Education in a New Society

Renewing the Sociology of Education

Jal Mehta, Scott Davies, Jal Mehta, Scott Davies

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226517421, 9780226517391
• eBook ISBN: 9780226517568
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In recent decades, sociology of education has been dominated by quantitative analyses of race, class, and gender gaps in educational achievement. And while there's no question that such work is important, it leaves a lot of other fruitful areas of inquiry unstudied. This book takes that problem seriously, considering the way the field has developed since the 1960s and arguing powerfully for its renewal.
The sociology of education, the contributors show, largely works with themes, concepts, and theories that were generated decades ago, even as both the actual world of education and the discipline of sociology have changed considerably. The moment has come, they argue, to break free of the past and begin asking new questions and developing new programs of empirical study. Both rallying cry and road map, Education in a New Society will galvanize the field.

PART ONE

Theoretical Perspectives

TWO

Social Theory and the Coming Schooled Society

David P. Baker1

Theorizing about education and society is at an intellectual crossroads. Starting from humanistic descriptions of schooling, over the past half-century sociology of education has matured into an academically recognized field with an influential record of inquiry contributing to the pursuit of central questions. Naturally, success comes at the price of some inertia and specialization. This book addresses the fact that, since its zenith in the 1970s, the debate over contrasting theories of the role of education in society has become sparse; empirical inquiry in sociology of education, while technically impressive, is nearly exclusively focused on stratification and educational inequality. To avoid being a victim of its own past success, sociology of education could intellectually embrace the most transformative educational phenomenon across the entire human record: the education revolution and the coming of what can be called “the schooled society.”

Dominant theoretical positions from the inception of a mature sociology of education all depart from the implicit assumption that education is a secondary social institution, and that its sociological role is largely determined by its subservient relationship to more primary institutions.2 The functional branch of social theory, including human capital and socialization theories, assumes that education exists to fulfill political and economic functions, while the Marxist-conflict branch assumes that it exists to reproduce and legitimate power and material contradictions inherent in the capitalist system of production (e.g., Dreeben 1968; Schultz 1971; Bowles and Gintis 1973). Yet an assumption of subservience increasingly flies in the face of evidence that education has become a dominant institution in its own right, with considerable independent sociological influence on culture (Baker 2014; Brint 2006). Given this, social theory about education and society should be recast and empirical inquiry expanded if sociology of education is to carry its success into the future.

The current robust and extensive culture of education is chiefly a product of its own development as an institution. In other words, it is not a creation of an overeducation crisis, educational credential inflation, a fooled public, a plot to reproduce social class, runaway populism, technological advance, media hype, or any of the other external reasons often suggested. Like other social institutions currently at the center of human society, the massive undertaking of formal education commands a significant share of cultural understandings that influence life globally, deeply permeating many noneducational dimensions. Seen this way, the indefatigable expansion of schooling across the world’s population and the rising normative levels of educational attainment over successive generations can enrich the understanding of ascendant aspects of late-modern society, plus many qualities of the subsequent postindustrial society, and likely scenarios for the future of global society.

Of course, the sociology of education already occupies itself with the study of educational expansion and its institutional development. Since John Meyer’s key formulation of education as a social institution in the late 1970s, a stream of research has investigated the education revolution through analysis of growing primary- and secondary-school enrollments over the past century and a half (e.g., Fuller and Rubinson 1992; Meyer 1977). While this is an obvious and productive approach, the impression remains that the education revolution came out of midair with few cultural ties to prior developments, thus trivializing the study of the independent influence of an expanding education sector on society. Further, this research, accompanied by neo-institutional theory, has not been fully integrated into sociology of education; the field seems not to know what to make of either. (See also chapter 3, by Scott Davies and Jal Mehta, for a similar argument with additional important theoretical extensions.)

To remedy this problem, two heretofore underdeveloped theoretical questions must be addressed and become foci of future empirical research: What is the origin of the education revolution? And what are the societal consequences of a robust institution of education? As described in more detail below, theories about the origin of the education revolution and its ultimate impact on society are a high priority for the future. Neo-institutionalism offers the beginnings of one such theory, but there is much it does not yet include. Similarly, if theory from a Marxist-conflict vein is to remain viable, it also must address origins, as it is now clear from the empirical record that industrialization and large-scale capitalism, while contributors to the education revolution, were not its originators. Human-capital arguments also must consider the education revolution if they are to go beyond narrow and limited recognition of the impact of education on the nature of work, labor markets, and economic innovation (Baker 2014).

Like its origins, the constructive power of education in a schooled society is a major new avenue for theory and research. Education is becoming a master causal agent in society, demonstrably independent from other factors such as race, gender, material wealth, and so forth. And although sociology of education currently has useful literatures on some aspects of this process, the changing power of education is so dynamic and extensive that the field risks falling behind if there is not significant new theory and research. Failure to embrace fully the “So what?” question is, for example, a notable weakness in past scholarship motivated by neo-institutional theory. And, as empirical research from other fields across a vast range of outcomes for humans and their collectives already promises, if answering the impact question goes well beyond social class reproduction, elite legitimation, and simple human capital accumulation, then how will the Marxist-conflict and human capital perspectives account for this?

In partially abdicating the study of education effects, sociology of education is missing a major opportunity to inform social science about central individual and collective processes. This is in large part a result of how the subservient assumption traps the field into considering education either as a secondary function or as only reproductive. Early attempts to research the cognitive and psychological impact of absolute levels of schooling on individuals were mostly abandoned in the rush to focus on relative social status attainment processes. But the education revolution and the rapid coming of the schooled society represent an invitation for the sociology of education to grow intellectually in dynamic ways; the schooled society is ripe with new and exciting research opportunities.

Change and Social Theory

When societies radically change, weaknesses in social theories can become apparent. In a sense, social change represents an empirical challenge for current theoretical perspectives. And that is as it should be, if sociology is to continue being scientific. New ways in which humans organize society and derive meaning from its reality offer rare opportunities to assess and, if warranted, reject theory. As any treatise on scientific methods attests, an empirical chance to reject theory is the essential logic of scientific inquiry. Social change as theory testing must be embraced.

The usual rejoinder to this is, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” In other words, is a particular incidence of social change profound enough to test theory? Or does current theory predict it, rendering it relatively trivial? Profound social change—industrial capitalist process and the decline of “traditional society”; the rise and spread of nation-states and the death of empire; social movements, revolution, and other widely participatory political actions; and world society’s intensive globalization—have motivated broad theory testing and retheorizing. Indeed, the genesis of sociology as a formal intellectual endeavor stemmed from all of these changes as they first occurred in Western society over the late modern and industrial periods. But early social theory’s success in explaining the decline of traditional society and the rise of late modern society becomes a liability as times moves on. Much sociological theory reads as if little else has occurred since, or as if the change that has happened was fully predictable from existing theories of a past world.

Early social theorists and precursors to empirical social sciences, with their “discovery of society,” or, better, their “invention of society,” as a manifest entity worthy of intellectual inquiry formed a new way to conceptualize origins of human life and its nature as a collective reality (Collins and Makowsky 1998). And this conception has in turn fueled the grandest of intellectual endeavors about society: namely, to identify key causal factors behind the worldwide decline of traditional society in all its forms, and the rise, globalization, and greater differentiation of modern society. From the mid-nineteenth century on, this inquiry led to the founding of the discipline of sociology and other social and behavioral sciences. Creators of sociological inquiry, including Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, spent their careers trying to understand this transition, and their general insights set the leitmotifs of investigation for the expansion of the social sciences over the course of the twentieth century (Frank and Gabler 2006).

It is ironic, then, that these intellectuals’ work came too early to recognize the implications of the growing institution of education. Instead, economic and political factors received the lion’s share of credit. Of course, both Durkheim and Weber included some examination of the role of the university and science in their analyses of the great societal transition, but they could not have been expected to perceive formal education’s independent and future role in this transformation worldwide (e.g., Durkheim 1938/1977; Weber 1958).

Real social change is notoriously difficult to identify. Everyday life in postindustrial society is so wedded to the notion of constant change that much trivia is heralded as profound. Also, one of the central insights of social science inquiry is that human society is organized around a remarkably common set of requirements and hierarchies, so that societal change probably has some upper bounds. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize change, particularly in an ever-universalizing world, is that common components of culture can become more or less prominent in meaning, and hence in social control and power, at different historical points. This is the point of the functionalist stream of social theory in its attempt to address the question: How is society possible? Specifically from the neo-institutional version of functionalism, change is assumed to exist in a process of institutionalization.

As a theory, neo-institutionalism essentially retools the older concept of social institution by placing far greater theoretical emphasis on institutions as producing widely shared cultural meanings instead of as only consisting of highly prescribed and structured social roles and norms (Meyer and Jepperson 2000). The deep institutionalization of capitalism was a substantial social change from earlier periods during which this particular economic process had less meaning. Conversely, military conquest as an economic strategy was heavily institutionalized, only to lose its legitimation and advantage. There are many components to social change, including technological and physical change, but all result in institutionalization, which is at the heart of a social construction of reality that undergirds neo-institutional arguments (Berger and Luckmann 1966).

Seen this way, one of the largest societal projects of institutionalization over the past 150 years or so is the development of, and widening access to, formal education from early in childhood up through the far reaches of the university and now into adulthood. Compared to past societies, the worldwide education revolution, as Talcott Parsons named it in 1970s, is profound social change (Parsons and Platt 1973). Formal education has been a social institution for at least several millennia, but its level of institutionalization (control of meaning) has steadily grown, first over the eight-hundred-year course of the successful Western version of the university, and then into the recent period of mass schooling and wide inclusion of the world’s population and many social functions into the institution. As recently hypothesized elsewhere, the education revolution is the essential social change by which current theories of sociology of education, and, to a significant degree, general social theories must be assessed (Baker 2014). The central empirical challenge before sociology of education is to explain why the education revolution is happening, and its consequences for postindustrial world society. We can no longer treat expanding education and its role in society as a secondary institution that supports economic or political reproduction of the nineteenth-century version of social class; it is now a prominent constructer of social reality at the center of society.

The Education Revolution as Institutional Change

The demography of the education revolution is well known to sociologists of education, but what may be less clear is how the trend may have accelerated, both quantitatively and qualitatively, from about 1960 onward. Gross enrollment rates have risen consistently over the past 150 years; near-full enrollments have been attained, first in wealthier nations, and since the middle of the twentieth century, more globally (Benavot and Riddle 1988; Fuller and Rubinson 1992). Consequently, 80 percent of persons across the world age fifteen or older can both read and write a short statement about their life—a social change that would have been hard to imagine fifty years ago, and unthinkable one hundred years ago (UNESCO 2002). Along with the diffusion of mass education, the normative standard of educational attainment has risen with each new generation of schooled parents. For example, the United States has led the way in developing mass education. A hundred years ago, about half of all US school-aged children were enrolled in school, whereas the proportion rose to 75 percen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Foreword / A Much-Needed Project / Michèle Lamont
• ONE / Education in a New Society: Renewing the Sociology of Education / Jal Mehta and Scott Davies
• PART ONE / Theoretical Perspectives
• PART TWO / Substantive Contributions
• PART THREE / Old Themes, New Perspectives
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects