Education and Society

25 Years of the British Journal of Sociology of Education

Len Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134130160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The British Journal of Sociology of Education has established itself as the leading discipline-based publication. This collection of selected articles published since the first issue provides the reader with an informed insight and understanding of the nature, range and value of sociological thinking, its development over the last twenty-five years as well as the analysis of the relationship between society and education.

Divided into four sections, the book covers:

• social theory and education
• social inequality and education
• sociology of institutions, curriculum and pedagogy
• research practices in the sociology of education.

The intention of this form of organisation is to provide the reader with an awareness and understanding of multiple perspectives within the discipline as well as key conceptual, theoretical and empirical material, including a wealth of insights, ideas and questions. The editor's specially written introduction to each section contextualises the selection and introduces readers to the main issues and current thinking in the field.

Part 1
Theme: social theory and education

Madeleine Arnot & Len Barton

Sociological theory of education is a complex, often contentious affair. Its history reflects the social positioning of academics and researchers, often within higher educational departments which, in turn, reflect the different types of regulation and control of the teaching profession within mass schooling. Social theory in education recontextualises mainstream sociological theories, concepts and methodologies and cross-fertilises specific national understandings of global trends and political discourses. It sits at the interface of pure theory, applied policy research, and action oriented research programmes. In this small yet not unrepresentative selection of seminal journal articles, the tensions associated with theorising ‘the social’ in relation to education are shown to be fruitful, dynamic and politically informed.

In the first issue of the Journal, Bates raises the question of the nature and function of social theory within a discussion of the so-called ‘New Sociology of Education’. A perennial interest by the discipline in the issue of human betterment is explored through a critical review of the epistemology and political claims in Michael Young’s phenomenological account of ‘what counts as educational knowledge’ in the mid 1970s. The challenge is one of understanding how the education system produces the varied kinds and degrees of stratified knowledge and the possible relationship between knowledge and control; the position and influence of dominant groups and their legitimation of particular kinds of knowledge; and, the nature of political action in the pursuit of change. Both relativism and overly deterministic approaches are identified and critiqued, as part of a more general concern about the production of an alternative theory of educational transmission and practice.

An alternative critical social theory which could address theory and practice and the production of social change even within the conditions of social inequality and domination was located initially within social reproduction theories (such as that of Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis). Key tensions were the relationship between structure and agency, culture and ideology, rational and subjective knowledge and freedom and determination. Walker’s article engages with these dualisms when assessing the contribution of Paul Willis’ extraordinary study of the ‘resistance’ of a group of English working class ‘lads’ and his theory of cultural production which marked a shift in the then dominant view of schooling as playing a significant distributive role in the reproduction of economic, social and cultural inequalities. Walker’s article demonstrates the problems associated with challenging the more overtly pessimistic, functionalist and determinist elements of such theory with notions of cultural production, cultural meaning-making and forms of social class resistance.

By 1999, Bernstein distinguished between two different forms of discourse – employing a distinction between subjective, spontaneous, segmentalised commonsense knowledge (horizontal discourse) and vertical discourse found particularly in the sciences and made up of specialised languages. Sociology as a discipline is represented here as employing a horizontal discourse with a horizontal knowledge structure with weak grammars. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, the various sociological theories employed by educationalists (functionalism, Marxism, post-structuralism, postmodernism etc.) construct the field through permanently shifting standpoints, relational truths and forms of experiential knowledge. Such forms of knowledge, whilst a crucial resource for social empowerment or betterment, are not rational/scientific and thus not replicable or incremental. Bernstein’s article raised the question: what is the social significance of sociological knowledge as discourse?

This critique of sociology has particular resonance with the development of post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches to education, which offers deeper insights into the political processes of identity construction, regulation and governmentality, the normative framing of subjectivity and social relations through education. These alternative frameworks reject the dualisms and essentialism which shaped the l980s and 1990s social theory, but they were, in turn, critiqued in terms of their contribution to the ‘social betterment’ agenda described earlier. Elizabeth Atkinson’s article defends the ethical reflexivity of postmodernism, its engagement with the fluidity, volatility and diversification of the modern social order and particularly with multiple significations and the active processes of construction and mediation of self and society.

Social theory in education represents a rich discourse located on the borders of sociology and education. It engages with the puzzle of how and why socially differentiated and generally unequal outcomes of education are generated and how and where agency occurs which reproduces or might disrupt such outcomes. The pedagogic processes involved in education and their relationship to the social context lie at the heart of this scholarly endeavour.

BJSE Articles

Bates, R. (1980) New developments in the New Sociology of Education, BJSE, Volume 1, Number 1, pp. 67–79.

Walker, J. (1986) Romanticising resistance, romanticising culture: problems in Willis’s theory of cultural production, BJSE, Volume 7, Number 1, pp. 59–80.

Bernstein, B. (1999) Vertical and horizontal discourse: an essay, BJSE, Volume 20, Number 2, pp. 157–173.

Atkinson, E. (2002) The responsible anarchist: postmodernism and social change, BJSE, Volume 23, Number 1, pp. 73–87.

1 New developments in the New Sociology of Education

Richard J. Bates

Epistemological foundations

The epistemological claims of the New Sociology of Education have been under attack since the publication of Knowledge and Control (Young, 1971). Trenchant and unsympathetic critiques have been mounted, both by philosophers (Pring, 1972; White, 1975; Flew, 1976; Dawson, 1977; Hand, 1977; Warnock, 1977) and by sociologists (Banks, 1974; Sharp & Green, 1975; Ahier, 1977; Demaine, 1977). The substance of these attacks is that the language of the New Sociology of Education is incoherent; that its espousal of relativism invalidates its basic claims; that the autonomy of rationality and logic makes nonsense of the idea that social power determines truth; that the criterion of ‘human betterment’ is inadequate in determining the worth of any epistemology.

Earlier discussions of the New Sociology of Education have suggested that a modification of position, which spoke of ‘what counts as knowledge’ within any social group rather than knowledge as such, would allow a much greater coherence, though it would not solve the problem of incommensurability between groups (cf. Ahier, 1977; Whitty, 1977; Bates, 1978). In the light of an interesting interpretation of Young’s work conducted by Clark & Freeman (1979), such a modification appears as both timid and unnecessary.

In their critique of the corpus of Young’s work, Clark & Freeman argue first that the apparent incoherence of Young’s work stems from its attempt to avoid the form of ordinary language accepted by philosophers and sociologists in order to present a radical ideology in language appropriate to that ideology:

We can thus understand, too, why Young has chosen to express himself in such a way as to seem almost deliberately to be trying to confuse us. For with such a perspective we can understand that if, with Marcuse (1964), he believes ordinary language to be infused with ideological presuppositions and necessarily mystifying (in the Marxist sense), then the Marxist perspective commits him to the view that what he has to say could not be expressed in ordinary language without distortion. The language he writes is not ordinary language used in a convoluted way, but the language of a radical ideology.

(Clark & Freeman, 1969, p. 8)

Second, Clark & Freeman argue that Young, in his later work (1973, 1975), provides grounds for a solution of the problem of relativism. While admitting that cultural relativism leaves us ‘with no grounds for deciding the worth, truth or value of anything’ (Young, 1975, p. 210) within a traditional epistemology (as the idea is self-refuting), Clark & Freeman point out Young’s rejection of traditional epistemology (Clark & Freeman, 1979, p. 8). Similarly, while arguing that Young’s appeal to the criterion of ‘human betterment’ offers no direct way out of the relativist dilemma, Clark & Freeman suggest that Young’s reassertion of the validation of knowledge through action (praxis), and his assertion of a conceptual relationship between knowledge and control through the idea of epistemic authority is a viable, though controversial position. More explicitly,

In arguing that education is essentially and necessarily political, Young is suggesting that a conceptual relationship holds between education and politics . . . It would therefore follow that a conceptual relationship between knowledge and control was supportable, since politics necessarily involves control. In that case, the claim that any epistemology is either itself a reflection of a political position or may be used to control politically is worthy of serious consideration.

(Clark & Freeman, 1979, p. 13)

In this respect, Clark & Freeman can argue that Young’s position is not epistemologically wanting, since it does adhere to a consistent and coherent view of knowledge, which is defined as ‘the forms of thought promotive of human betterment and liberation’ (Clark & Freeman, 1979, p. 13).

Certainly this view of knowledge is at variance with the technical scientific definition of knowledge and rationality. It is, however, consistent with the view of historical knowledge, in which ideas of truth and validity are supplemented by critical discourse over the ways in which knowledge serves the course of human betterment. Such a position is argued at length by Habermas, who contends that the annexation of rationality by dominant scientific, technical, manipulative interests has prevented the continuation of a historical discourse directed towards ‘a rational administration of the world (which) is not simply identical with the solution of . . . practical problems’ (Habermas, 1974, pp. 275–276).

This argument is put perhaps more clearly by Richard Bernstein, who argues that

We are coming to realise that human rationality cannot be limited to technical and instrumental reasons; that human beings can engage in rational argumentation in which there is a commitment to the critical evaluation of the quality of human life; that we can cultivate theoretical discourse in which there is a rational discussion of the conflict of critical interpretations, and practical discourse in which human beings try not simply to manipulate and control one another, but to understand one another genuinely and work together toward practical, not technical, ends.

(Bernstein, 1976, p. 233)

Young’s position is clearly in agreement with Bernstein’s opposition to a purely technical rationality and the forms of thought and life with which such a rationality is concerned.

Such a view of knowledge may well be foreign to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophy, but it is not therefore illegitimate. Attempts to describe it as such may, in fact, provide substance for the very argument that Young is promoting – that of the pervasive relationship between knowledge and control. The description of knowledge as practical, social and historical, rather than solely technical and manipulative cannot simply be legislated out of court as confused (Clark & Freeman, 1979, p. 13), except by appeal to the very notion of epistemic authority which is being denied.

Young is to be seen then, not as denying the validity of scientific rational knowledge, but as asserting its inadequacy in the face of moral, social and political dilemmas. For, as Clark & Freeman put it,

Why should not epistemological knowledge and sociological knowledge also be understood in terms of their contribution to human betterment and liberation, as Young suggests, remembering what has been said about the fact that true beliefs are attested to by successful practice? This does not imply the abandonment of ideas of truth and validity, but rather suggests that they are necessary but not sufficient criteria for a theory to be ‘good’.

(Clark & Freeman, 1979, p. 14)

Indeed, such a position is closely akin to a respectable tradition within science itself (cf. Popper, 1972; Dolby, 1974). Moreover, to say that this position allows no limits or ending to debate over what promotes human betterment is no justification for the denigration of such pursuits from a rational point of view, for is not continual openness to debate over theory and explanation also one of the hallmarks of that scientific rationality with which such critical social theory is compared?

It would seem then, that the modification proposed by Young in his later work and the constructive critique provided by Clark & Freeman offer a coherent explanation of the New Sociology of Education’s underlying epistemology, which links it not only with certain celebrated features of Marxist theory (in particular the assertion that theory is to be validated through praxis), but also with a growing body of critical social theory.

Phenomenology and the problems of structure

The extreme relativism of the initial formulation of the New Sociology of Education owed much of its emphasis to the influence of phenomenological thought and its insistence on the ability of men to ‘make’ their reality through the processes of social interaction. Both relativism and phenomenology seemed to be key weapons in the early argument. The relativistic stance apparently allowed the assertion that one man’s knowledge was as good as another’s, and therefore challenged the possibility, let alone the validity, of the stratification of knowledge, which was what Young and his colleagues were intent on making problematic. Phenomenology apparently supported such a challenge in its assertion of the power of individuals to create knowledge and structure through the achievement of common sense understandings through negotiation. For if men could create their world, then so too could they recreate it. What was not initially realised was that the espousal of relativistic and phenomenological positions prevented the analysis of the very structures that were argued as problematic, for

The phenomenological framework does not enable us to pose the question of why it is that certain stable institutionalised meanings emerge from practice rather than others, or the extent to which the channelling of interpreted meanings is socially structured and related to other significant aspects of social structure.

(Sharp & Green, 1975, p. 24)

In this respect, the early phenomenological and relativistic arguments of Young (1971), Esland (1971) and Keddie (1971) in particular, act against solution of the problems of ‘the social organisation of knowledge’ (Young, 1971, p. 8) and ‘how some categories and not others gain institutional legitimacy’ (Young, 1971, p. 13).

This contradiction within the early formulation worried even those who were sympathetic to the concerns of the New Sociology of Education:

The over-emphasis on the notion that reality is socially constructed seems to have led to a neglect of the consideration of how and why reality comes to be constructed in particular ways and how and why particular constructions of reality seem to have the power to resist subversion.

(Whitty, 1974, p. 125)

The reasons why a phenomenological relativism cannot pursue these questions lie partly in its methodological procedures, which exclude questions of time, place and structure, other than those immediately observable, interpretable and attributed by participants. As Holly argues,

A satisfactory social epistemology cannot be derived from a subjective relativism of this kind for two reasons. First, a phenomenological analysis cannot, by definition, penetrate beyond the immediately present conditions, the competing definitions avowed or implied by actors in a given situation. We are, therefore, debarred from considering wider social factors, more or less distant in time or space. Secondly, even in the case of the immediate situation, the subject’s perceptions or ‘construction of reality’ is clearly not the only factor determining the differential status being accorded to various types of knowledge. A viable theory of knowledge needs, on the one hand, to take account of the historical character of objectified knowledge and, on the other, the nature of the social relations temporarily determining a given stratification.

(Holly, 1977, p. 178)

But even more serious than these limitations of phenomenological analysis by time and place, and the methodological exclusion of historical and social linkages, is the theoretical incapacity of phenomenology to provide a basis for making judgements of the value of social constructions. While such a perspective might be used to support the withdrawal of legitimacy from some malevolent social...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Education and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• General introduction
• Part 1: Theme: social theory and education
• Part 2: Theme: social inequality and education
• Part 3: Theme: sociology of institutions, curriculum and pedagogy
• Part 4: Theme: research practices in the sociology of education