vols., 1971, 1973, 1976), Paul Willis (Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, 1977), Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1970), Pierre Bourdieu and Passeron, J.-C. (Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 1977), John Goldthorpe (Social Mobility and Class Structure, 1980), and A. H. Halsey et al (Origins and Destinations, 1980), showed that schools and other educational institutions indoctrinate students with rationalizations and justifications in defense of existing systems of inequality (based on race, class, and gender) and thus help in maintaining and reproducing those inequalities.

References:

Becker. Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life (1968);

Bernstein. Class, Codes and Control, Vol. I. (1971);

     -     Class, Codes and Control, Vol. II: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language (1973);

     -     Class, Codes and Control Vol. III: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmission (1976);

     -     Class, Codes and Control, Vol. IV: The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (1990);

     -     Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique (1996);

Boudon. Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality (1974, in French 1973);

Bourdieu. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977, in French 1970);

     -     The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture (1979, in French 1964);

     -     State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (1998, in French 1989);

     -     Homo academicus (1990, in French 1984);

     -     Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power (1996);

Cicourel. The Educational Decision-Makers (1963);

Coleman. Equality of Educational Opportunity  (1966);

     -     Public and Private High Schools: The Impact on Communities (1987);

     -     Equality and Achievement in Education (1990a);

Dewey. The School and Society (1899); 

     -     Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916);

     -     Experience and Education (1938);

Durkheim. Education and Sociology (1956, In French 1922);

     -     Moral Education, (2012, in French 1925);

Illich. Deschooling Society (1970);

Lynd. Fieldwork in Colledge Education (1945);

Mannheim. Diagnosis of our Time (1943);

     -     Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning (1951);

     -     Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (1952);

Meyer. Organization and Instruction in Elementary Schools (1976);

     -     The Structure of Educational Systems: Explorations in the Theory of Loosely-Coupled Organizations (1977);

     -     The University and the Global Knowledge Society (2020);

Mills. Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (1964);

Riesman. Constraint and Variety in American Education (1956);

     -     The Academic Revolution (1968);

     -     Education and Politics at Harvard (1975);

     -     On Higher Education (1998);

Smelser. Public Higher Education in California (1974);

     -     Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict (2013);

Thomas W. Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education (1917);

Veblen. The Higher Learning in America (1918);

Willis. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977); 

     -     Schooling for the Dole (1984);