Sociology and School Knowledge

Geoff Whitty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135835675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The rise of a radical 'new' sociology of education during the early 1970s focused attention on the nature of school knowledge. Although this new approach was set to revolutionize the subject, within a few years, many people considered these developments an eccentric interlude, with little relevance to curriculum theory or practice. First published in 1985, this book offers a more positive view of the new sociology of education and its contribution to our understanding of the curriculum. In doing so, it argues that some of the radical promise of the new sociology of education could be realised, but only if sociologists, teachers and political movements of the left work more closely together

Part One

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From theory and research to policy and practice

1

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Sociological approaches to the school curriculum

The sociology of education in Britain is generally regarded as having gone through a paradigm shift in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A supposed ‘new direction’ in the sociology of education was seen to emerge from the work of Basil Bernstein and Michael F.D.Young and their colleagues and students at the Institute of Education in London. This shift, but also the lack of a single-minded adoption of any one of a number of possible lines of development, was symbolized in the sub-title of the first major publication by this group—Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education (Young 1971a). In so far as there was anything that had a coherent claim to be termed a ‘new sociology of education’ (Gorbutt 1972), its approach was one that sought to make problematic that which had hitherto been taken for granted in education (Young 1971b). As, at least initially, many of the writers associated with these developments chose to make the nature of school knowledge one of their central problems (Esland 1971; Keddie 1971), this period is often seen as opening up for the first time the possibility of a genuinely sociological approach to the study of the school curriculum. As early as 1970 Young defined the central project of the group associated with him as an attempt to relate the ‘principles of selection and organization that underlie curricula to their institutional and interactional setting in schools and classrooms and to the wider social structure’ (Young 1971b). This fairly ambitious and catholic definition of the task of a sociology of the curriculum is worth bearing in mind throughout our exploration of the way in which different elements of the formulation received emphasis at different times during the following decade, as different figures in its somewhat eclectic intellectual heritage of phenomenologists, interactionists and Marxists gained ascendancy.

There are some who seem to regard the whole of the 1970s as something of an eccentric interlude in the history of the sociology of education. For some observers, the period that was dominated by the so-called ‘new sociology of education’ and its various phenomenological and neo-Marxist derivatives diverted a generation of sociologists of education from the central concerns and tasks of the discipline. Some of these same observers have seen in the publication of a new book by one of the founding fathers of British sociology of education (Halsey et al. 1980), and in the work of the latest generation of writers in this field (Demaine 1981), evidence that the 1980s have brought a return to the older orthodoxies in the field (St John-Brooks 1980). However, I want to suggest that, despite its many shortcomings, the work of the 1970s has not been entirely at odds with the mainstream concerns of the discipline and that its legacy is of continuing value to contemporary sociologists, curriculum theorists, policy-makers and teachers, even if this is in ways that were not generally grasped at the time. The book therefore begins with an attempt to trace the various ways in which sociologists have sought to conceptualize the relationship between curricula and their institutional and societal contexts over the past fifteen or so years.

The emergence of the ‘new’ sociology of education

In some ways at least, the emphasis on the newness of the new sociology of education is misleading. Certainly, leaving aside the work of Mannheim (who seems to have been neglected by old-and new-style sociologists of education alike), the idea that the curriculum should be seen as a social invention, reflecting conscious or unconscious cultural choices that accorded with the values and beliefs of dominant groups, was not a central one in British sociology of education prior to that date. Nor were the sociology of knowledge and phenomenology perspectives that figured in the work of the major practitioners in the field such as Halsey and Floud. On the other hand, Banks (1974) has pointed out that sociological analysis of the curriculum was not entirely lacking in the traditional sociology of education, as could be seen in the work of Cotgrove (1958) and Musgrave (1967) on technical education. Nevertheless, these features of the work of Young and his collaborators were those which received most initial attention and there was thus a tendency for its advocates to emphasize its refreshing ‘newness’ and its adversaries to point to its idiosyncracies. Yet, at the same time, it is important to insist that there is a sense in which the new sociology of education constituted a development of, rather than a break with, the dominant tradition in the British sociology of education since its emergence as a major field of study in the 1950s, a tradition largely concerned with the underachievement of working-class children in school. I want to suggest that an important influence in the subsequent development of British sociology of education was this same concern emerging in new, and politically more radical, guises. Indeed, as will be seen, much of the history of the sociology of education in Britain since the late 1960s was, in part at least, the product of an interplay between this dominant political concern and successive fashions within academic sociology.

I shall therefore briefly try to locate the so-called new sociology of education within the history of British sociology of education more generally. The dominant theoretical paradigm adopted by British sociologists of education in the 1950s and 1960s was that of structural-functionalism though it was rarely made explicit. However, the research tradition was also strongly influenced by a commitment to a version of Fabian socialism and social engineering via education. Like the policy-makers with whom they became associated, British sociologists in the twenty years after the Second World War were largely concerned with the problem of increasing access to schooling rather than with examining the nature of the education which they sought to distribute more widely. Their interest focused upon the consistent tendency for the children of manual workers to receive less schooling and achieve less success at each of the successive educational hurdles than the children of professional and managerial workers. In most of these studies of working-class failure (Silver 1973) there was a confident assumption that what we took for granted as education was a ‘good’ in itself and that it was in the interests of both individuals and the national economy that they should receive more of it. Much the same assumption seemed to be made about the social mobility that education was presumed to encourage. The variety of statistical studies produced during the 1950s and early 1960s made it clear, however, that the tripartite system of education was failing to increase significantly the number of upwardly mobile working-class children, and it was hoped that sociologists would be able to explain working-class failure and thus provide a basis for policies that would produce the equality of opportunity which the earlier reforms had failed to achieve.

Given this basic orientation, sociologists began to examine in more detail the relationship between social class and educational performance. Their initial work sought to explain the phenomenon of school failure by reference to the cultural features of working-class life (Craft 1970), though the concept of culture they employed was a heavily loaded one and the methodologies they employed were hardly able to grasp the nature of this culture in the way recent approaches to cultural studies have sought to do. The general orientation was one in which working-class culture was characterized as creating a ‘deficit’ in the child that would have to be remedied before he or she could hope to succeed at school (Keddie 1973). So long as the nature of education was taken for granted, home background was seen as the key variable in the production of educational success and failure. The response of policy-makers was to pursue two related strategies, which involved broadening access to schooling and developing ways of counteracting the influence of class culture upon school achievement. The introduction of comprehensive education, RoSLA, ‘compensatory education’ programmes and the extension of nursery education may all be seen, in some respects at least, as examples of such strategies. Clearly the organizational structure of schooling did itself come under a certain amount of critical scrutiny, and indeed underwent successive changes, but these were generally designed to increase the penetration of an education, the nature of which continued to be taken for granted.

However, as one organizational innovation followed another, and the correlations between social class background and school achievement remained remarkably consistent over time, in both Britain and the USA, the validity of the assumption that the major problems for working-class pupils were those of home background and of access to schooling was increasingly called into question. Studies began to home in on the school as a site of interaction between home culture and school culture. Some of these studies were more micro-sociological in orientation and attempted to grasp how a pupil’s experience of school produced success and failure. In some ways Colin Lacey’s book, Hightown Grammar (Lacey 1970), supports his own view that it stood (along with David Hargreaves’s Social Relations in a Secondary School (Hargreaves 1967)) the new sociologies of education. Yet, although Lacey’s book proposed a change from streaming to mixed-ability teaching, it did not even entertain the notion that the nature of the central activities of schooling might be altered and it ended with a suggestion that working-class children should be helped to adapt to schooling—by appointing social workers to those whose home backgrounds seemed most likely to create problems. Even Hargreaves only raised the possibility of redefining the nature of education in one of his concluding remarks and it was far from clear what he meant by it. Yet these two studies were exceptional in placing any emphasis at all on the process of schooling as an explanatory variable.

Thus, the tendency of sociologists to treat the curriculum as outside the scope of their enquiries persisted even within those studies that began to look more critically at the institutions of schooling. Young made the comment about sociological studies of public schools that ‘one can read them and hardly be aware that considerable periods of pupils’ time are taken up, and presumably their consciousness is developed, by what they do in classrooms, laboratories and libraries and by the kinds of courses made available to them’ (Young 1973a). This was more widely applicable to studies of other kinds of schools as well. Young also suggested that the neglect of curriculum issues by sociologists until the late 1960s might well be explained by the difficulty of conceiving of alternatives when ‘the organization of knowledge implicit in our own curricula is so much part of our taken-for-granted world’ (Young 1971b). It was only with the failure of those policies that attempted to tackle the less deeply embedded features of education, and only when a broader movement for curriculum change had already developed, that the nature of what working-class pupils were failing at began to be given serious attention by sociologists of education. Warwick (1974) goes so far as to suggest that some of their work in this field was explicitly intended to provide theoretical support for the growing ‘movement for a progressive curriculum based in the concept of integration’.

It is therefore interesting to notice that, writing as long ago as 1961 and before many of the successive organizational innovations had been introduced into the British educational system, Raymond Williams, in The Long Revolution, made the following comment in the course of a perceptive analysis of the development of English education:

Attention has been concentrated, by critics in the public educator tradition, on the organization of secondary education to the point where a common general education of a genuinely secondary kind, will be available to all. The detailed proposals for this are interesting and many successful experiments have already been undertaken. Yet it remains true that the crucial question, in any such programme, is that of curriculum and teaching method, and it is difficult to feel that the present grammar-school curriculum, or its partial imitation and local extension by the secondary modern school, is of such a kind that the problem is merely one of distributing it more widely. An educational curriculum as we have seen again and again in past periods, expresses a compromise between an inherited selection of interests and the emphasis of new interests. At varying points in history, even this compromise may be long delayed, and it will often be muddled. The fact about our present curriculum is that it was essentially created by the nineteenth century, following some eighteenth-century models, and retaining elements of the medieval curriculum near its centre. A case can be made for every item in it, yet its omissions are startling.

(Williams 1965:171–2)

It is perhaps significant that during the period of organizational reforms in the 1950s and 1960s, only those like Williams on the political left and Bantock on the right, were arguing that ‘the basic educational dilemma of our time is a cultural one and affects the nature of the meanings to be transmitted by the schools’ (Bantock 1973). Meanwhile the radical and libertarian movement in education in the USA, and subsequently the deschoolers (Illich 1971; Reimer 1972), were also becoming known in Britain by the early 1970s and posing, from a different perspective again, critical questions about the role of schooling in social control. What is interesting about Williams, Bantock, and the radical educators is that they were all working outside the broad arena of consensus politics in which educational policies were formulated and in which most of the leading British sociologists of education were located (CCCS 1981).

By the late 1960s and early 1970s the social democratic consensus was already beginning to fall apart and the notion that state policy would serve to reduce significantly social inequalities and bring in a fair and just society by gradualist means (the classic dream of the Fabian socialists in Britain) was increasingly being called into question. It was also, of course, the tail-end of the period of ‘flower power’ and the philosophy of doing your own thing and creating your own realities. The so-called crisis of western sociology (Gouldner 1972) and the ‘discovery’ of a new brand of phenomenologically informed sociological theory (Filmer et al. 1972) were not unconnected with these trends. Yet the enthusiastic way in which phenomenology, and some of the ideas of American radical educators, were taken on board within the new sociology of education was not merely the result of fashion. It also stemmed from a belief that they offered both analytic and practical tools for tackling the very same issue of working-class school failure which earlier (and apparently discredited) perspectives and policies had failed to overcome.

It was at this time that a number of established sociologists of education were also turning their attention to the social basis of the selection, organization and distribution of knowledge in the school curriculum. In the paper entitled ‘On the curriculum’, first circulated in 1969, Bernstein suggested a way of conceptualizing the school curriculum which made clear that:

there is nothing intrinsic about how educational time is used, or the status of the various contents or the relation between the contents. I am emphasizing the social nature of the system of choices from which emerges a constellation called a curriculum. (Bernstein 1977b:80)

This exploratory paper, from which much of Bernstein’s subsequent work developed, illustrates the way in which the content of the curriculum, and its social organization, were no longer being taken for granted. At about the same time Musgrove was suggesting that sociologists might fruitfully begin to:

examine subjects both within the school and in the nation at large as social systems sustained by communication networks, material endowments and ideologies. Within a school and within the wider society subjects are communities of people, competing and collaborating with one another, defining and defending their boundaries, demanding allegiance from their members and conferring a sense of identity upon them…. Even innovation which appears to be essentially intellectual in character can be usefully examined as the outcome of social interaction and the elaboration of new roles within the organization. (Musgrove 1968:101)

Similarly, Musgrave (1973) has claimed that a recognition of the centrality of the curriculum came to him on a walk in Bristol in the autumn of 1968.

Nevertheless, it was probably only in 1971, with the publication of Knowledge and Control (Young 1971a), that the importance of the school curriculum as an area of sociological study came to be widely recognized, although the particular approaches the book espoused made it the centre of a considerable amount of political and academic controversy (see e.g. Bernbaum 1977; Best 1976; Flew 1976; Simon 1974). For Young and his collaborators, the sociology of education was ‘no longer to be conceived as an area of enquiry distinct from the sociology of knowledge’ (Young 1971b). Gorbutt characterized the new ‘interpretive’ paradigm in the following way:

The sociology of knowledge occupies a central place within interpretive sociology in contrast to its place as a fringe specialism within the normative paradigm. The work of Berger and Luckmann [1967] argues for the recognition of the social origin of all ideas. Knowledge at all levels, common sense, theoretical and scientific thereby becomes thoroughly relativized and the possibility of absolute knowledge is denied. Whereas Marx and Mannheim, key figures in the sociology of knowledge, asserted that some knowledge can be free from social bias, Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge is socially constructed and ideological. Truth and objectivity are human products.

(Gorbutt 1972:6–7)

Gorbutt suggested that this approach had particularly significant implications for the study of three related areas; educational knowledge, the categories of educators and classroom interaction. In the following extract he spelt out some of the implications for the study of educational knowledge:

The relativization of educational knowledge is implicit and explicit in several of the contributions to Michael F.D.Young’s book Knowledge and Control…. As Young points out Treating “what we know” as problematic, in order that it becomes the object of enquiry, rather than as a given, is difficult and perhaps nowhere more so than in education. The out-thereness of the content of what is taught, whether it be as subjects, forms of enquiry, topics or ways of knowing, is very much part of the educator’s taken for granted world.’…It is not surprising that treating knowledge in this way has excited more than a ripple of interest, particularly amongst philosophers of education, for the worthwhileness of particular educational activities can no longer be justified in absolute terms once the social basis of such justification is recognized. The apparent self-evident justification for education into particular forms of knowledge is laid bare as an ideological statement. The process through which particular curricula are institutionalized and justified becomes open to sociological examination. Thus for example, the social assumptions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE FROM THEORY AND RESEARCH TO POLICY AND PRACTICE
• PART TWO CURRENT CURRICULUM CONFLICTS IN A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
• Notes
• References
• Name index
• Subject index