Social Control and Education (RLE Edu L)

Brian Davies

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415689465
• eBook ISBN: 9781136470691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Social control is a central sociological concept which has generated many influential 'models' of man in society. This book examines these major models, and examines the rise of compulsory schooling in Britain and the USA and shows us which aspects of education and social control have been elaborated or neglected in the sociology of education down to the mid 1970s.

1

Background: basic issues in sociology

Agreement more apparent than real?

Facing up to writing a short book entitled Social Control and Education involves the realization that one has undertaken a task rather akin to whistling the Messiah, solo, in the Albert Hall in no more than eleven minutes, flat. The range of material to be covered is potentially immense but, unlike great works of art, parts of it stand in unwieldy relationship to others. The very term ‘social control’ has a different origin and history in sociology and has long meant very different things to different sorts of sociologists. In this sense, of course, it is by no means unique in social science, where almost every basic concept has a multi-meaning character. But it is as well to grasp this fact straight away and recognize that in consequence of it we shall have to spend a fair bit of space clarifying what sociologists mean by social control, as well as how they write about education.

Strangely enough, one of the few things that sociologists of various persuasions seem to agree about in general is the ‘importance’ of education. It is quite interesting and instructive that Everett, writing in the famous first edition of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences in 1937, should say that ‘Education is perhaps the most useful tool of social control but it works for militarists and class conscious snobs as well as for humanitarians and men of vision’ (Everett, 1937: 347). In the process of social control, defined in the wider sense of any influence exerted by society upon the individual, whether conscious or unconscious, she described education as potentially more useful than families or firms or other groups. In a world of rapid technical and economic changes which had led to the widespread breakdown of ‘individualist assumptions’, education is seen as the one public experience through which all must pass. In a world much given to ‘economists, engineers and technicians’, Everett would have delivered education largely into the hands of ‘prophets, poets and artists’, in the hope of combating what she saw as the growingly wrong balance between individuals and society. Modern education was inevitably massively organized and incursing, and was important enough to need careful watching.

Few sociologists would disagree with this sentiment, despite the fact that they are notoriously quarrelsome people in terms of their views of how man in society works. Indeed we shall not be able to do very much by way of analysing their claims about education until we understand a little about what it is they focus their disagreements upon in general. Although we shall see in detail as we go along how different types of social theorists develop their cases, we can assume from the start that:

(1)  different social theories involve differing basic ideas or assumptions about what is ‘really real’;

(2)  man is endowed with mind and consciousness, he experiences the world, himself and others subjectively as well as objectively;

(3)  men conduct their activities in pursuit of ends, goals or purpose through actions which are habituated and rule-bound. This is not to say that they do not experience feelings of freedom or personal uniqueness. The age-old debate about free-will and determinism attends to a perfectly real aspect of the human condition. The problems which it raises cannot be ‘solved’ and certainly not by sociologists. Their task can only begin, indeed, when the assumption is made that man’s will and his conception of it are the products of his social time;

(4)  in more modest terms, men share values and rules, some of which become deeply embedded in consciousness, others of which remain more superficially active, all in manifold contexts of power;

(5)  how and why and to what extent this sharing takes place in the everyday life of a society, and what it means for activities like philosophizing about or socially analysing that life, are the very problems with which we are concerned. It is right that this should sound thoroughly circular, for that is how we shall assume that social process is.

Men in society are created by and recreate objective events and relationships which they experience as individuals subjectively and inter-subjectively (between themselves). Those variously viewed and experienced events and relationships which carry obvious personal reality also have more to them than just ‘how they appear’ to particular men.

It is around the balance between ‘appearances’ and what ‘lies behind’ them, that philosophical and social theoretical battle has raged. We cannot avoid the warfare in seeking to understand social control, for it is exactly about man’s activity or passivity, his exact status as controller or controlled, or both, that conflict has centred. Some social theoretical views place the origins of the social and of consciousness in some potent single force, initially outside of man, for instance, in material circumstances, as with Marxism. In this sort of view, men can appear to be very much the product of forces and relations beyond their control and hidden from them until they manage to grasp the words and concepts that puncture appearances and give an access to reality that may then be ‘worked with’. Others view social events as existing in their own right, independent of human wills, and exerting a coercive influence upon them, there ready to be analysed by scientific methods as to their cause and functions, in the spirit that Durkheim advocated. Yet others place prime emphasis on the dominance of consciousness and language, very often raising major problems as to the entrapped nature of social knowledge itself. For instance, anthropologists like Winch (1958) believe that the rule-following aspect of social life is so exclusively important that no one except fully-imbibed culture members can ‘get on its inside’. Once on its inside, the problem then is of getting back out, of being able to treat a form of cultural experience as a ‘topic’ when in fact we possess it as a ‘resource’. Indeed there may be a questioning of whether there is any sense at all in which we can talk of understanding or explaining a ‘form of life’, social or intellectual, other than in its own terms. Sociologists who believe that the world is talk and associated symbolization, requiring constant reaffirmation and repair from its participant members, are called ethnomethodologists. They are a specific sub-type of a congerie of believers who are drawn towards the ‘man is free’ pole, loosely called pheno-menologists.

Positivism

In recent years, many of the differences between these views have been polarized as a debate about ‘positivism’ and its place, if any, in sociology. Very crudely, positivists are described as having a belief in an ‘out there’ version of reality, which the scientist taps as he moves from hunch via test to truth (laws, etc.) in a given paradigm (a shared way of seeing, working and judging in an intellectual area). Valid objects of knowledge are held to be given to experience, whether they be natural, like rocks and rivers; or social, like values or interaction. Because of this ‘positivist sociologies necessarily tend to reduce the social to given observables, to behaviour, interaction, etc. And to measurable and controllable reports of experience, attitudes, statements of value, etc. On the part of human subjects’ (Hirst, 1975: 179). What has usually been argued to be wrong with doing social science in this way is that it entails a notion of men ‘made’ by and passively responding to forces ‘out there’ and beyond them. Positivistic sociology, it is said, does not allow for the fact that man has subjectivity and is capable of reflexion, that is, has free will and imputes meaning. Phenomenologists would say that it ‘reifies’ (makes misplacedly concrete) the social. Man is ‘different’ in this respect and his subjectivity may only be ‘grasped’ or entered into via empathetic understanding. There has been a specific rejection one by the other of those who believe that natural science methods can be applied to the social, and others who believe that only humanistic ‘understanding’ is possible. This difference, traditionally represented as being about method, is shot through with other considerations. Traditional positivists and subjectivists in sociology are both empiricists in that both accept the givenness of objects to experience, differing rather as to which objects are given. When phenomenologists are faced with the fact that men experience the social (rules, habits, customs, laws, expectations, etc.) as perfectly concrete, they tend to reply anti-positivistically that the sociologist ought not to, or else he cannot investigate such experiences as phenomena worthy of explanation. Sociologists, then, have special problems of participating in their ‘data’ which are potentially overcomable. All this needs to be distinguished from essentialist views of knowledge as well as from shallow and partial manipulations of ideas about the relationship between knowledge and power. On the latter score, positivists are charged that their accounts, by sustaining an atmosphere of tested, expert knowledge, shore up controlling forces and groups in a society who may turn such knowledge into exploitative social technology. Functionalists, for example, who treat all societies as having the same problems, tasks or prerequisites, and who analyse social activities in terms of which problems they help to ‘solve’, are regarded as especially dangerous on this score. They emphasize the self-correcting (equilibrating) forces within societies which operate to combat ‘breakdown’ and argue that getting social members to share norms and values is a key element in this process. What seems to be overlooked is that it is the a priori and unexaminable element of their theories which leads to difficulties, not its positivism. Marxists, who would accuse positivists of driving a wedge between the necessary unity of theory and practice, solve these traditional problems by abolishing them in favour of one penetration of reality by one form of belief which has escaped the ideological disability of all others. No wonder that most Marxists, in a way quite different from functionalists (because their beliefs are essentialist and require the test of revelation rather than revelation via test) also place great importance for explaining social reality on shared values or ideologies. In post-revolutionary societies, adherents to communist social theory accord vital emphasis to correct shared belief. Marxists view capitalist societies as essentially conflict-ridden and prone to dissolution, because groups called ‘classes’ experience fundamentally differing interests generated by their relations to productive processes and their ownership. Owners expropriate ‘surplus value’ and control society’s ‘super-structure’, which includes all forms of knowledge and belief, in their own interests. Correct grasping of Marx’s delineation of this state of affairs constitutes the beginning of knowledge of the way out.

‘Order’ and ‘control’

Questions of how human ‘meaning’ is generated and shared (or imposed) lie at the bottom of most well-known attempts to plot out differences between sociological approaches. Dawe (1970), for instance, distinguishes between approaches where the primary emphasis is upon order or control. Order approaches emphasize external constraint upon men (they are ‘ordered’); control approaches dwell upon society as the creation of its members (they ‘control’ their meanings and relationships) – ‘one views action as the derivative of system, whilst the other views system as the derivative of action’ (p. 214). Dawe argues that these two approaches are doctrines, proposing utopias or impossible societies out of the clash of which modern sociology has been forged. Many sociologists have acted as if Dawe had shown that actual societies were, or could be, ‘action’ or ‘control’ places. The air of crusade has been increased by distinctions like that of Wilson’s (1971) between ‘normative’ and ‘interpretive’ paradigms in sociology, giving the impression that ‘shared values’ or ‘freedom’ are real social choice-points. In fact, men’s ‘freedom’ socially does not spring from the absence of control but depends both quantitatively and qualitatively upon both those controls built into and those exerted around him for its type. The bridges between us, along which our understanding ‘grasp’ of others flows, are made up of shared, collective meanings, individually experienced.

Culture – the accumulated experience, meanings, rule-systems, and forms of understanding of groups and societies – is the stuff out of which human biology is transformed into social individuality. The development of social self in its relationships to other persons and objects (called socialization) is a complex and continuous process. The combination of our ‘take’ from experience with individual biology produces self, uniquely conscious, imbued with identity and capable of activity. Such a social individual is, in terms described by Mead (upon which we will expand later), capable of controlled feeling and reflective intelligence in a way not possible in the non-human organism. Such a self stands in dialectical (i.e. Reciprocal) relationship with its own impulses and the external world. Uniqueness is built in alongside physiology and culture, and all this is clearly ‘different’ about human experience and makes its explanation more complex. But it certainly does not rule it out from objective scrutiny as just subjective and end-directed (teleological).

Understanding and explanation

Explaining other people’s behaviour is not the same as understanding it from their point of view. How I come to be writing this book is explicable in terms of the laws of biology and physics, my motives and intentions (not to mention personality, need-dispositions, etc.), the politics and economics of university departments (experienced as the requirements of job and role), the operations of formal and informal networks of academic publishing, and so on, and so on. Getting to write a book, as with getting to post a letter, getting married, lost, or educated involves complex sets of activities, carried on by individuals within a culture which are at one and the same time massively patterned and repeated, while uniquely experienced and individually malleable. The empathetic grasping by another of the meaning to me of writing this book is also perfectly possible. If I call this ‘understanding’, following Jarvie’s (1972) terminology, we can distinguish understanding my subjective state from understanding an explanation of my activity (or anything else for that matter). Explanations might be made of my activity, even by someone who had grasped my subjective intent, that might have been unknown to me or unacceptable in my judgement. They might even be beyond my grasp unless I learned (and was in a position to do so) the language within which they were couched. We might want to argue that certain sorts of sociological explanation ought to contain (or refer to, in some form) the facts of my subjective state, but it would be difficult to argue that all explanations properly called sociological should.

Indeed, no great sociological approach is just subjectivist (where only the contents of consciousness are given meaning) or wholly objectivist (where consciousness is explained away entirely in terms of ‘something else’). We do tend, though, to see sociological progress as one polarized position swallowing up another. Perhaps this is because social reality is so complex, because social theory has moral relevance (and moral positions in their nature tend to be pre-emptive), and because ‘knowledge communities’ experience human struggles where who knows best and who is best get mixed up. We need to constantly remind ourselves that all an approach like Marxism, or interactionism, or functionalism or ethnomethodology can do is to strike a more or less complex balance about the priority of the individual or society, involving a consideration of biological-species-personality factors, economic-material influences and normative-value-cultural realities. It is possible to plump for one type or level of explanation as basic and to see the rest as derivative (or epiphenomenal). But society’s (and sociology’s!) existence depends upon there being reciprocal relationships between these levels. No known form of social theorizing has yet satisfactorily (i.e. Without raising more problems than it has solved) swallowed up all others. Of course there can be no ‘final proof for it, only the test of asking what one loses at the same time as enjoying the gains afforded by using a particular approach. My argument is that to understand the manifold nature of social control, we must understand the manifold nature of the social, shown up sufficiently only if we consciously juxtapose major theoretical approaches.

2

Social control and models of man

Differences between sociological approaches are concerned with the very nature of individual/person and social group/ relationships. Views of social control span the entire spectrum. At the one extreme, some sociologists would want not to use the term at all, as it presupposes a reified view of the social which, being no more than the product of men, is infinitely revisable by them. In old fashioned terms, this represents the full flowering of the belief that if you don’t talk about something it will go away, whereas if you do, it will come to pass. It is perfectly consistent if one believes, as some sociologists do, that the world is talk. At the other extreme would lie a view of man as essentially the same mentally, governed by universal master patterns, everywhere. Differences in culture would be merely superficial, accidentally or randomly generated or borrowed, covering up fundamental identities in structure. Both of these views, while graspable, are absurd.

A kit for all seasons

A basic, usable conceptual kit for viewing social control which could be tested generally against experience would consist of no more than

(a) a model of an actor whose self is ‘made’ out of the action of experience of culture upon biology

(b) within whom develops the capability to act reflectively upon his intelligence and environment

(c) as a result of the cumulative and qualitatively transforming nature of the experience of social formation.

Influences upon him would change from initial childhood to old age, some being more crucial than others. In all societies, the acquisition of language is highly important in self-formation. In some, first mass, first job, first marriage, first degree might be more or less salient. The activity of becoming social is the activity of becoming acculturated, which always includes some means of acting back upon the culture which forms and controls. The culture in its turn is a product of and is part of the economic, familial, class, religious, political and other aspects of society. Social control merges comprehensively with self and interpersonal control, cultural, political and other forms. And control ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Editor’s introduction
• 1. Background: basic issues in sociology
• 2. Social control and models of man
• 3. The rise of mass education: I: Britain
• 4. The rise of mass education: 2: United States
• 5. Two great sociologies, both of necessity: Marx and Durkheim
• 6. Education functions (and Weber lives)
• 7. Transmission and reproduction: the contemporary work of Bernstein and Bourdieu
• 8. Inside schools and classrooms
• References and name index
• Subject index