Social Origins of Educational Systems

Margaret S. Archer, Margaret Archer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415639033
• eBook ISBN: 9781136660979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1979, this now classic text presents a major study of the development of educational systems, focusing in detail on those of England, Denmark, France, and Russia - chosen because of their present educational differences and the historical diversity of their cultures and social structures. Professor Archer goes on to provide a theoretical framework which accounts for the major characteristics of national education and the principal changes that such systems have undergone.

Now with a new introduction, Social Origins of Educational Systems is vital reading for all those interested in the sociology of education.

Previously published reviews:

'A large-scale masterly study, this book is the most important contribution to the sociology of education since the second world war as well as being a substantial contribution to the consolidation of sociology itself.' - The Economist

'I cannot improve on her own statement of what she is trying to do: 'The sociological contribution consists in providing a theoretical account of macroscopic patterns of change in terms of the structural and cultural factors which produce and sustain them'...Unquestionably, this book is an impressive work of scholarship, well planned conceptually and uniting its theoretical base with a set of four thoroughly and interestingly researched case-studies of the history of the educational systems of Denmark, England, France and Russia.' - British Journal of the Sociology of Education

'This magnificent treatise seriously explores many of the most recalcitrant questions about institutional systems.' - Journal of Curriculum Studies

'A gargantuan and impressive socio-historical enterprise.' - Encounter

'...a major achievement.' - New Society

1 THINKING AND THEORIZING ABOUT EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS

The questions dealt with here are macroscopic ones: how do educational systems develop and how do they change? The nature of these problems means that our approach to them must be both historical and comparative. If sociology is to add to the work of the educational historian and the comparative educationalist it must be by developing theories which over-arch their findings. This is what the present study attempts to do – to account for the characteristics and contours of national educational systems and their processes of change. However, it goes about this in a particular way because of the conviction that macroscopic educational problems can best be approached through macro-sociological theory.

The first question about the characteristics of education can be broken down into three subsidiary ones: Who gets it? What happens to them during it? Where do they go to after it? These enquiries about inputs, processes and outputs subsume a whole range of issues, many of which have often been discussed independently. They embrace problems about educational opportunity, selection and discrimination, about the management and transmission of knowledge and values, and about social placement, stratification, and mobility. At the same time they raise the two most general problems of all, namely those about the effects of society upon education and about the consequences of education for society.

Thus the fundamental question here is why does education have the particular inputs, processes and outputs which characterize it at any given time? The basic answer to it is held to be very simple. Education has the characteristics it does because of the goals pursued by those who control it. The second question asks why these particular inputs, processes and outputs change over time? The basic answer given here is equally simple. Change occurs because new educational goals are pursued by those who have the power to modify previous practices. As we shall see, these answers are of a deceptive simplicity. They are insisted upon now, at the beginning, because, however complex our final formulations turn out to be, education is fundamentally about what people have wanted of it and have been able to do to it.

The real answers are more complicated but they supplement rather than contradict the above. It is important never to lose sight of the fact that the complex theories we develop to account for education and educational change are theories about the educational activities of people. This very basic point is underlined for two reasons. Firstly, because however fundamental, much of the literature in fact contradicts it and embodies implicit beliefs in hidden hands, evolutionary mechanisms, and spontaneous adjustments to social change. There education is still seen as mysteriously adapting to social requirements and responding to demands of society not of people. Secondly, and for the present purposes much more importantly, our theories will be about the educational activities of people even though they will not explain educational development strictly in terms of people alone.

The basic answers are too simple because they beg more questions than they solve. To say that education derives its characteristic features from the aims of those who control it immediately raises problems concerning the identification of controlling groups, the bases and processes upon which control rests, the methods and channels through which it is exerted, the extensiveness of control, the reactions of others to this control, and their educational consequences. Similarly, where change is concerned, it is not explained until an account has been given of why educational goals change, who does the changing, and how they impose the changes they seek. To confront these problems is to recognize that their solution depends upon analyzing complex forms of social interaction. Furthermore, the nature of education is rarely, if ever, the practical realization of an ideal form of instruction as envisaged by a particular group. Instead, most of the time most of the forms that education takes are the political products of power struggles. They bear the marks of concession to allies and compromise with opponents. Thus to understand the nature of education at any time we need to know not only who won the struggle for control, but also how: not merely who lost, but also how badly they lost.

Secondly, the basic answers are deceptively simple because they convey the impression that education and educational change can be explained by reference to group goals and balances of power alone. It is a false impression because there are other factors which constrain both the goal formation and goal attainment of even the most powerful group – that is the group most free to impose its definition of instruction and to mould education to its purposes. The point is that no group, not even for that matter the whole of society acting in accord, has a blank sheet of paper on which to design national education. Conceptions of education are of necessity limited by the contemporary state of knowledge, and their implementation by the existing availability of skills and resources. Another way of stating this is to say that cultural and structural factors constrain educational planning and its execution. Since this is the case, then explanations of education and educational change will be partly in terms of such factors.

Moreover, only the minimal logical constraints have been mentioned so far: in practice educational action is also affected by a variable set of cultural and structural factors which make up its environment. Educational systems, rarities before the eighteenth century, emerged within complex social structures and cultures and this context conditioned the conception and conduct of action of those seeking educational development. Among other things the social distribution of resources and values and the patterning of vested interests in the existing form of education were crucially important factors. Once a given form of education exists it exerts an influence on future educational change. Alternative educational plans are, to some extent, reactions to it (they represent desires to change inputs, transform processes, or alter the end products); attempts to change it are affected by it (by the degree to which it monopolizes educational skills and resources); and change is change of it (which means dismantling, transforming, or in some way grappling with it).

These considerations introduce important refinements to the basic answers and at the same time specify the theoretical problems to be solved in answering the basic questions properly. A macro-sociology of education thus involves the examination of two things and the relations between them. On the one hand, complex kinds of social interaction whose result is the emergence of particular forms of education: on the other, complex types of social and educational structures which shape the context in which interaction and change occur. The sociological task is thus to conceptualize and theorize about the relationship between these two elements. Its aim is therefore to provide an explanation of how social interaction produced specific kinds of education in different countries and how, from within this context, further interaction succeeded in introducing change.

It is a complicated task because it involves separating out the factors which impinge upon education from the wider social structure and network of social relationships in which it is embedded. This means that we have to differentiate continuously between those things in society which influence education and those which may be ignored at any given time because they do not then impinge upon it. It also follows that the factors which are included are themselves treated as unproblematic – for instance, in incorporating the educational consequences of economic organization we do not try to explain the nature of the economy, but treat it as given. This procedure is unavoidable for there is no such thing as an educational theory (which explains education by things educational), there are only sociological theories of educational development and change. Equally, there is no such thing as a unified sociological theory which can be applied to education, whilst simultaneously explaining the nature of and relationships between every other relevant element.

It is a task worth doing in its own right but also because, if such theories are developed, they can point to the best ways of going about changing our educational systems. There is nothing more pointless than the debates which have now lasted for centuries about the ideal nature of education. The only function they serve is in helping individuals and groups to clarify their educational goals, to recognize the implications of their chosen aims, and sometimes to get others to share them. They remain sterile unless and until they are harnessed to an understanding of the processes by which present education can be changed to conform to the ideal.

However, we are proposing to go about this task in a particular way and to develop a particular type of sociological theory to deal with the two major problems. It will be clear by now that both a pure action approach and a purely structural approach have been rejected in favour of a macro-sociological perspective which blends the two. Action theory is held to be incomplete because it has to take the social context of action for granted, and structural theories are considered equally inadequate if they make no reference to social interaction, but instead perpetuate an empty form of determinism. Nevertheless, rejection of these two types of theories does not involve abandoning all of their core premises. Indeed the notion that relations between education and other social institutions condition social interaction and in turn influence educational change is crucially important. But, equally essential to explaining the origins of educational systems and the processes of educational change are propositions about the independent contributions made by social interaction. In other words, it is argued that an adequate sociology of education must incorporate statements about the structural conditioning of educational interaction and about the influence of independent action on educational change.

Weber’s analysis which gave equal emphasis to the limitations that social structures impose on interaction and to the opportunity for innovatory action presented by the instability of such structures is the prototype of this theoretical approach. The kind of macro-sociology advocated here is seen as following the mainstream of the Weberian tradition. Pedigrees, however, can always be disputed and are no substitute for justifying the adoption of a particular approach. The rest of the chapter will be devoted to just that: to spelling out the nature of macro-sociological theory, to examining the principal objections brought against it, and to disabusing serious misapprehensions about it.

IN DEFENCE OF MACRO-SOCIOLOGY

From the beginning of the discipline sociologists have been concerned with the explanation of large-scale, complex social phenomena. From its earliest origins too there has been disagreement about the nature of such phenomena and the proper method of explaining them. The debate about their nature has been conducted between those who describe the major components of social structure in holistic terms versus those who employ individualistic terms. It is thus a controversy about the nature of sociological concepts, or, to put it another way, about the definition of the ‘social’. Those maintaining that supra-individual group properties can be meaningfully attributed to social phenomena are usually termed descriptive holists. On the other hand descriptive individualists insist that, in principle at least, all group concepts can be redefined in terms of individual behaviour (although group properties like stratification and centralization may be quite different from those possessed by individuals).¹ It is only a slight exaggeration to claim that we are all descriptive individualists now, i.e., that we all accept as a matter of logic that groups are made up of nothing more than individuals and the relations between them, whatever the practical difficulties of defining our concepts in this way. Because descriptive individualism is so general this particular debate has lost its sting and will not be re-entered here.

However, even if we agree in principle about the nature of the ‘social’, this does not involve consensus upon how we can explain large-scale events and things. This is a distinct problem: whilst some have adopted a macro-sociological approach as appropriate for the explanation of complex phenomena, others have denied that the scale of events studied calls for a distinctive body of sociological theory. It is with this denial that the rest of the chapter will be concerned. The issues involved have of course been the subject of considerable philosophical as well as sociological controversy, and reference will frequently have to be made to the former in discussing the latter. However, the philosophical debate will not be entered into here except to show that the conclusions reached by many philosophers do not constitute practical injunctions to develop one kind of sociological theory rather than another.

First, however, macro-sociology must be defined and the nature of the claims made about its special appropriateness for the explanation of complex social structures and large-scale social processes need to be outlined. Historically the origins of the discipline are synonymous with the origins of macro-sociology – most of the early founding fathers asked big questions to which they gave equally big answers. Yet initially there was not thought to be anything distinctive or difficult about, for example, explaining political instability by reference to sedentary culture (Ibn Khaldun) or social order by religious organization (Maistre and Bonald). The reason for this seems to be that these thinkers did not simultaneously address themselves to the explanation of smaller phenomena: for when, in the nineteenth century, various writers sought to treat both small group interaction and events of the largest scale together, the problem of scope became immediately apparent and, with it, the nature of macro-sociology was clarified.

The work of Simmel and Weber contains a recognition of the fact that there is frequently little similarity between the behaviour of a complex and that of its component elements. Correspondingly both acknowledged that the laws developed to cope with one level of complexity were not directly applicable to a higher or lower level. Thus Simmel appears to have become increasingly uneasy about the appropriateness of applying statements concerning dyadic or tryadic relations to, for instance, the behaviour of political parties or religious organizations, because of the ‘unending complexity’ of these large-scale phenomena.² To him the problem of transition from micro- to macro-sociological considerations appeared insuperable and in consequence he tended to endorse a dualistic position in which micro explanations were provided for small-scale events and macro ones for the large-scale. The distinctive characteristic of such macro-sociological explanations is the assumption that the laws explaining large group behaviour are emergent with respect to laws about individuals. Macro-sociological laws contain group variables like ‘ruling class ideology’, ‘political stability’, ‘legitimacy’, or ‘social stratification’ and often state relations between them. While such variables are defined in terms of properties of and relations between individuals, they only pertain to certain sizes of groups. For example, ‘racism’ can develop in the tryad, but logically cannot emerge from dyadic interaction.

However, while Simmel’s dualism led him to treat macro-sociology as an undertaking distinct from studies of smaller phenomena, rather than simply a distinct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Thinking and Theorizing About Educational Systems
• Part I: The Development of State Educational Systems
• Part II: Educational Systems in Action
• Index