essay on relationship between sociology and education

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SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION AND ITS RELEVANCE IN THE TEACHING CAREER

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The ‘new sociology of education’, then and now: looking back to the 1970s and ahead to today

• Point and counterpoint
• Open access
• Published: 03 October 2023
• Volume 43 , pages 183–186, ( 2023 )

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It is 50 years since the work characterized as the ‘new sociology of education’ gained prominence. It constituted a body of writing and self-consciously new ways of theorizing the relationship between schooling, knowledge, power, ideology and inequality. While grounded in specific intellectual histories and locations, and closely aligned with sociological traditions emanating from the UK and north-western Europe, it became influential across many parts of the world. It spawned a body of work that provoked debates, disputes and new lines of inquiry, many of which continue to reverberate across sociological studies of education today. The essays in this Point and Counterpoint revisit these well-known ideas and discussions. exploring diverse points of connection and contrast, as well as pointing to some new directions for sociology of education today.

In broad terms, the 1970s’ new sociology of education was interested in how education, and particularly schooling, far from ameliorating social divisions, worked to reproduce existing social inequalities. Studies were more likely to be qualitative (in contrast to the previous dominance of quantitative studies) and draw from interpretive and critical traditions, often infused with a radical and disruptive knowledge politics: the language of reproduction and resistance, of disadvantage and democratic, permeated the sociological air. Topics of interest included educational experiences and processes, micro and informal practices, such as the ‘hidden curriculum’, and the relationship of schooling to popular culture, to class and to work and life beyond the classroom walls.

A key focus was the construction, organization and differential valuation of school knowledge—including advocacy for organic, local and participatory curriculum, critiques of the structure of curriculum and its class-based assumptions and effects, and the relationship between knowledge, power and schooling. Signature texts commonly associated with this period include M. F. D. Young ( 1971 ) Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education ; Bowles and Gintis ( 1976 ) Schooling in Capitalist America ; Bourdieu and Passeron ( 1977 ) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture ; Apple ( 1979 ) Ideology and Curriculum , Bernstein ( 1975 ) Class Codes and Control ; David ( 1980 ) The State, the Family and Education ; and Dale et al. ( 1976 ) Schooling and Capitalism: A Sociological Reader .

One of the leading figures in this work, Michael F. D. Young, succinctly described an epistemological position that was shared across a broad range of scholarship at this time; that is, a shift to turn the seemingly taken-for-granted aspects of education into ‘objects of inquiry’. This involved, for example, taking ‘what counts as educational knowledge, and how it is made available’ as problematic, as a question to be examined, and for these questions and forms of knowledge to ‘become objects of enquiry’ (Young, 1971 , p. 2). The orientation to interrogate and destabilize familiar questions and issues—to undo the social—has many forebears, heirs and distant relatives, from C. Wright Mills, to Foucault, to multiple feminist theorists, among many others. While it would thus be erroneous to see the new sociology of education as the primary instigator of this way of approaching and conducting sociological research, it is nevertheless the case that it had a significant influence on educational research and specifically on studies of school knowledge and curriculum. A major focus of the sociology of education became ‘an enquiry into the social organization of knowledge in educational institutions’ (Young, 1971 , p. 3): the imperative was ‘to make’, not ‘to take’, educational problems.

Such propositions may now seem quite familiar today, arguably operating at the level of truisms or articles of faith, alongside the critiques that subsequently arose about the silences, exclusions and overstatements of this large body of work. Indeed, this work generated a large volume of reflection over the following decades, with multiple assessments of what it was about, what it amounted to and what it failed to address (e.g. Acker, 1981 ; Arnot, 1982 ; Bates, 1980 ; Karabel & Halsey, 1976 ). These waves of intense critical engagement and repudiation not only exposed the new sociology of education’s blind-spots and particular pre-occupations, but they were also intellectually generative, sparking new work in opposition. This was particularly so at the time in relation to feminism and gender (Arnot, 1982 ; David, 1980 ; McRobbie, 1978 ). Other silences and erasures, such as those regarding race and colonialism, were called out later. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, this intensity also helped to cement the new sociology of education as a ‘thing’, a key moment or event in the periodization of histories of educational ideas, with battered copies of M. F. D. Young’s edited volume Knowledge and Control often standing in as an era-defining object.

These and other issues are taken up in the essays that follow. However, before running headlong into the cataloguing of faults and shortcomings, this Point and Counterpoint invites us to pause and to assess this body of sociological work with a slightly different lens and set of concerns. The essays presented here were developed in response to a forum on the ‘new sociology of education’ held at the 2022 conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education. Participants in this forum were invited because of their varied intellectual—and generational—positioning and engagement with theories, authors or projects directly or indirectly in dialogue with ideas linked to the new sociology of education. Footnote 1 Presenters were asked to revisit and historicize the aims and concerns of the new sociology of education, and to give their take on the legacies of this body of work. This could be in terms of their own intellectual formation, research agendas or disputes, adaptations and challenges to this tradition as well as any reflections on the ongoing effects of this oeuvre on the field of sociological research in education, with attention to what might be potential ‘new directions for sociology of education’ today. Specifically, the aims of the forum were to:

reflect on what the new sociology of education of the 1970s–1980s did and did not notice—historicizing its claims and concerns;

consider what its legacies are today, including what is and is not remembered; and

ask what might, does or should constitute the pressing questions, concerns and concepts for a ‘new’ sociology of education for today.

Panellists and audience members responded generously and thoughtfully to these questions, as is evident in the following essays. Responding directly to the invitation to historicize this work, Bob Lingard’s essay zooms in on the context and concerns of the canonical text Knowledge and Control , locating it against dominant sociological trends at the time of its publication and subsequent critiques about what (and who) the expansive claims for a new sociology of education did not consider. He notes debates then and since, including Young’s (e.g. 1998 ; 2005 ) own rethinking of his earlier position and his recasting of the central problematic for sociology of education as not so much one of knowledge and control but of powerful knowledge. Traversing big currents in sociological theorizing, and recognizing the impact and challenge brought to bear by feminist and decolonizing agendas, Lingard also looks ahead to current and emerging lines of sociological inquiry, such as research on the biosocial and on AI and education. Parlo Singh and Henry Kwok turn to consider the contributions of the prominent British sociologist of education Basil Bernstein to the new sociology of education; this is framed as a kind of dialogue between the work of Bernstein and of M. F. D. Young, in reference to their respective (and changing) readings of Durkheim’s writings on education. Singh and Kwok trace the different influences on Bernstein’s thinking about knowledge and curriculum, notably his engagement with Foucault’s writing and his shift to understanding, in their words, ‘the school curriculum as composed of a collection of scientific discourses’. This allowed Bernstein to conceptualize the ‘dynamic nature’ of curriculum and informed his analysis of the structuring of scientific/specialized knowledge, across both intellectual fields and everyday contexts. Reflecting on their own extended engagement with the work of Bernstein, Singh and Kwok consider debates about situated knowledges and objectivity (looking particularly at Indigenous and feminist scholarship) and link these to the knowledge and post-truth debates that emerged sharply in response to COVID measures and, in doing so, call out future directions for curriculum studies.

A related fresh line of thinking is mapped out by Joel Windle who focusses more on the ideas of another iconic figure, Pierre Bourdieu, and on the analytic process of recontexualization. Windle calls for a ‘rescaling’ of the new sociology of education as one way to understand its contributions and limitations, and to ‘draw connections to alternative scales upon which inequalities may be identified’. In some respects, these arguments pick up the above concerns with ‘situated knowledges’ but, for Windle, this is about situating the intellectual agendas and problems of inequality (which were mainly construed in terms of class) addressed by the new sociology of education in a ‘distinctive spatio-temporal nexus’—predominantly, that of north-western Europe in the post war decades. As Windle illustrates, remarkably, this excluded attention to many other, perhaps less visible yet violent forms of inequality, such as anti-colonial struggles. In acknowledging the need to contextualize the conditions of knowledge production shaping the new sociology of education, he further argues for more careful critical attention to how insights from this work travel, land, and are transformed in other spatio-temporal settings. The final essay from Jessica Gerrard and Helen Proctor returns our focus to the contemporaneous reception of the then-new sociological ideas. They attend to the parallel rise of the social science curriculum in 1970s Australia, canvassing conservative responses to these curriculum developments. In doing so, they draw connections between debates about sociological knowledge and the reach of social scientific sensibilities into the school curriculum—a movement that was seen by some to displace the authority of foundational knowledges, such as history. For conservative critics, this signalled much more, including the worrying rise of educational and social progressivism and a feared concurrent retreat from meritocratic principles and educational standards. Highlighting the work of the Australian education historian and commentator Alan Barcan, they tease out some of the complexities of conservative thought during this period. In doing so, they show the value of exploring the intersections and tensions between and across the different domains (e.g. university, schools) in which questions of knowledge formation, curriculum and new sociological thinking are enacted and (re)contextualized.

Together, these essays underline the importance of the new sociology of education as part of the intellectual history of the field of educational research. But, as important, they point to some of the ways which these ideas seeped beyond academia and arcane debates, intersecting with (shaping and being shaped by) a vast range of innovations and experiments in educational practices and curriculum during this same period. In this sense, attending to the new sociology of education also points to directions for a practical and curricular history, for histories of practice and knowledge making in schools during this era. For example, and very briefly: in Australia (as elsewhere), the growth in community, alternative and open schooling during the 1970s points to some of the ways in which the flow of new sociology of education ideas, mixed with de-schooling society and radical democratic projects (e.g. Freire, 1972 ; Illich, 1971 ), formed part of the context shaping the administration and design of schools, the nature of teachers’ work, and curriculum practices, priorities and ambitions (e.g. McLeod & Rosén Rasmussen, 2021 ).

As I was drafting this introductory note, I repeatedly and mistakenly wrote the subtitle for Knowledge and Control as’ new directions in the sociology of education’, as if that collection were documenting and reporting on existing new directions. In fact, the correct subtitle is ‘new directions for the sociology of education’ which, for me at least, evokes a very different tone and ambition; one that is more manifesto-like, self-consciously setting the agenda and marking out its own confident role in that future. A confidence in the authority and purpose of the sociology of education, of its own paradigm-breaking direction, one fundamentally tied to the sociology of knowledge and particular political agendas, is perhaps one of the most striking contrasts with what is arguably a more uncertain, less all-knowing and more situated sociological imagination in education today.

In addition to the authors contributing to this section, I wish to acknowledge the contribution of Dr Eve Mayes (Deakin University) who presented a paper as part of this forum at the AARE 2022 conference.

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McLeod, J. The ‘new sociology of education’, then and now: looking back to the 1970s and ahead to today. Curric Perspect 43 , 183–186 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-023-00213-y

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Published : 03 October 2023

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-023-00213-y

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