EDUCABILITY,SCHOOLS AND

IDEOLOGY

Edited byMichael 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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ISBN 13: 978-0-415-61517-4 (Set) eISBN 13: 978-0-203-81617-2 (Set) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-50075-3 (Volume 175) eISBN 13: 978-0-203-12865-7 (Volume 175)

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EDUCABILITY, SCHOOLS AND 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: 0–85664–126–X

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Limited, Trowbridge & Esher

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1. Continuities and Discontinuities in the Sociology of Education by Bill Williamson 3

2. Sociological Accounts of Differential Educational Attainment by Michael Flude 15

3. Phenomenological Perspectives and the Sociology of the School by Roger Dale 53

4. Sustaining Hierarchy through Teaching and Research by John Bartholomew 70

5. Ideologies, Integration and Conflicts of Meaning by Dennis Warwick 86

6. Sociology and the Problem of Radical Educational Change by Geoff Whitty 112

7. The Official Ideology of Education for Girls by Ann Marie Wolpe 138

8. The Teachers and Professionalism; the Failure of an Occupational Strategy by Noel and Jose Parry 160

9. Deschoolers and New Romantics by David H. Hargreaves 186

10. 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. The final paper 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.

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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 inter-actionism, 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

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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 people—processing 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

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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

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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

9

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's22 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

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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

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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.

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1. R.K. Brown (ed) Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change. Tavistock 1973.

2. M. Young (ed) Knowledge and Control, Collier Macmillan, 1971. 3. M. Young, op. cit. 4. B. Bernstein 'On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge'

in Young, op. cit. 5. B. Bernstein, op. cit. 6. See, for instance, N. Keddie 'Classroom Knowledge' in Young op.cit. 7. J.W.B. Douglas The Home and The School, MacGibbon & Kee, 1964. 8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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).

11. Children and Their Primary Schools, op. cit. 12. A.H. Halsey Educational Priority, op. cit. 13. M. Kogan The Politics of Education, Penguin, 1971. 14. On this point see P. Abrams The Origins of British Sociology, University

of Chicago Press, 1969. 15. A.H. Halsey op.cit. 16. A.H. Halsey 'Education and Social Class in 1972' in Kathleen Jones (ed)

Yearbook of Social Policy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. 17. 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.

18. See, for some suggestions of this argument, the paper by Nell Keddie, op.cit. 19. See B. Bernstein, op.cit. 20. 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,

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NOTES

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.'

(Inaugural Lecture, published by the University of Durham, 1972). 21. A. Gouldner The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology, Heineman, 1971. 22. G. Esland in Young, op.cit. 23. 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.

24. G. Esland, op.cit. 25. R. Williams The Long Revolution Chatto and Windus, 1961 26. K. Marx 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' in D. Fernbach

(ed) Surveys from Exile The Pelican Marx Library, 1973. 27. R.H. Tawney Equality Allen & Unwin, 1931. 28. D. Glass 'Education and Social Change in Modern England' in Halsey,

Floud and Anderson Education, Economy and Society Free Press, 1961. 29. R. Johnson 'Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian

England' Past and Present No.49 November 1970. 30. M.W. Flinn, 'Social Theory and the Industrial Revolution' in T. Burns and

J. Saul Theory & Economic Change Tavistock 1967. 31. P.W. Musgrave Sociology, History and Education Methuen 1970. 32. 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.

33. R. H. Tawney, op. cit. 34. For example, The Black Papers on Education C.B. Cos and A.E. Dyson

(eds) Davis-Poynter, 1971. 35. 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.

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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

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