Recommended Reading
In the mid-nineteenth century the founding fathers of Sociology like Marx, Comte and Durkheim, sought to achieve their political objectives by using scientific methods. They wanted to convince others about the validity or desirability of their views and the most effective way to achieve that was to employ the tried and tested research methods of the natural sciences. Whether they were critics of capitalism like Marx, or were supporters of it like Comte and Durkheim, all were systems theorists. They offered meta-narratives which set out how the social system worked. Yet these grand theories did not continue to multiply and later Sociologists have proved to be much less ambitious, simply preferring to limit themselves to more manageable topics within the discipline like education. As such, these Sociologists are known as middle-range theorists.
Whilst there’s been an enduring interest in the subject, theories of education have come in and gone out of fashion. Whether a theory/perspective was in vogue or not, owed much to the state of the economy and the dominant political values of the time.
For example, Functionalism dominated Sociology in the 1950s due to the post-war boom. The education system was largely viewed as beyond reproach. It was a multifunctional institution that socialised the younger generation, gave them economically useful skills and it acted as a sifting and sorting device, differentiating between the able and less able.
By the 1970s, structural tensions, inflation, economic stagnation and unemployment, meant that Marxism and other critical theories like Feminism and anti-authoritarian Liberals became far more influential.
The education system was undemocratic, unequal and unfair. Marxists like Raymond Boudon argued that positional theory determined educational success or failure. It was your position in the class structure that gave you an advantage, or a disadvantage, in the competitive world of education. For Bourdieu, the working class lacked what he referred to as cultural capital; without which they were doomed to failure. Cultural capital included the valuable cultural experiences of foreign travel, museums, theatre and the possession of a sophisticated register and middle class norms and values.
For Bowles and Gintis, the education system propagated a hidden curriculum where the working classes learnt to know their place, to obey rules and were also socialised to accept that inequality was natural and inevitable.
Feminist theories of education focused on gendered learning materials, a gendered curriculum and discrimination in the classroom. Liberals like Ivan Illich in his De-schooling Society argued that young people should not be encumbered by rules and regulations because all discipline stifled their natural creativity. Practitioners should take a laissez-faire approach to student management and students should only work when, and if they choose. Additionally, prescriptive rules of grammar and punctuation should be ignored as what students have to say, is far more important than how they say it. This approach was later referred to as “trendy teaching methods” in the UK and the unfortunate product of this was a generation of largely illiterate, unemployable youngsters.
As the New Right became dominant on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1980’s, education was viewed as being too concerned with the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake. Not only was much of the output of education unproductive in any immediately apparent sense, it was often far too critical of society. Education should concern itself with making an economic contribution to society, focus on vocational training and maintaining social control; all of which was designed to tackle the behaviour and skills deficit amongst working class males.
Today, the Sociology of education remains interested in the classical theories developed by the founding fathers and the seemingly endless reinterpretation of their groundbreaking work, yet there has been a noticeable change in emphasis as researchers try to understand how post-modernity affects education. A post-modern world is an uncertain one that’s chaotic and lacks the optimism of the enlightenment. This makes it very difficult for those charged with planning education policy. Sociologists no longer claim to be able to discover the truth in a risk society, so they limit themselves to offering interpretations of what they see, rather than solutions. Government is then left to make of it what they will and to try and formulate policy prescriptions that will equip our young people for the world of work. Unfortunately, this has led to hyper-reform where qualifications and the regulatory framework are in a constant state of flux. Students are unclear which of the new qualifications have real currency, which qualifications will be discontinued and employers have been equally confused by the whole scenario, especially where the new vocational diplomas are concerned.
