Making Sense of Education Policy

Studies in the Sociology and Politics of Education

Geoff Whitty

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761974529, 9780761974512
• eBook ISBN: 9781446231791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

`This book is a very worthwhile read for teachers, student teachers and teacher educators. It would be encouraging if politically based policy makers were to digest its contents also? - Citizenship, Social and Economics Education

`I recommend this book as an enjoyable, thought provoking and politically important read? - Widenining Participation and Lifelong Learning

`This important book challenges current educational policies in England in a style, for the most part, easily accessible to a wide audience. Geoff Whitty?s assertions are supported by a wide variety of research findings and this is a book that should be of considerable interest to student of sociology and to all member of the teaching profession? - Mark Pepper, Equals

`The particular strength of this book is Geoff Whitty?s grasp on and insights into the politics of education... he is able to bring to bear an authoritative perspective which is unrivaled in the United Kingdom. there is no other current book which compares in terms of the breadth and depth of this? - Professor Stephen Ball, Institute of Education, University of London

`This book represents a "struggle" by the director of the London Institute of Education, one of our foremost centres of teacher training and research in education, to understand what lies behind the education policies of recent governments. It is tempting to conclude that if a leading educational sociologist such as Geoff Whitty, who happens also to be brother of the former general secretary of the Labour party, has difficulty with this, there can be little hope for the rest of us. But now, at least, we have this personal odyssey to guide us? - Bob Doe, Times Educational Supplement

This book aims to make sense of the changes in education policy over the past decade, using the resources of the sociology and politics of education. The author shows that wider sociological perspectives can help us to appreciate both the limits and the possibilities of educational change.

Geoff Whitty illustrates this through studies of curriculum innovation, school choice, teacher professionalism and school improvement. He considers how far education policy can be used to foster social inclusion and social justice and the book concludes with an assessment of New Labour education policy in these terms. The book deals with education policy in England and Wales, as well as making comparisons with contemporary education policy in other countries.

This book is relevant to students of education at masters and doctoral levels, students of social policy, and policy-makers.

1

Introduction: Sociology and Education Policy

This introductory chapter locates the sociological study of education policy within a tradition that goes back to the distinguished European sociologist Karl Mannheim. Although better known for his work on social theory and the sociology of knowledge, Mannheim became increasingly concerned with the sociology of education and education policy when working at the London School of Economics and the Institute of Education in the 1940s. I argue here that, although the particular approach adopted by Mannheim may be inappropriate today, many of the questions he asked remain relevant and his use of sociological concepts to help make sense of education policy sets an important example for contemporary sociologists of education to follow.

This book reflects my own struggle to make sense of changes in education policy over the past ten years, using the resources of the sociology and politics of education. In some ways, it is a sequel to my earlier book, Sociology and School Knowledge: Curriculum Theory, Research and Politics (Whitty, 1985), which used similar disciplinary resources to explore changes in the school curriculum. The present volume brings together and updates a series of lectures given during the past decade. It represents my developing understanding not only of education policies at the turn of the millennium but also of the conceptual tools that have proved helpful for understanding those policies in my own research and teaching.

Ten years ago, in 1992, I moved within the University of London from the Goldsmiths Chair of Policy and Management in Education at Goldsmiths College to the Karl Mannheim Chair of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education. The latter chair, previously held by Basil Bernstein, was named after the eminent Hungarian sociologist, Karl Mannheim, who worked at the Institute in the 1940s. During the eight years that I held that chair,¹ I sought to build on the strong tradition of sociology of education as a discipline at the Institute, but particularly sought to utilise it to explore the sorts of issues in policy and management that I had tried to grapple with in my previous post. The different ways in which I have tried to do this are reflected in the selection of work presented here. Some of the chapters draw on findings from empirical research, while others are more theoretical or speculative in nature. Although much of the substantive content relates to education policy in England and Wales, I have also included some material based on comparative studies of education policy.

In this chapter, I consider the extent to which the tradition of sociological work that began at the Institute with Karl Mannheim still has relevance to the study of education policy today.² Mannheim was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century. He gained his Doctorate in philosophy in 1918 at the University of Budapest, after studying in Berlin, Paris, Freiburg and Heidelberg as well as Budapest itself. Significantly for his later career, he mixed freely in both positivist and anti-positivist circles. Nevertheless, he became most closely associated with the group that had gathered around George Lukács, the Marxist literary critic who was briefly a Commissioner for Education in a short-lived Communist-Social Democratic coalition government. Although Mannheim declined to join the Communist Party, Lukács appointed him as a lecturer at the College of Education of the University of Budapest, which he later described in his curriculum vitae of August 1945 as Hungary’s nearest equivalent to the Institute of Education in London.

As a result of his association with Lukács, Mannheim fell foul of the new counter-revolutionary government in Budapest and left for Vienna in December 1919. From there, he moved to Germany and many of his most formative intellectual experiences took place in exile in Weimar Germany. He went initially to Freiburg and Berlin but settled in Heidelberg, where he was a member of the circle that had grown up around Max Weber and had continued to meet (under Alfred Weber) after his death in 1920. In 1930, Mannheim became Professor of Sociology and head of a newly created College of Sociology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. In 1933, he was ‘retired’ by the Nazis from his position in Frankfurt and came, via Amsterdam, to England where he held a temporary lectureship in sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE).

The distinguished educationist, Sir Fred Clarke, who was the Director of the Institute of Education at that time, had been impressed by his contact with Mannheim at meetings of the Moot, a group of intellectuals that included such notables as J. H. Oldham, Adolph Lowe, J. Middleton Murry, Sir Walter Moberly, Lord A. D. Lindsay and T. S. Eliot. In 1941 Clarke therefore arranged for Mannheim to teach classes at the Institute on a part-time basis while he was still working at the LSE. Negotiating this arrangement with the LSE was not straightforward, because of the strained relations between Mannheim and the Professor of Sociology, Morris Ginsberg, and it was only secured because of the close friendship between Clarke and the then Director of the LSE, Professor A. M. Carr-Saunders (Kettler et al., 1984; Woldring, 1986). For two years, it involved Mannheim travelling between his home in Hampstead to Nottingham, where the Institute was evacuated for much of the war, and Cambridge, where the LSE was based during the war.

As early as March 1943, Clarke was arguing the case for appointing someone like Mannheim – and he clearly had Mannheim himself in mind – to a new professorial position at the Institute as soon as the war was over. In a note to the Delegacy responsible for the Institute, he wrote:

The case for a professorship to work in terms of the sociological approach may be related to the uneasy awareness, now so widespread and yet so ill-defined, that great changes in the social order and the inter-play of social forces are already in progress – and that educational theory and educational policy that take no account of these will be not only blind but positively harmful.

(Sir Fred Clarke, Director, Institute of Education, 18 March 1943)

In the event, on 1 January 1946, Mannheim succeeded to Clarke’s own chair in education, which on Clarke’s retirement became separated from the Directorship of the Institute on the grounds that, while his successors as Director ‘might well continue to carry the title and status of Professor [it was] too much to expect them to go on functioning in that capacity to any degree of effectiveness’. Although Mannheim’s chair was in education, he took special responsibility for the sociological aspects of the field. His own conception of his post was a broad one influenced by his background and interests in philosophy, sociology and social psychology. He also approached it in much the same spirit as the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, which he founded and which reflected his conviction that sociology could provide the basis for a postwar social reconstruction in which education would play a vital role.

Mannheim held his chair at the Institute of Education for little more than one year before his untimely death at the age of 53 on 9 January 1947. My own life overlapped with Mannheim’s by little over a week. This can hardly entitle me to claim membership of the same generation let alone the same ‘generation unit’ – to cite one of his concepts that has survived into the contemporary literature. Yet, I believe that, even though there have been major changes in the past fifty years, there are some striking continuities which suggest that parts of the legacy of Karl Mannheim are well worth holding onto. I hope they are apparent in the examples of my own writing contained in this book.

Mannheim for today?

Certainly, the argument for having sociologists involved in the study of education is at least as strong as it was when Clarke was arguing the case fifty years ago. There is a similar widespread sense today that significant but ill-defined changes in the nature of the social order are in progress. Not only sociologists, but also the ‘quality’ media, constantly debate the implications of living in postmodernity, a post-industrial society, late capitalism, high modernity, a post-traditional society or whatever they choose to call it. Chris Shilling, one of the most insightful of today’s sociologists of education in Britain, who favours the concept of ‘high modernity’, has written:

Modernity brought with it a period of rapid change and the promise of control. In contrast, high modernity is a ‘runaway world’ which is apparently out of control . . . The consequences of high modernity . . . have the effect of introducing a radical doubt as to what precise goals education should achieve. These consequences also throw into question whether education systems have the capacity either to be fully controlled, or to accomplish planned social change with any degree of accuracy.

(Shilling, 1993: 108)

I want to suggest that, long before modernity was thought to have run its course, Mannheim was struggling with similar issues even though he responded to them in rather different terms. He once wrote that he wanted to learn ‘the secret (even if it is infernal) of these new times’, confronting problems that Kettler and Meja (1995) suggest, in the introduction to one of their books on Mannheim, should remain ‘irresistible to reflective people at the end of the twentieth century’ (1995:1). Yet Mannheim barely gets a mention in the voluminous works of Shilling’s mentor, Anthony Giddens, generally regarded as Britain’s leading contemporary social theorist and current Director of the London School of Economics.

Although Mannheim’s work on the sociology of knowledge is still cited in other contemporary literature, as is his work on generation, Denis Lawton (1975) has quite rightly pointed to his relative neglect in education studies, even in the 1970s when his work on the social determination of ideas might have been expected to commend itself to the then ‘new’ sociologists of education. With only a few exceptions (e.g. Lander, 1983), his work has not in recent years been seen as a major theoretical resource for research even in the sociology of education at the Institute and elsewhere in Britain. Indeed, even what is generally regarded as his most important work, Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim, 1936), has been borrowed from the Institute of Education library only a handful of times since the early 1970s.

In some ways, of course, this neglect is justified. It would, after all, be easy to exaggerate the extent to which Mannheim is a contemporary thinker. Not only would this be in some tension with the thrust of his own writings on the sociology of knowledge, it would involve doing a considerable degree of violence to his texts. To give but one example, I read with interest in an intellectual biography of Mannheim that he had written about the prevalence of ‘an attitude of believing in nothing’ and ‘an endless craving for new sensations’ (Loader, 1985:189), statements that resonate with some contemporary characterisations of postmodernity. Yet when I traced this back to its source in Diagnosis of Our Time (Mannheim, 1943), I read:

Whereas in some prominent individuals . . . falling into the abyss of the self without reaching the bottom presents itself as a grandiose struggle, a new Titanism, in the average man the very same dynamics lead to a frivolous attitude of believing in nothing and an endless craving for new sensations.

(p. 108)

In both style and content, this sentiment places Mannheim in a very different age from our own, though even one of his own contemporaries, Professor Cavanagh of King’s College, suggested that, perhaps because ‘the German way of writing doesn’t fit English’, Mannheim’s writings seemed ‘to say little in a large number of obscure words’ (Cavanagh to Clarke, 10 September 1942). Furthermore, the character of his work does not always make it easy for us to be clear what Mannheim is saying. Although one of his posthumous volumes was entitled Systematic Sociology (Mannheim, 1957), Mannheim was hardly a systematic thinker. His work may be charitably considered what his intellectual biographer, Colin Loader (1985), euphemistically terms a ‘dynamic totality, but even the books compiled during his lifetime under his own supervision are full of inconsistencies and repetitions.

Yet, I still believe his work as a whole deserves considerably more attention than it has recently received. As Meja and Kettler (1993) put it: ‘Mannheim confronts many contemporary sociologists with their hopes and misgivings, and offers them a model for resourceful thinking’ (1993: xxxiv). Even some of the themes he addressed are surprisingly contemporary or at least relate to issues that continue to concern us, both in sociology and in education. His more theoretical work on the sociology of knowledge was unfashionable among Marxist sociologists of education in the 1970s partly because he resisted the notion that all ideas could be understood in terms of relations of class. But, notwithstanding the unremitting maleness of his language, one might have expected him to be cited more by feminist writers in the 1980s, as unusually among male sociologists of his era (and some would say since) he had pointed out that women’s interests were not best served by constantly having their voices mediated by men (Meja and Kettler, 1993: xxxii). And, in so far as he generalised this argument to all social groups, it might be thought surprising that his work has not been recuperated in the 1980s and 1990s by contemporary writers who question the primacy not only of class relations, but even that of the ‘holy trinity’ of class, race and gender. Furthermore, his discussion of the growth of ‘social techniques’ which penetrate deep into our private lives and subject ‘to public control psychological processes which were formerly considered as purely personal’ in some ways anticipates Foucaulfs concern with ‘moral technologies’. Finally, some of his discussions of consciousness and awareness anticipate contemporary notions of reflexivity.

Even so, it would be extremely difficult to characterise Mannheim as a post-structuralist or postmodernist theorist by any stretch of the imagination. His social psychology of personality was at odds with the notion of the decentred subject and the various ‘solutions’ he sought and provided to the ‘problem’ of relativism retain little currency today. His work was also firmly set in the redemptive project of the Enlightenment, albeit in the light of a recognition that it was in danger of all going horribly wrong. Thus, not only did his roots predispose him towards a ‘grand narrative’ approach to theory, his own solutions to a ‘runaway world’ were classicly modernist ones. Kettler and Meja (1995) suggest that his ‘project was to link thinking to emancipation – despite strong evidence against the connection’ (1995: 1)!

Nevertheless, like Mannheim, many contemporary sociologists still struggle with the prospect of losing any basis for claiming the superiority of one account over another – and continue to seek a viable epistemological basis for social science and social intervention. To put the problem in contemporary sociological jargon, rather than that of his own times, Mannheim sought a way of rejecting essentialism and foundationalism without being disempowered in the process. This has remained a recurring theme within social theory and in the sociology of education. Not only is it a major concern for those writers who still seek a basis for action in an uncertain world in the light of postmodernist critiques of social science, it is also the very issue that the ‘new sociologists of education’ at the Institute (Young, 1971) struggled with in the early 1970s and which Michael Young sought for a time to address through the social phenomenology of Merleau Ponty (Young, 1973).

Subsequently, that particular Latin turn in the sociology of education was swiftly overshadowed by an Althusserian one and more recently by a Foucauldian one. However, other sociologists of education eschewed that theoretical response to the cold climate facing them under Thatcherism in the 1980s in favour of a move into policy studies. For example, Brian Davies says of me, in his own inimitable way, that I have ‘moved with some decorum, rather than any hint of “scramble”, from being “new directions” first insider-critic to neo-Marxist curriculum analyst . . ., to policy researcher and theorist’ (Davies, 1994:14). In some ways, that move too was prefigured in Mannheim’s own career. Jean Floud, who knew Mannheim in the 1930s and was later Reader in the Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, suggests that by the 1940s Mannheim ‘had turned from the fine points of the diagnosis [of the crisis] to the active political problem of controlling the descent into disaster’ (Floud, 1959: 49). Put another way, the detached critical observer had ‘grown into the political and social strategist who tries to understand so that others may be able to act’ (Bramstedt and Gerth, 1951: xii). And, in proposing ‘Planning for Freedom’ – a Third Way between a laissez-faire society and total regimentation (Mannheim, 1951: xvii) – Mannheim went even further to suggest how they should act. With the hindsight of the late 1950s, Floud wrote dismissively of Mannheim’s ‘joyful conviction that Sociology, the science of social action, can banish or mitigate the horrors of social change’ (Floud, 1959: 42). Although Mannheim’s obituary in The Times claimed that he himself always insisted that he was concerned with diagnosis only, Campbell Stewart has suggested that his denial of partisanship was ‘rather like Mr Roosevelt’s claim to be neutral before Pearl Harbor’ (Stewart, 1967).

According to Yoshiyuki Kudomi, a Mannheimian scholar from Japan, Mannheim certainly did not abandon the one project for the other (Kudomi, 1996). Whether or not he actually made significant contributions to social theory after the mid-1930s, he continued to argue the need for sociological analysis alongside what he called ‘social education’ or the development of the techniques necessary for the creation of the democratic personality. He always regarded his prescriptions for policy in ‘Planning for Freedom’ as informed by his social theory even if that was not always clear to others.

Part of the reason why Floud and others could regard Mannheim’s quest as irrelevant in the 1950s and beyond was that his diagnosis did not seem directly applicable to postwar social democracy. However, it is at least arguable that, after the experience of deregulation and political hostility to planning under Margaret Thatcher and her successors in Britain and elsewhere, Mannheim’s ideas about the damaging effects of atomisation and a laissez-faire society now have considerably more pertinence than they did then. In an interview with Kudomi in 1991, Campbell Stewart – a student of Mannheim, who later developed his writings on the sociology of education into a textbook (Mannheim and Stewart, 1962) – mused about wha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: sociology and education policy
• 2. School knowledge and social education With Peter Aggleton and Gabrielle Rowe
• 3. Devolution and choice in three countries With Sally Power
• 4. Re-forming teacher professionalism for new times
• 5. Consumer rights versus citizen rights in contemporary education policy
• 6. The overt and hidden curricula of quasi-markets With Sally Power
• 7. School improvement and social inclusion: limits and possibilities
• 8. New Labour, education policy and educational research
• References
• Index