EDUCABILITY,

SCHOOLS AND
IDEOLOGY
Edited by
Michael Flude and John Ahier

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:

EDUCATION

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:

EDUCATION

EDUCABILITY, SCHOOLS AND

IDEOLOGY

EDUCABILITY, SCHOOLS AND

IDEOLOGY

Edited by
MICHAEL FLUDE AND JOHN AHIER

Volume 175

Routledge
Taylor &. Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1974

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1974 Michael Flude and John Ahier
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EDUCABILITY, SCHOOLS
A N D IDEOLOGY
EDITED BY
MICHAEL FLUDE AND JOHN AHIER

CROOM HELM LONDON

First published 1974

Reprinted 1978
1974 by Michael Flude and John Ahier
Croom Helm Ltd
2-10 St John's Road London SW11
ISBN: 085664126X

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Redwood Burn Limited, Trowbridge & Esher

CONTENTS

1.

2.

3.

4.
5.
6.

7.
8.

9.
10.

Introduction

Continuities and Discontinuities in the Sociology of

Education
by Bill Williamson

Sociological Accounts of Differential Educational

Attainment
by Michael Flude

15

Phenomenological Perspectives and the Sociology of

the School
by Roger Dale

53

Sustaining Hierarchy through Teaching and Research

by John Bartholomew

70

Ideologies, Integration and Conflicts of Meaning

by Dennis Warwick

86

Sociology and the Problem of Radical Educational

Change
by Geoff Whitty

112

The Official Ideology of Education for Girls

by Ann Marie Wolpe

138

The Teachers and Professionalism; the Failure of an

Occupational Strategy
by Noel and Jose Parry

160

Deschoolers and New Romantics

by David H. Hargreaves

186

Professions and Ideologies

by John Ahier

211

Index

217

INTRODUCTION

It was evident that new ideas and different research projects were
emerging in the sociology of education with the publication of Michael
Young's Knowledge and Control1 and R.K. Brown's Knowledge
Education and Cultural Change2, and the construction of relevant
courses for the Open University. Subsequent commentary and debate
has been chiefly confined to the educational press and professional
publications. The editors of this book hope that the essays included
here will help to open out this debate to wider audiences of students
and teachers. Before any self-styled new sociology of education
becomes the sociology of education we feel that it is the time to
present some theoretical doubts and internal criticisms. For this
reason the contributors have shown a concern to locate the issues they
are discussing within the broader parameters of sociological work. The
most obvious tensions here are those between what may be broadly
termed a phenomenological sociology and a sociology focusing on
macrostructures and the sociohistorical dimensions of society. It
should be said, of course, that within this duality there are equally
significant divisions.
Following a general, critical survey of the field by Bill Williamson
the papers are grouped around problems relating to educability, schools
and ideology. Initially in Michael Flude's paper there is a discussion of
the research and policy implication of social class differences in
educability. The general phenomenological stance that is presented in
this paper is further clarified by Roger Dale in the chapter that follows.
The problems of the relation between researchers who use such a
perspective and the teachers whom they may study is examined by
John Bartholomew. Dennis Warwick's paper is an analysis of current
work in the sociology of the curriculum and an exposition of the
connections between this particular aspect of the sociology of
education and the development of critical sociology in general.
Phenomenological sociology naturally forces attention on educational
content and meanings. Geoff Whitty takes up some of the problems for
what he sees as this essentially idealist enterprise and refers to the
difficulty of accommodating phenomenological sociology with a critical
Marxism.
The first of the two historical studies looks at the way government
reports on education have ideologically legitimated the reproduction of
a relatively unskilled labour force. Ann Marie Wolpe approaches three
1

of the most influential British educational reports and shows how they
both perpetuated stereotypical views of women's work and female
interests and consistently misrepresented the actual employment of
women. The second historical study in this book is an analysis of the
use by teachers of the ideology and strategy of professionalism.
Traditional sociological approaches to the professions are criticised by
Noel and Jose Parry and instead professionalism is interpreted as a
strategy aimed at the attainment of upward collective social mobility.
This is followed by a critical evaluation of the deschooling literature
by David Hargreaves. Thefinalpaper by John Ahier is a general
commentary on the project of the sociology of education as presently
conceived.

NOTES
1. M.F.D. Young (ed) Knowledge and Control, Collier-Macmillan, London, 1971.
2. R.K. Brown (ed) Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change, Tavistock
Publications, London, 1973.

1.

CONTINUITIES & DISCONTINUITIES IN THE

SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
Bill Williamson

Sociologists have been interested in education for a long time. The

study of education was a major preoccupation of both Emile Durkheim
and Karl Mannheim. Their interest in education derived from the
knowledge that educational institutions play an important part in most
societies as agents of social control, cultural change, and, not least,
social selection. Since their time the role of education in these three
areas has been richly documented. It is in no way an overstatement
that the sociology of education has become one of the most
successful specialisms of sociology itself. To the satisfaction of most
sociologists the Gordian knot of the relationship between education
and social class has been largely unravelled at least in theory, although
few would be complacent enough to suggest that anything like equality
of opportunity in education has been realised in practice.
At the moment, however, the sociology of education is in a state of
transition. The theoretical frameworks in terms of which the subject
operates are being redesigned. There is considerable excitement now
about the potential gains to be made in applying to questions of
education such diverse theoretical perspectives as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology. The hope is that
new questions can be posed about old problems and new problems
identified. The books edited by R.K. Brown1 and M. Young2
respectively contain some of the essential papers setting out these new
perspectives. But these two books only represent the tip of the iceberg.
The sociology of education is not a thing, a set of references or of
solutions to problems; it is an ongoing process of research, writing,
discussion and teaching occurring in many different institutional
settings. It is in these different contexts that the transition I have
referred to is taking place. What is being affected are the assumptions
in terms of which this activity of thinking sociologically about
education has been embraced. There is hardly a lecture course in the
land unaffected by it. In this respect, and on its own terms, the new
sociology of education provides us with an intriguing example of
curriculum change which cries out to be analysed in its own right.
The result of such an analysis could not, of course, be prejudged,
but I believe it could be useful as a stock-taking exercise. There is a
danger inherent in all intellectual innovation that the significance of
earlier paradigms of enquiry will be devalued, or that the value and
3

distinctiveness of new approaches will be overestimated. This danger is

very real in the case of the new sociology of education. As I shall
attempt to show, much of it is neither new nor illuminating, and the
relevance of some of the perspectives employed even to the supposedly
new questions being posed is questionable indeed.
My argument has four major steps in it. Firstly, I shall attempt to
typify in what can only be a rather sketchy fashion what I understand
as the new sociology of education. This involves, secondly, saying
something about the perspectives it seeks to replace. Thirdly, I want to
throw out some hypotheses about why the transition I have referred to
has occurred and to suggest what it is which gives the new developments
some of their key characteristics. Fourthly I want to to reconsider the
potentiality for further development of, for brevity, the earlier
paradigm. This recommendation, if all goes well, leads quite naturally
to a consideration of just how far the new is a major departure from
the old, or is simply an extension to it.
To begin, then, with the new sociology of education. I am going to
use this phrase to cover the theoretical perspectives developed in M.
Young's book, Knowledge and Control.3 Essentially this book signals
an attempt to redefine the kinds of questions sociologists should ask of
education by taking seriously some of the theoretical insights of Marx,
Max Weber and Emile Durkheim together with those of George Herbert
Mead. The starting point of this redefinition is the view strongly
expressed by both Young and Basil Bernstein that sociologists have for
too long accepted administrators' definitions of what the problems are
in the study of education. The upshot of this is that important questions
about the way in which knowledge is selected and transmitted in
schools have not been asked, and the study of school socialisation has,
as Bernstein claims, been trivialised.4 What they seem to be arguing is
that schools should no longer be regarded simply as peopleprocessing
institutions selecting and grading the input to make sure of a
satisfactorily unequal output. Rather they should be seen as agents of
cultural transmission and social control and from this starting point it
then becomes possible to ask questions about the principles which
govern the selection of transmittable knowledge to the young
generation.
From such a starting point it becomes possible to regard interaction
processes between teachers and pupils as processes of reality building
and identity formation. Conflict in the classroom seen from this point
of view is conflict about the legitimacy of what is being taught and
about the self-conceptions and identities being offered to people.
Teachers are no longer innocent pedagogues doing their bit to help
children to learn. In so far as they accept the principles upon which the
school operates they are acting as agents of social control. What they
4

are doing is to foster the development of cognitive patterns in children

which do not allow for the easy emergence of oppositional thinking.
Teachers are world builders not world destroyers; they are in the
business of thought control.
The paper by Basil Bernstein on classification and framing adds
considerable theoretical weight to such a perspective.5 It sets out to
provide a new language for the study of socialisation in schools in
fundamentally Durkheimian terms. His paper forces attention down to
the socialising effects of curricula, teaching methods and measurement
systems so that we can no longer take for granted, or even assume the
neutrality of, the structure of the school itself.
The new sociology of education operates on two levels or, at least,
seems to be preoccupied with two kinds of problems. Firstly, there is a
concern with what is regarded as appropriate knowledge to be passed on
in schools. M. Young's view on this matter is that if we knew more
about the selection of knowledge we would know more about the
structures of power in society. Secondly, and particularly for those who
are more attracted to the interactionist social psychologies which are
one of the intellectual tributaries to the new sociology, the most
important concerns seem to be with the structure of classroom
interaction between teacher and pupil.6
The new sociology appears at first sight to be markedly different
from the old, although, of course, there is very little in it which cannot
be found in Durkheim and Mead, and which is not presupposed in the
old sociology. In the first place it is excitingly critical in so far as it
makes problematic the taken for granted assumptions most
educationists have about schools and education. The perspectives
incorporated in it raise difficult questions about teaching, learning,
evaluating learning, curriculum, school organisation and control and
the raison d'etre of educational institutions. What is more, this kind of
fundamental questioning is sustained with something which appears
to be lacking in the old sociology of education, namely sociological
theory. In this respect it represents a considerable departure from the
empirical plodding and political pragmatism of earlier approaches. It
is certainly not in the least concerned with questions of educational
policy, although studies of the social construction of social policy
would not be precluded by these perspectives.
In this latter respect a comparison with Marxism may not be out
of order. The point is admittedly sweeping, but in times when the
revolutionary transformation of society seems a pipe dream, Marxism
tends to be critical and philosophical; people are more preoccupied
with the theory of alienation than the class struggle. In times when a
society seems ripe for change Marxism seems to be bureaucratic and
practical. In the field of the sociology of education the mood is both
5

critical and philosophical.

The contrast can be highlighted if we move on to the second part of
my account, the character of the old sociology. I believe it is through a
consideration of these approaches to education that we might get some
clue about the reasons for the rapid growth of the new sociology and
an explanation of its particular characteristics.
The phrase, 'old sociology' refers quite clearly to a small group of
writers who, during the 1950s and 60s, successfully pointed to and
made an important issue of the way in which patterns of inequality
persisted in the English educational system.
In sharp contrast to the complacency of public opinion in this area
the work of men like J.W.B. Ebuglas7 and A.H. Halsey8 perhaps the
two most well-known and respected writers in the field stood out as
a model of clear, well-researched and committed social analysis. What it
revealed was the persistence of inequality in education despite ambitious
legislation to remove it, and of an inequality so deeply entrenched that
to remove it would require a massive switch of resources from the rich
to the poor, and a fundamental change in social attitudes to education.
Only in this way could the disabling effects of poverty be relieved and
the quality of life improved, particularly in the disadvantaged regions
of the country and areas in the cities. In different ways Halsey and
Douglas exposed the normally unseen, unreported and rotten
underbelly of affluence. Their work and at this point I group the two
of them together as symbolising a way of working and thinking has
becomes part of the conventional wisdom of teacher education and, to
some extent, of social policy. Few sociologists have received such
professional and public recognition, and few could legitimately claim
to have gained the ear of successive education ministers.
Men like Halsey and J.W.B. Douglas were, and still are, concerned
with the twin themes of social justice and efficiency in education.
Their work can, I think, be legitimately located as part of a much
longer tradition of political arithmetic in Britain.9 Their basic demand
is that policies in the field of education should be grounded in a
knowledge of the social facts of unequal provision and inequality. Their
work made a wide appeal to a wide audience, but its basic orientation
was dictated by a desire for social democratic change to a more equal
society.
The substantive focus of this research was the relationship between
social class and educational opportunity. This broad theme includes a
wide range of separate questions, which led to studies of streaming
practices in schools, of secondary school reorganisation policies, of the
effects of different kinds of schooling on the occupational aspirations
of children, and most recently, to studies of the special problems of
so-called deprived areas. Apart from the preoccupation with questions
6

of inequality in education, perhaps the most salient thread in this work

has been the notion of educability. It has been through a concern with
the social determinants of educability that the essential theories in
terms of which the old sociology operates have been developed.
Three main points need to be made about the research tradition I
have been referring to. The first is that the relative absence of overt
theorising is deceptive. The old sociology had as its focus the
connection between social class and opportunities in education, but
this connection was, and still is, understood within the context of
social market economy presuppositions. The basic commitment is to
the view that inequalities in education are not ordained by Providence
and to that extent are capable of being changed. In this respect I think
it can be shown, although to do so satisfactorily would take more time
and space than I have available, that the old sociology presupposed a
pluralistic theory of social power. In this respect it differs very little
from the new sociology of education. What this position entails is the
view that through appropriate political action on resources the social
market economy can be modified and real life chances redistributed.
The second observation is a consequence of the first. The old
sociology is distinguished by a pragmatism totally absent from the new.
What explains this difference, I suspect, is the character of the
relationship which different sociologists have with political decision
makers. Where this relationship is close it is incumbent on the
researcher to formulate his work and his writing in such a way that
some kind of political or policy action can flow from it. Where the
relationship is loose or nonexistent no such compunction exists. Even
a cursory glance through some of the major postwar reports on
education reveals the large extent to which educational decision makers
have relied on the work of sociologists of education. 10 Indeed, a great
deal of the work which makes up the old sociology has been to a
greater or lesser degree sponsored by official and semi-official agencies.
This is directly true of the national survey carried out by Professor
Wiseman for the Plowden Committee.11 And the volume Priority by
A.H. Halsey and his colleagues was itself the result of sponsored
research. 1 2
This point about the political connection is made even more
graphically by Anthony Crosland in an interview with Maurice
Kogan.13 He tells of the way in which he actively exploited the ideas
of men like Halsey and Tyrell Burgess whenever he was coming up to
an important political decision during his time as Minister of Education
in Harold Wilson's Labour Government. It is this official connection
which explains the pragmatism I have referred to, and it is a connection
which explains much about the whole character of British sociology.14
The third observation is that the social policies evolved from this
7

way of thinking about education have failed to achieve the aims set for
them. Comprehensive schools no longer seem the panacea solution to
inequality in education and no one feels complacent that the simple
expansion of school places solves the problem either. Describing the
basic thrust of such policies as being liberal in character, A.H. Halsey
explains their failure in the following terms:
'In summary, it may be said that liberal policies failed basically on
an inadequate theory of learning. They failed to notice that the
major determinants of educational attainment were not schoolmasters but social situations, not curriculum but motivation, not
formal access to the school but support in the family and the
community.' 15
For this reason Halsey has now lent his not inconsiderable intellectual
weight to the notion of positive discrimination in education. One cannot
help feeling, however, that the spirit in which he does so is one of
cheerful pessimism. It is the structural intransigence of inequality which
has pushed him in this direction although he has not yet conceded that
the goal of equality, however strongly formulated, is unattainable. In a
later publication to the one I have already quoted from he makes his
position clear:
'The association of social class with educational achievement will
not therefore be explained by a theory or eliminated by a policy
which falls short of including changes in public support for learning
in the family and the neighbourhood, the training of teachers, the
production of relevant curricula, the fostering of parental
participation, the raising of standards of housing and employment
prospects and, above all, the allocation of educational resources.
The translation of such a theory into action would require political
leadership with the will to go beyond the confines of traditional
liberal assumptions.'16
The road to equality is thus still more or less open but the route is a
tortuous one made even more so by the political land mines which line
it.
The new sociology cannot be divorced from this context of the
supposed failure of educational reform in the fifties and sixties. For
this failure is not only a failure on the part of the old sociology to ask
new kinds of questions; it is also seen as a political failure on the part
of democratic reformism itself. Marxist writers such as Althusser have
never entertained the illusion that a capitalist society is capable of
sustaining an education system which promotes equality. Nor have they

ever doubted that schools are transmitters of bourgeois ideology or

that teachers were the active agents of this transmission. But it has
taken the new sociologists a little longer to raise fundamentalist
questions of this kind and then in the language of social phenomenology.
I suspect, in fact, that the most important effect of the new sociology
and the theory of social world building which goes with it, is to force
students and teachers alike to consider the whole basis on which they
act and to contemplate a radical reconstruction of educational
institutions. In this respect the analytical language of the new sociology
is almost Marxist. In a curiously convoluted doublespeak the morning
assembly of the school becomes a world building religious ritual; the
classroom an ideological battle ground and the psychological
assumptions of current pedagogy a set of self-fulfilling prophecies
whose sole effect is to emasculate the intellectual development of the
child. Education becomes the process of socialisation into an ordered
world. What is more, such processes reflect the fact that what in the
end decides the institutional form of the school and the content of
what the school transmits is a system of power in society.
In this respect, and paradoxically, the effort of the new sociologists
to redefine the subject so that it becomes properly concerned with
sociologically relevant aspects of education (and not, for instance,
concerned with the wider system of social stratification) fails entirely.
The field gets redefined as the study of power structures although,
typically, little light is cast on this question. The new sociologists in
this respect are trapped by the same problems as their colleagues in
political sociology. They cannot find the power centre! And like some
of their colleagues in the field of modern deviance studies they solve
the problem by examining the minutiae of interaction sequences in
schools. Alvin Gouldner says somewhere that the trouble with the new
deviance theory is that it does no more than show us how nasty some
policemen are to juvenile delinquents. The same danger threatens to
beset the new sociology. People might assume that its message is that
teachers are not the nice people they are cracked up to be.
I think it can be argued, although the argument requires more flesh,
that the new sociologists are fired by a critical zeal but totally
uninspired by the conventional instruments for achieving change. The
experience of the sixties, I suspect, confirmed for some people the
irrelevance of piecemeal social changes to achieve pretty basic reforms.
Education could no longer be singled out as an instrument of change.
In this respect the new sociology is no different from the old. Except,
of course, in one fundamental respect. The new writers themselves
have not been (so far, at least) so well connected that they could expect
some kind of political response to their work. There is an element, if
we can compare it for the moment with the new deviance theories, of

romantic, libertarian anarchism right at the heart of the new sociology

which makes political pragmatism unthinkable. At the same time, and
again the parallels with the new deviance theory are worth drawing,
these perspectives (paradoxically enough) sustain a critical posture in
relation to contemporary institutions without at the same time
demanding direct political commitment.
Put another way, they want to understand the ideology of education
without having first worked out its political economy. It is not
sufficient to be aware only of the fact that the principles governing the
selection of transmittable knowledge reflect structures of power. It is
essential to move beyond such suspicions to work out the precise
connections.
I maintain that such a study would not involve research into
curriculum change, or into the psychological epistemologies (to use
one of Esland's 22 inimitable phrases) of teachers, or even into the way
in which 'knowledge' is packaged into 'courses' and filtered through to
the schools. At the same time I recognise why such studies seem
attractive. They are all possible in terms of the antipositivist, ahistorical
social psychologies of the new sociology, and in any case are deeply
satisfying to a group of people totally preoccupied with education.
The new sociologists are, in this respect, trapped in their own
institutional location. The London Institute of Education and, later,
The Open University have provided the setting for much of the new
work, and both organisations are directly bound up with the training
of teachers.23 Geoff Esland says near the end of his paper, which
explored the kinds of assumptions teachers bring to their daily tasks,
that the aim of his paper was to help teachers reach a greater
understanding of their role. 24 It is not clear, of course, what they
would do with the greater understanding they achieve, except, of
course, submit their immediate resignation in recognition of the futility
of what they are doing. But at least we know why he wrote it. If the
aim was to understand power in education then we would expect to
see studies of a quite different kind.
In the first place research into this question would have to be
historical. M. Young recognises this when he cites Raymond Williams'
much neglected chapter on education in the book The Long Revolution,
where Williams draws a connection between class groups and
educational ideologies.25 To paraphrase Marx's introduction to the
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, men make their own history
but not by themselves; they have to contend with the institutional and
ideological forms of earlier times as the basic constraints on what they
can achieve.26
Applied to education, the implication of this argument is simple.
What is provided in schools and what is taught in those schools can
10

only be understood historically. Earlier educational attitudes of

dominant groups in society still carry historical weight and are
exemplified even in the bricks and mortar of the school buidlings.
themselves.
The division of schools into public and private, elementary and
secondary, selective and nonselective, and the great divide in the
teaching profession between graduates and non-graduates reflect basic
class divisions in society and, as Tawney had it, a whole religion of
inequality.27 It seems to me that the structure and content of schools
on education more generally cannot be divorced from this context.
The argument, however, is not a new one. But what still needs to
be understood is how the institution of education came to reflect
this context. And that is an historical question and an economic one.
The framework for such studies, at least initially, is probably to be
found in the work of Marx and Weber or Tawney rather than George
Mead, Emile Durkheim or Alfred Schutz. Practical models of what such
studies might look like can be seen in the papers by Glass,28
Johnson, 29 Flynn, 30 and Musgrave.31 Each in their own way
connect up the development of mass education in Britain with the
economic and ideological changes of industrialisation.
Each writer analyses education provision as the fracture line
between opposing economic and ideological forces; between the need,
on the one hand for diligence and docility in the labour force and on
the other, and at a later stage, for a sufficient degree of educational
mobility to meet working class political demands, and the industrial
need for better trained manpower. The Education Act of 1870 and
the 'free place' system of 1907 symbolise both sets of problems. In
the twentieth century the debates about whether or not to raise the
school leaving age are a good example of the same kinds of tension.
As a political demand, the idea of extending the amount of time a
child spends at school has always had a reasonable ring about it. But
in practical political terms the demand has been ludicrously Utopian
for the last forty years. In a political struggle between the main parties
with an agenda of priorities concerned with basic economic issues it is
hardly surprising that the raising of the school leaving age has been
regarded, like dentistry and clean air, as a luxury which can be
reasonably dispensed with.
If what I have said so far about the need for historical studies is
correct, then I think a further point can be emphasised. It is simply
that the research I recommend would concern itself principally with
the connection between education and social class. It is only in this
way that the effect on education of different social groups with
different degrees of effective social power could be assessed.
There is no sense in which the kinds of research problems I am
11

suggesting are either strictly noneducational or administrative. But the

focus is still on the connection between social class and education, and
the working premise is that there is nothing uniquely educational about
education. H.G. Wells grasped this when he described the 1902
Education Act as an Act for the lower classes.32 Tawney knew it when
he described the public elementary schools in 1931 as having been
robbed of their spirit to educate.33 And in another sense we see the
same tension being worked out in attempts to defend the grammar
school against the tide of comprehensive reform. 34
In each case there is an undertow of class conflict about resources
for education, about what should be taught in schools and about who
should gain access to schools. All three issues are closely interdependent
and all three have generated tremendous political heat, particularly
since the Second World War. What is interesting, too, is that there is
still little agreement about these issues. The educational system, as
A.H. Halsey has emphasised, still functions to reflect and maintain
inequality. What we need, in the face of this, are more studies of the
education-society equation which recognise, again as Halsey has put it,
the 'structural force' of class. 35 We need such studies not only to
understand inequality but also to cast some light on what in retrospect
seems to be the rather affluent question of what it is which governs the
selection and transmission of educational knowledge.
I conclude then with a curse. A plague on both your houses! It is
just as woolly-headed to seek a solution to educational inequality in
different learning situations as it is to attempt the discovery of a power
structure through a school syllabus. The one futility is born from a
sense of failure, the other from a premature embrace of a doubtful
radicalism. Both in the end, have the same problem and for as long as
this society needs dustmen and shop assistants, and so long as some
people have more power than others to ensure that their children don't
get such jobs, the problem will not change. Seen in this light the new
sociology has to be accepted as either a radical social psychology of
not inconsiderable significance when kept inside the classroom, or a
half cock attempt to ask new questions of old problems with an
underlying, yet false and unadmitted, celebration of the autonomy of
education.

12

NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

9.

10.

11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

R.K. Brown (ed) Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change. Tavistock

1973.
M. Young (ed) Knowledge and Control, Collier Macmillan, 1971.
M. Young, op. cit.
B. Bernstein 'On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge'
in Young, op. cit.
B. Bernstein, op. cit.
See, for instance, N. Keddie 'Classroom Knowledge' in Young op.cit.
J.W.B. Douglas The Home and The School, MacGibbon & Kee, 1964.
A.H. Halsey's publications are too numerous to list, but special attention
can be given to J. Floud, A.H. Halsey and F. Martin, Social Class and
Educational Opportunity, Heineman, 1956, and for a later period, A.H.
Halsey (ed) Educational Priority, HMSO, 1972.
The point has been made by O. Banks, 'Sociology of Education in the
United Kingdom' International Review of Education 18 No.l: pp.95-99,
1972.
All the major postwar reports on education made direct reference to
appropriate research in the sociology of education. This is particularly
true of The Newsom Report (Half our Future: a report, HMSO 1963), and
The Plowden Report (Children and Their Primary Schools: a report, HMSO
1967).
Children and Their Primary Schools, op. cit.
A.H. Halsey Educational Priority, op. cit.
M. Kogan The Politics of Education, Penguin, 1971.
On this point see P. Abrams The Origins of British Sociology, University
of Chicago Press, 1969.
A.H. Halsey op.cit.
A.H. Halsey 'Education and Social Class in 1972' in Kathleen Jones (ed)
Yearbook of Social Policy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
B. Bernstein, R.S. Peters and H. Elvin 'Ritual in Education' in School and
Society: A sociological reader by the Open University Course Team,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.
See, for some suggestions of this argument, the paper by Nell Keddie, op.cit.
See B. Bernstein, op.cit.
Referring to the concepts in which political sociologists have dealt with the
notion of power Philip Abrams has written:
'We are offered strategic elites, functional elites, power elites, veto
groups, ruling strata, dominant but not ruling strata, ruling classes,
hegemonic classes, executive coalitions and as many more forms of
power structure as one cares to imagine. Moreover, the type of empirical
work that is associated with studies of power structure makes it quite
impossible for us to adjudicate between the claims that are made. Thus
some writers assert the existence of a ruling class in Britain, others
insist that while there is an upper class it does not rule or alternatively
that although there is rule it is not by class. The point is that we shall
never produce satisfactory answers to questions like "is there a ruling
class in Britain?" while we insist on offering answers couched firmly
and exclusively in the present tense. Analyses of the structure of power
must be historical; they have to deal in processes of appropriation,

13

defence, loss, accommodation, aggrandisement, in other words in the

mechanics of structuring through time not just in patterns of distribution detached from temporal action. The fact that our distinctive
research techniques are adapted to doing the latter and not the former
is no excuse, although it seems to be used as such, for ducking the
nature of the problem.'

21.
22.
23.

24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.

(Inaugural Lecture, published by the University of Durham, 1972).

A. Gouldner The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology, Heineman, 1971.
G. Esland in Young, op.cit.
This is directly true of the London Institute, but true of the Open
University only in so far as many OU students are teachers, and OU
education courses are designed with teachers in mind, although, of course,
there are other considerations too.
G. Esland, op.cit.
R. Williams The Long Revolution Chatto and Windus, 1961
K. Marx 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' in D. Fernbach
(ed) Surveys from Exile The Pelican Marx Library, 1973.
R.H. Tawney Equality Allen & Unwin, 1931.
D. Glass 'Education and Social Change in Modern England' in Halsey,
Floud and Anderson Education, Economy and Society Free Press, 1961.
R. Johnson 'Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian
England' Past and Present No.49 November 1970.
M.W. Flinn, 'Social Theory and the Industrial Revolution' in T. Burns and
J. Saul Theory & Economic Change Tavistock 1967.
P.W. Musgrave Sociology, History and Education Methuen 1970.
H.G. Wells quoted by D.V. Glass 'Education and Social Change in Modern
England' in Halsey, Floud and Anderson (eds) Education, Economy and
Society, Collier Macmillan 1965.
R. H. Tawney, op. cit.
For example, The Black Papers on Education C.B. Cos and A.E. Dyson
(eds) Davis-Poynter, 1971.
A.H. Halsey, in K. Jones op.cit.

I should like to thank Mike Syer of the Department of Sociology and Social
Administration, University of Durham, for his helpful comments on this paper
and for making available to me his own extensive analysis of the recent work of
Basil Bernstein, which will be published as a Departmental Working Paper in the
near future.

14

2.

SOCIOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS OF DIFFERENTIAL

EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT
Michael Flude

The main research programme so far undertaken in the sociology of

education has been the attempt to establish and explain the marked
variations in the educational attainments of pupils from different social
class and ethnic backgrounds. In Britain such research was undertaken
in a political climate where the educational provision made available,
especially at the secondary stage, was being reviewed in the light of
evidence that documented significant discrepancies in the opportunities
available to pupils for all kinds of selective education. In response to
what appeared to be an uncomfortable gap between the official
ideology, proclaiming the fairness of a system where opportunities for
selective secondary education were dependent on individual merit and
achievement, and the actual functioning of the system, a strong body
of political opinion called for a greater measure of equality in the
distribution of educational opportunities. It was claimed that this
would not only bring about a greater degree of social justice, but that
it could also ensure the identification and development of talent vital
to the manpower requirements of a highly complex, technological
society. Such thinking lies behind the expansionist policies for higher
education proposed by the Crowther and Robbins Reports, and the
movement towards the comprehensive reorganisation of secondary
education. However the so-called 'educability' studies carried out by
sociologists in the 1960s suggested that such changes in the opportunity
and organisational structure of schooling would not in themselves
dramatically reduce the disparities found in the levels of achievement
of pupils from different social class backgrounds. How then did social
class influence the likelihood of pupils' chances of educational success
or failure?
In tracing the attempts made by sociologists to resolve this problem,
it is important to acknowledge the impact of the demographic or
'political arithmetic' tradition of empirical sociology in Britain, with
its concern for questions of poverty and social inequality. It was during
the 1930s, following the establishment of a Department of Social
Biology at the London School of Economics, that systematic efforts
were made to investigate the part played by education in maintaining
and perpetuating the class structure, facilitating social mobility, and
'the problem of maximising the rational use of talent regardless of
social origins'.1 The institutionalisation of this fact-finding mission
15