Social Analysis of Education

After the new sociology

Philip Wexler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415792134
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351814133
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1987, this book offers an ideological critique of the new sociology of education, with the aim to redeem understanding of the social and historical character of knowledge. It argues that with an historical and social grasp, university knowledge can be understood as a collective product and can become a useful resource for encountering and transforming the social present.

To reach this objective, the book reviews the history of the new sociology of education and shows how it is limited by earlier times and social conflicts. In doing so, it aims to continue the unrealized critical analysis that was promised by the new sociology of education and remained contained.

PART ONE

Social analysis and sociology of education

1

Revision

Introduction

The cultural revolution that was expressed early in the student movement and that later appeared in paradigmatic critiques of academic social science has been contained. The form this containment takes is self-congratulatory. The existence of so-called critiques and alternatives gives the aura of transformation and progress within society. In fact, these alternatives operate as blockages to the exploration and realization of deeper differences and changes. The new sociology of education is an asserted example of this dynamic containment. Progressive change and its difference from the ‘old’ is advertized. But, there are no questions asked that challenge the mode of doing new sociology of education, or that lead to an understanding of it as a particular kind of historical cultural practice. Do we ask: Of what historic movement was new sociology of education a part? Do alternatives work to block reclamation of the larger social aims that first inspired them? Does the legitimacy of alternative paradigms and status of radical academic professionals block perception of new social movements?

The starting point of the social analysis of education that I offer in this book is to criticize the academic alternative of new sociology of education. My criticism is that the new sociology of education is not reflexively historical. It is not understood as part of a cultural and class movement. Without this basic reflexive social understanding, it becomes easy to extract concepts and theories from collective historical movements. I think that has happened in the new sociology of education. My purpose is not simply to perform an ideology critique of the new sociology of education, although that is a valuable devaluation of objectivist pretensions. Ideology critique, however, can become the carping historicism that stops questioning at one’s own front door. My aim, rather, is recollective and redemptive: to redeem understanding of the social and historical character of knowledge. With an historical, social grasp, university knowledge can be understood as a collective product. It can become a useful cultural resource for encountering and transforming the social present.

The new sociology of education has a history. I review that history, to loosen the grip of historically reified knowledge that poses as ‘new’ or ‘radical.’ I aim to show how the new sociology of education is limited by the horizons, hopes and defenses of earlier times and previous social conflicts. I want to press forward the still unrealized critical analysis that I think was promised by the new sociology of education and remains contained, rather than fully realized in theory and in practice.

New sociology of education

The main tendency in new sociology of education’s recent past has been to attack the institutions and culture of liberalism, to criticize its educational concepts and practices. We can see, I think, how the new sociology of education attack on liberalism was part of a broader historical movement which included: conflict of class factions and social groups; cultural boundary shifts; reformulation of professional identities within the academy; and reorganization of educational institutions more generally. The new sociology of education, like other types of university knowledge, belongs to an historically identifiable social group engaged in cultural action on its own behalf. The dilemma that group now faces is whether to continue refining and rationalizing cultural residues of its past that are now institutionalized as legitimate knowledge, or whether instead to look ahead to an uncertain and increasingly polarized future.

My criticism of the new sociology of education is that while it asserted the interested social basis of the old sociology of education, it neglected its own historicity. The new sociologists failed to explore the practical and intellectual relation of their work to the historic developments to which it belonged. New sociology shared with conventional academic knowledge an illusion of sociocultural autonomy. That illusion of autonomy is integral to, and protective of, the academic norm which codes conceptual change only as theoretical advance, rather than as also rationalization of cultural change. This does not mean that there were not important conceptual changes in the social study of education indicated by the rubric ‘new sociology of education.’

The new sociologists of education made a particular effective claim to analyze the social construction of meaning and to apply the social theory of knowledge neglected by their predecessors in the old sociology (Young, 1971; Brown, 1974). Symbolic inter-reactionism and various versions of Marxism replaced the liberal old sociology of education’s commitment to its central theme of estimating the value of education for social mobility. ‘Correspondence’ (Bowles and Gintis, 1976) and ‘reproduction’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Apple, 1979a) became organizing concepts that proclaimed a less hopeful mood about the social possibilities of education. New sociology of education asserted instead a socially less sanguine theory of the relation between education and society. Drawing on the work of educationists as well as sociologists, gleaning encouragement from a more theoretical mood, new sociology brought into play the Marxism and phenomenology which had been generally excluded from American academic social science. Yet, even in that paradigmatically radical achievement, it already slighted explication of the deeper cultural sources of the critique of liberalism, in Romanticism, and even in historical materialism.

It is a deeper criticism of liberalism that now presses the new sociology of education to awake from the recent respectability it discovered in its role as alternative within the apparatus of social science. But unlike the earlier post-sixties academic radicalism which drove new sociology of education, the deeper criticism, while it has a long social history, has now a different and less direct origin. It seems to arrive at sociology of education from afar, as a result of a kind of discursive status consumerism and academic fashion consciousness. Critique is now applied to sociology of education by borrowing from modern social and cultural theory. But the high status discursive resources that are borrowed as ideas to be applied, are themselves part of a much larger cultural and social transformation that includes the transformation of educational practice.

Incipient changes in educational practice hint at a wider redefinition of, generally, social movements and social theory. The new sociology of education is poised to articulate education’s pivotal position in the social transformation and in the redefinition of the relation between social practice, social movement, and social theory. A central motive for my critique of the new sociology of education is to impair its current academic cultural use. For like other social science ‘alternatives,’ it operates as a blockage to the articulation of the present social transformation.

The new sociology of education achieves this discursive blockage by occupying the space allocated to negation and critique. Is the ‘old,’ ‘mainstream’ sociology of education liberal and meliorist? Then the ‘new’ sociology of education announces the pervasiveness of domination. Is the sociology of education obsessed with mobility and status attainment? Then the new sociology discovers as its topic educational knowledge and the reproduction of social classes. Occupying the culturally legitimate space of negation, the alternative academic discourse garners discursive power to itself at the cost of elevating its counter-concepts to the same transhistorical static level as those ideas that it opposes. While it claims to be ‘new,’ as I will show, new sociology of education actually recoups and repeats the logic and concepts of an earlier time, the time of its origin in opposition. It has the effect of blocking the articulation of a contemporary critical analysis. It does that by assimilating the voices of opposition to its central concepts, but remaining silent about the social and cultural transformation now occurring which changes the very meaning and terms of opposition. The new sociology shares with the old the same formal ideology, the same way of thinking and talking about knowledge and about its own utterances. In Foucault’s (1970) term, it is part of the same episteme. In its cultural form, despite the critique of liberalism, it expresses the same representational realism as old, conventional or mainstream sociology. It antedates current transformations in technology, culture, and social knowledge. Going beyond the formal cultural limitations of the new sociology of education, and its socially conservative uses requires, I think, a challenge to that larger episteme, to the form of sociology.

Social analysis

I want to suggest that sociology is being replaced by social analysis. While social analysis is not a direct representation of changes in social life, it is part of a broad set of historical changes in social production and organization, in the content and forms of cultural expression, and in the aims and linguistic means of analytic social work. What are these broad changes and what do they imply for social understanding?

There are many attempts to describe a current broad set of changes at the global level: Toffler (1971) indicates a third wave; Bell (1979) describes a post-industrial society; Luke (1983) develops the theme of an ecological society. At an equally global level, a cultural transformation is described when: Baudrillard (1981) describes and criticizes the semiological reduction and the arrival of the speechless, consumer society; Foucault (1979; 1982) writes of a disciplinary, discursive society; MacCannell and MacCannell (1982) announce that it is ‘the time of the sign.’

At this general level, changes are being described in the language and form of systematic social understanding as well as in the productive system, social organization and cultural forms of society. Geertz (1980) has described a ‘refiguration’ of social thought, by which he means that the metaphors which structure social analysis are increasingly drawn from the humanities rather than the so-called natural sciences. The shift in the kinds of metaphors used in social theorizing represents the current weight granted to the words and images of symbolic action and cultural performance, and indicates also a redirection in the goal of social science toward ‘interpretation.’ Processes of significance, of making meaning, and the traditional locus of their study, become the focus of an interpretive social science. More and more of shared social meaning and the activity of social understanding is encompassed by the now auratic term: text.

‘The rise of the text’ (Rorty, 1982) in social analytic language is more than just a shift in the locus of metaphors, or the disciplinary bases of social science. It is also a modern occasion for the renewal of Romanticism as a social movement, and despite its own ethos of dispersion, also becomes the center of a contemporary critique and metaphysics. The imagery and methodology of textualism goes beyond a disciplinary realignment. Rather, as Barthes (1981:43) puts it, ‘… textual analysis impugns the idea of a final signified.’

Derrida’s (1982:3–27) concept of ‘differance’ is another assertion against the philosophical foundations of objectivism. The insistent deferral of some thing itself, in favor of the relational dynamism of the representational system makes not ‘the text,’ but the chain of signification into the crucial active process. The oppositional system which anthropological structuralism first generalized from linguistics is put into movement by further extending the relational difference model to the sign itself. If structuralism abrogated the view of a natural tie between object and language as its representation, post-structuralism severs the necessity of a relation between representing concept and symbolic expression, between signified and signifier (Young, 1981:15). The free-play of the structure (Derrida, 1970) decenters, defers (the signified, the referrent, the subject, the center, the transcendental being), and introduces linguistic playful movement, ‘jouissance,’ as the activity antithetical to any understanding of process as an emanation from a center or subject. Not the text, but textuality, signifying movement, is the key term for the deeper analytic alteration that Geertz taps by the term of ‘refiguration.’ This movement is broadly called ‘post-structuralism’ (Young, 1981; Lentricchia, 1980; Rorty, 1982). Like the text metaphor which is its more assimilable, though essentialized, trace, this movement is seeping into institutionalized channels of social analysis.

The transformation includes then post-industrialism in social life and post-structuralism in social analysis. However, like every condensation of succinct insight, the global descriptions oversimplify and leave out too much. Talk of post-industrialism as the general social change that reflects a tremendous growth in information technology and the communications apparatus should not obscure the extent to which social life continues the exploitative patterns that have typified industrial social relations. Recognition of the increased importance of new mass cultural forms of symbolic communication does not erase the still-engaging power that organic attachments and interactional rituals have to determine social commitments and to form social identities. Any post-industrial society that is now surging forward is also carrying with it encasing and determinative elements from earlier patterns of industrial and preindustrial forms of organized social life. Likewise, a refiguration of cultural performance, either in the high culture of the academic discourses of the social sciences, or in the symbolic action that occurs in every other sector of social life, is also limited by extant cultural forms and commitments. For example, the social organization of discourse production in the academy has not been altered by the renaissance and spread of interpretive paradigms, or by provocative declarations about ‘the end of metaphysics’ (Derrida, 1982), ‘humanism’, and ‘man’ (Foucault, 1972). Also, centralization of the mass culture industry has become more complex, but it has not been arrested by the rise of computers and telecommunications (Schiller, 1981; Mosco, 1982). Mass cultural forms of speech and entertainment have not been evidently shattered by the revolution in technological production. Descriptions of global transformations in productive energy, social organization, cultural form, and academic discourse, have all, I think, to be tempered, though not dismissed, by recognizing the continuing influence of the past.

There is a second type of qualification to attach to discussions of a global transformation and of an historic emergent new age in forms of life and discourse; the more specific social changes that occur within larger cycles, and affect everyday existence. For example, there has been a lot less talk about historic restorations than about revolutions and refigurations. Yet, in the United States, there is every sign that we have been going through precisely the kind of classic restoration that Marx described in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1959):

An entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revolution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch and, in order that no doubt as to the relapse may be possible, the old dates arise again, the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts … Society now seems to have fallen back behind its point of departure.

This cultural restoration, which has revived earlier images, rhetoric, and cultural content, is also related to particular and specifiable processes of institutional reorganization. In the past decade, a deliberate effort to dismantle social welfare aspects of the state has occurred. Simultaneously, there has been an economic crisis more severe than any since the great depression. Within that cultural atmosphere and institutional strategy, new forms of social organization have emerged, notably a move toward a corporatist model of social life.

In these social and cultural conditions, which clearly include a change in the analytic languages and prevailing mood of the academy, it is no longer a question of substituting Marxist categories for functionalist ones, or field methods for multivariate research. In this current movement, the activity of social knowledge is being dispersed and diffused back into collective history and into the process of making meaning. That is the key to the formal change from sociology to social analysis. The battle lines are now drawn differently: no longer between positivist and anti-positivist, or liberal and Marxist sociology, history and hermeneutics, or even humanities and social sciences. Rather, the oppositions within the domain of knowledge are between: symbolic practice against conceptual magic; points on a moving grid against secured foundational edifices; and, of social analysis as a symbolic movement against the disciplinary sociology that has operated as a rigidified, and culturally compartmentalized scientistic self-denial of practical activity.

The legitimating bar of scientism that separates social analysis from other forms of cultural expression currently has the effect of blocking any view of a deeper and more pervasive alteration that social science now shares with a wider cultural movement.

The idealist character of American social science is not that it asserts the causal primacy of ideas in its explanations of the course of events. It is that it denies that social science is a practical symbolic activity. From this vantage point, Marxist social science in America has generally been no less idealist. There too, social analysis as an historical cultural activity has been obscured in favor of a quest for apparently more accurate facts and truer theories. An alternative view is to see social analysis as historical action. In this view, its meaning is only historical, social, and practical. It counts only as a consequential cultural moment within the flow of specific historical movements. I know that such an alternative can send a chill of anti-scientific relativism to the heart of orthodox and liberal alike.

Sociology entertained this possibility, but only briefly and then only on the periphery. It politely took into account social, symbolic, practical, historical, and collective f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One Social analysis and sociology of education
• Part Two After the new sociology of education
• Part Three Social analysis of education
• Bibliography
• Index