THE SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
(With special
reference to the development of research in Western
and the United States of America)
Europe
by
JEAN
FLOUD and A. H. HALSEY
1
I.
INTRODUCTION
The sociology of education has a recognizable history from the appearance of
Lester Ward’s Dynamic Sociology in 18 8 3, with its reaction against Spencer’s pessimistic
view of social statics and its final chapter2 on education as the essential motive force
of progress3 [73]. But this early identification of the study of educational institutions
with human betterment was to prove a doubtful blessing for the disciplined development of the field. It was joined in the i8c)o’s by educational reformers inspired by
pragmatism, and Dewey’s The School and Society [48 1 ], which appeared in i 8~~, was
followed by an unusually diffuse and heterogeneous literature styling itself &dquo;educational sociology&dquo;.
A great part of this literature had little relevance to the study of education as a
social institution as expounded by Durkheim in the early years of the present century
[Sz], and still less relevance to the sociology of the educational institutions of contemporary industrial societies. The pragmatism of William James, C. S. Peirce
and John Dewey introduced normative considerations into the very approach to the
study of education and vitiated much of the work which was, in any case, generally
on an insignificant scale and methodologically weak.
But by 1930 the application of sociology to education had become a well-organized
movement. Text-books began to appear in America before the First World War,
and, from 1916, to embody the term &dquo;educational sociology&dquo; in their titles. A
department of educational sociology was established at Columbia in 1916, with David
Snedden as its chairman, and by the mid-twenties nearly zoo institutions of higher
education were offering courses in the subject. On this basis a National Society
for the Study of Educational Sociology was organized in y2 and the Journal of
Educational Sociology was launched in 1928. These latter developments owed a great
deal to the energy of E. George Payne. His collection of Readings in Educational
Sociology [16], published in i ~ 3 z, offers a fair illustration of the range of views held
within the &dquo;educational sociology&dquo; movement by such men as C. L. Robbins,
C. C. Peters [41], who was perhaps the strongest proponent of the view that
educational sociology was a branch of education rather than sociology, Snedden [22,
44, 451 and Charles Ellwood [8]. The first rumblings of protest at the inspiration,
tenor and technique of much of the work styling itself &dquo;educational sociology&dquo; also
appear here in the contribution by Robert Angell.
Only in Germany after the First World War were there more than the beginnings of a comparable movement. Here, too, ideological considerations-in
this case, left-wing political rather than pragmatist-progressive-dominated the
1
The University of London Institute of Education, and the University of Birmingham Faculty
of Commerce and Social Science. ’I’he two authors assume equal responsibility for this issue of
Current Sociology, and wish to record their gratitude to Miss Melville Currell, B.A., for the resourcefulness and care with which she performed the onerous task of checking the references cited.
2
Actually an abridgment of a more extended but unpublished treatise written in I873.
3
For an interesting comparison of the life and work of Spencer and Ward see Kimball [95].
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I65
field and determined the choice and formulation of problems; but theoretical
and technical advances in general sociology played an important part in giving
the bulk of the work a reasonably sophisticated and recognizably sociological
character. By 1933, when Nazism made further work impossible, much effort had
been put into recording and comparing processes of primitive education; pioneer
work in the comparative sociology of educational systems and ideas had been inspired
by the new or freshly formulated concepts of Marx, Weber and Mannheim, and in
the social dynamics of educational groups by the work of Simmel, Vierkandt and
von Wiese; adult education, especially in relation to the working-class movement, had its &dquo;sociology&dquo;-that is to say, the social and educational backgrounds
and the needs and motivation of its students had been studied; the perennial movement
for university reform had produced interesting work in the sociology of German
institutions of higher learning; and the changing influence of education on the
demography and stratification of German society had been to some extent explored.
The sociology of education (pa’dagogi.rche So~iologie), which got no mention in the
American Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, was recognized in Germany
between the wars and was discussed by educationists and sociologists, talking much
the same language, as can be seen from Geiger’s intelligent discussion of the field
in 1930 [10] and from the entries contributed by the distinguished educationist
Aloys Fischer [9] to Vierkandt’s dictionary in 1932. It had its application in the widespread and influential movement for &dquo;social education&dquo; (Sozialpådagogik) [94], in
which Marxism and Freudian psychology were both prominent influences, and its
offshoot in the specialized study of social factors in educability (~~Iilierrkrrrrde) which
developed largely under the personal aegis of A. Busemann (452, 433].
In France, on the other hand, all development seems to have ceased after the
I9zo’s, when Pierre Lapie [36] made his abortive attempt from the Ministry of
Education to implement Durkheim’s belief in sociology as a foundation-stone of a
rational pedagogy, by making it a compulsory element in the training of teachers,
and a subject in a competitive examination for senior positions in the education
service. But the Durkheimian tradition-or, at least, the scientific as distinct from
the ethical and philosophical elements in it-had already been lost; there developed no
empirical sociological work on modern educational institutions, and, despite the
anthropological interests of French sociology, no monographs on primitive education
were written. Even the two text-books which appeared in 1921 and 1922 (33J in
response to Lapie’s decrees were re-hashes of current American ones rather than
indigenous works.’
Meanwhile, in England, a vigorous theoretical and practical interest in education
based itself on a long tradition of empirical inquiry by Royal Commissions, inspectors
of schools and private social investigators-a tradition coterminous with the growth
of public education which has deposited a great quantity of sociologically unexploited
material. From the turn of the century, contributions were also made by local social
surveys which included material on educational facilities. These officially and privately
assembled data were used by the Fabians and other radical groups in the analysis of
educational inequalities between social classes and of social waste through inadequate
educational opportunity [5ool. In the 193o’s a beginning was made with the
systematic study of the social role of education by demographers and others in
the newly established Department of Social Biology at the London School of
Economics.2 Interest was focused on its part in producing and perpetuating class
differences and in promoting social mobility, and on the problem of maximizing the
1
en
See the brief account of the situation given by Aron, Raymond, pp. I3ff., in Les Sciences Sociales
ed. Bouglé, C. Paris, I937.
See Hogben, L. (ed.), Political Arithmetic. London: George Allen & Unwin, I938, 53I p.
France,
2
I66
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national use of talent regardless of social origins. Although on a relatively limited
scale, this work was of good quality and cumulative both empirically and methodo-
logically.
Recent Trend
The Second World War interrupted development in the short run; but the role
of education was so enhanced by subsequent economic trends, and public interest
in education was so heightened that work in the sociology of education has since
made substantial progress everywhere with the possible exception of France, where
there is still no revival of the Durkheimian tradition.
In Germany, although everything except the &dquo;sociology of talent&dquo; with its possibilities for distortion in the service of racialism, was extinguished by Nazism,
there is an impending renaissance. A monumental and, in many respects, a model
study of the universities has already been published [3 I j, 3 i 6, 322] and is being
followed in a number of centres, including G6ttingen from which it stemmed, by
other more intensive inquiries into related aspects of university structure and functioning. Work is also being undertaken on the influence of home background on
the educability of children, the social distribution of attitudes towards education
with particular reference to working-class families, the role of education in social
mobility and the changed problems of adult education. All these matters are treated
in sophisticated fashion, building on pre-war work by retesting hypotheses with the
aid of the more elaborate methods made possible by post-war funds and the judicious
application of American developments in empirical work.
In England, the scale of work remains restricted and socialist influence on the
choice of problems remains strong. The pre-war tradition of interest in the role of
education in relation to fertility, social mobility, class and occupational structure is
still vigorous, and, in addition, there are promising beginnings of work, primarily
social-psychological in technique and inspiration, on the sociology of the school.
However, the bulk of the work continues to be American. &dquo;Educational Sociology&dquo;
has maintained an unbroken tradition with a well-established institutional basis in
teacher and undergraduate education, and with its normative orientations unimpaired.
A competent post-war text-book (3oJ, for example, contains a chapter with the title
&dquo;Achieving Purposeful Living Through Adult Education&dquo;. But, since y:~5, there
has grown up a vocal group of professional sociologists with purist intentions
towards the sociology of education (I I, 12]. They are determined to reject the tradition which made it a branch of applied sociology, and insist that education is intrinsically worthy of scientific investigation by sociologists interested in problems of
comparative social structure and dynamics as against matters of educational policy
or human betterment. In consequence it has recently become possible for a review
of the field [2] to appear which regards publications before World War II as belonging
to the pre-history of the subject while, at the same time, assembling an impressive
list of one hundred works, only one of which is not American.
American and British influence can be seen in the post-war growth of the sociology
of education in Latin America, Japan, Scandinavia, Belgium and Switzerland,
countries which this report and bibliography do not cover, but where work is
evidently proceeding which is potentially important both in quality and quantity.
The prospects for future developments in the sociology of education are, therefore,
not unpromising. But before discussing them further, or offering a more systematic
review of what has been done over the past half-century, we propose to discuss
the general relations of education to society and to broach what seems to us to be a
proper notion of the scope of the sociology of education.
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I67
II.
THEORIES AND METHODS IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF
EDUCATION
Discussion of the relationship of education to social structure is at least as old as
Plato and Aristotle, and is renewed at every period of crisis in social development;
every landmark in political theory has its counterpart in educational theory. Since
the development of a self-conscious &dquo;sociology&dquo;, a path has been opened towards the
serious treatment of education as a social institution, but it has not as yet been
followed for any distance. In particular, the sociology of education in industrialized
societies suffers from the rank heritage of philosophical and sociological confusions
on which it has to build.
Of the acknowledged masters, Durkheim [5 z, 90] and Weber [io6 a-c] made the only
important theoretical contributions to the study of education as a social institution,
though Thorstein Veblen contributed, in The Higher Learning [6zg], a brilliant practical
example of the possibilities of this kind of sociology. In a later generation, Karl
Mannheim [58-62] produced a unique educational message, the climax of a long tradition of politically and ideologically inspired sociological thought on education, blend
of all contributions from Plato, through Marx, to Ward and Dewey, with the newer
fruits of the European psycho-analytic movement of the twenties and thirties of the
present century. Yet none of these writers seems to have faced the fundamental
dificulty in the sociology of education; namely, that of presenting an orderly and
coherent analysis of a set of institutions which by their nature confound socialpsychological and sociological issues, straddling as they do the psychology and the
organizational structure of society.
This point was touched upon by Meyer Fortes in his account of education among
the Tallensi. He states, but without developing the point further, that &dquo;the problem
presented [to the social analyst] by this [educational] function of society is of an
entirely different order from that presented by the religious or economic or political
system of a people. The former is primarily a problem of genetic psychology, the
latter of cultural or sociological analysis.&dquo;’ It is, of course, true that education in the
broadest sense is the transmission of culture through the socialization of individuals;
every society is, in a manner of speaking, an educative society, providing for the
transmission of its culture and the formation of the personalities of its members;
and there is always the dual problem, at once social-psychological and sociological,
of analysing these processes and the institutional framework within which they take
place. But a fresh set of purely sociological problems is created as soon as educational
tasks are performed by specialized agencies, since the possibility then arises that these
may behave as relatively independent variables in the functioning of the social
system, promoting or impeding change and producing unintended as well as intended,
and dysfunctional as well as functional, consequences.
Mannheim certainly sensed these problems; but he paid little attention to them,
exempting education from the &dquo;structural&dquo; analysis he generally advocated so
strongly, preferring to concentrate on a modern treatment of the traditional problem
of individual socialization in the interests of social integration and cohesion. It is
arguable that his attempt to treat this problem in detail as an exercise in total social
planning stands as a monument to the debilitating effect on the sociology of education
of failure to explore the structural relations between the educational system and other
social processes and institutions.
Durkheim’s work suffers from the
1
Fortes, M.,
Press, I938, p.
I68
Social and
6.
same
limitation. Both
Psychological Aspects of Education
men came to
education
in Taleland. London: Oxford
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University
through dismay at the problems of consensus and integration in modern Western
society. Both diagnosed the situation in fundamentally similar terms, though with
differences of formulation which are the result, partly, of the different sociological
traditions in which they worked and, partly, of the different historical circumstances
under which they wrote. Both treated education as a social function or social
technique, and ignored the problems raised by the existence of formal and specialized
educational institutions functioning in close relation to, but in partial independence
of, the wider social structure.
This is more surprising in the case of Mannheim, who generally made much of a
structural approach and was more than usually keen to point out the inadequacies
of any other conception in analysing the institutions of modern society. Of course,
he was aware of the structural problems of education; thus, he recognized its selective
functions in his work on the recruitment and composition of social ~lites; and he
briefly mentions its changing economic role and its bureaucratization. But he gave
no extended treatment to these important topics, and did not find it
incongruous,
therefore, to make the drastic demand that the school should become &dquo;more of a
family, more of a workshop, more of a community&dquo; in order to take on the socializing
functions of the declining &dquo;primary groups&dquo;.
In societies at pre-industrial stages of development the structural problems of
education are either non-existent or relatively uncomplicated. Under the typical
social conditions of primitive peoples there are no processes of social selection
or differentiation, and therefore no problems of &dquo;organic solidarity&dquo;. The educational
problem really is primarily one of &dquo;genetic psychology&dquo;, and well-institutionalized
processes of socialization in the family and in organized relations between the generations provide both the necessary instruction in relatively simple economic skills
and induction into a homogeneous and relatively unchanging spiritual and social
life.
At later, even quite advanced-though still pre-industrial-stages of development,
characterized by fairly complex patterns of division of labour and of stratification,
the educational problem may still usefully be thought of in terms of genetic psychology or individual socialization. As Weber shows, formal education in such
societies is primarily a differentiating agency, preparing individuals for a particular
style of life. Men are socialized into social groups having relatively stable relationships
to each other. Each is educated &dquo;according to his station&dquo; and, other things being
equal, consensus and integration follow. Of course, other things are not always equal.
Formal education becomes an object of political dispute as newly emerging or
dissident social groups claim right of entry or the right to school their young according to their own lights. Nevertheless, the relationship between education and social
structure remains in principle relatively simple until the onset of industrialism,
which greatly complicates it.
This is partly because industrialism, in speeding up the rate of social change,
attenuates the relations between sub-groups in the system of division of labour and
thus between individuals and the wider social structure; but it is mainly, perhaps,
because industrialism throws new burdens on educational institutions-the burdens
of mass instruction, promotion of scientific and technological advance, occupational
recruitment and social selection. Under conditions of advanced industrialism indeed,
the economy becomes increasingly dominated by the institutions of research and
technological innovation, with the result that the differentiation of educational
institutions and functions assumes new proportions. So much is this so that the
educational system comes to occupy a strategic place as a central determinant of the
economic, political, social and cultural character of society, and we propose using the
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I69
&dquo;technological society&dquo; to distinguish the
processes have developed.
term
stage of industrialism in which these
In fact, the contribition of education to social persistence and development in
the vast, ramshackle and relatively atomized structures of advanced industrial
societies is difficult to determine with any precision; it plays a role in relation to all
aspects of social structure-demographic, economic, political and social, as well as
ideological or spiritual-and we are confronted no longer with a problem &dquo;primarily
of genetic psychology&dquo; but with the problem of analysing a major institutional
complex in very diverse relations with the wider structure of which it forms part.
Even the problem of &dquo;genetic psychology&dquo;, which, of course, is not disposed of, is
complicated under these circumstances by the need to answer questions about the
part actually played by the formal institutions of learning in the socialization of
children and young people; and these questions cannot be answered without embarking on a far-reaching analysis of the nature and purpose of these institutions and of
their internal life.
In short, industrialism gives rise to-or at least, justifies-the sociology of education as a specialized field of study.
To treat the educational systems of developed societies as social institutions, asking
the same questions about them, in principle, as one asks about other social institutions and seeking the answers, in the main, with the aid of similar methods, involves
inquiry at various levels.
On the most general, macrocosmic level, the task is to study the educational system
in its relations with the wider social structure-that is, in relation to its value system,
its demography, the economy, and the political and stratification systems, always
bearing in mind its relation to tendencies for change and development in each of these
fields of behaviour.
At a less general level, the social structure and functioning of the constituent
groups of the system-schools, universities, etc.-must be studied; each will have
its characteristic value-system, its demography and its economic, power and status
structures, to be studied for themselves and in interrelation. And it is worth pointing
out that work at this level on the sociology of educational institutions cannot be
effective unless something is known of structural relations and trends at the macrocosmic level just mentioned. These are the source of the subtle transformations of
function which schools, colleges and universities undergo without overt redirection
of aim or radical reorganization, and which generate the pressures and tensions
underlying and permeating their daily lives as on-going concerns.
At what may be termed the microcosmic level, the social relations inherent in,
or arising out of, educational activities are studied-the social psychology of classroom and school (as, for example, social distance and modes of authority in the learning situation) and &dquo;the separate culture of the school&dquo;, as Waller [5 3 i) aptly termed it
(&dquo;la vie scolaire&dquo; in Durkheim’s phrase [Sz6~).
Finally, our attention must be directed beyond the school or university to the
educational influences implicit in the social environment of pupils and teachers,
supporting or frustrating the tacit and explicit educational intentions of these institutions, but extraneous to them (as in family, neighbourhood or religious community).
Thus, in primitive societies, the educational problem is that of individual socialization in the interests of consensus and integration; and an anthropologist interested in
education in these societies is concerned with relations between the generations
wherever they occur, but especially within the family, and with sub-structures
such as age-sets and religious fraternities carrying socializing functions. The focus
of attention for the sociologist working in industrial and technological societies,
I70
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must be on formal and specialized educational institutions. His concern
is with the social forces which create and mould pedagogical aims and educational
policies and the institutions in which they are embodied; with these institutions
themselves and their functions as, in some measure, independent parts of a wider
and changing social structure. This is the context in which he comes to the fundamental problems, of social integration through the socialization of individuals,
and of persistence and development through the transmission of culture. The
approach is indirect, but there is no short cut.
The sociology and the &dquo;anthropology&dquo; of education must in practice tend to be
separate fields of inquiry because of the different problems and method involved in
studying, on the one hand the socializing process in primitive society, and on the
other the structural relations and internal functioning of the elaborate educational
provision characteristic of more developed societies. Nevertheless, it is obvious
that the comparative study of education in societies at various stages of development
takes on an enhanced interest and value in the light of the complexities of life in
industrialized societies. Thus, a strong movement among certain, mainly American,
anthropologists has been concerned to emphasize the implications of their work in
primitive societies for the study of education in developed societies.
This anthropological influence on the sociology of education takes two forms,
one straightforward and on the whole beneficial; the other more subtle, and on the
whole harmful. The straightforward influence is exercised when anthropological
findings are used as a vantage point for direct critical analysis of modern educational
forms, sometimes, as in the writings of Margaret Mead [63, 490],’ in a way reminiscent of Durkheim’s interest in the problems of moral education of the members
of industrial, specialized society. The same direct influence can also be seen in studies
of out-of-school influences on the formal educational process and, in particular, in
community studies of education of the kind undertaken by Warner and his associates,
research on social class influences on learning, and the study of education among
negroes and immigrant minority groups. On balance, this influence has been beneficial ; on the one hand it has diffused, especially in educational circles, an awareness
of the wide range of cultural forces impinging on the educational process both
inside and outside school; and, on the other, it has inspired investigations of the
subtler aspects of social processes such as selection, differentiation and mobility.
The indirect influence is methodological in character. &dquo;Structural-functionalism&dquo;
is par excellence the anthropologist’s approach to social analysis. The notion of social
equilibrium is central to this view of society, which is then regarded as a system,
rather than as a conative whole, as an entity rather than as a process-or, if a process,
then as a process of a special kind in which education, for instance, is seen simply
as one term of a relationship which is supposed to reproduce itself in a dynamic
equilibrium. The structural-functionalist is preoccupied with social integration
based on shared values-that is, with consensus-and he conducts his analysis solely
in terms of the motivated actions of individuals. For him, therefore, education is a
means of motivating individuals to behave in ways appropriate to maintain the society
in a state of equilibrium. But this is a difhcult notion to apply to developed, especially
industrialized, societies, even if the notion of equilibrium is interpreted dynamically.
They are dominated by social change, and &dquo;consensus&dquo; and &dquo;integration&dquo; can be
only very loosely conceived in regard to them.
Thus, if we take first the problem of social cohesion, the social anthropologist,
however,
1
Our exclusion of anthropological monographs from the bibliography has the unfortunate result
that we do less than justice to the writings of Margaret Mead which are, in any case, not open to the
methodological criticism advanced below against anthropologically inspired studies of education in
differentiated societies.
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I7I
the sociologist working with structural-functional concepts, interprets the relation
of education to society either psychofogically, to mean that education makes its
contribution to social integration through the formation of the &dquo;basic personality&dquo;,
or ideologically, through the inculcation of an appropriate set of common values.
Yet it seems doubtful whether this notion of &dquo;integration&dquo; can be applied to the
ramified, complex structures of modern industrialized societies. In any case, it is
clearly easy to exaggerate both the actual and the possible contribution of formal
educational institutions to consensus in these societies, whether we think in terms of
the formation of basic personality or of the inculcation of a common set of values.
It need hardly be said that the importance of schools and universities as agencies of
socialization in relation to the social-class and occupational structures, and thus their
contribution to a shambling sort of social integration, is not in doubt; but what are
we to understand by consensus in these societies? Durkheim and Mannheim both
wrestled with the problem; the former had recourse to a syndicalist, the latter to a
platonic-totalitarian solution.
It seems likely that when we are dealing with the mass educational services which
are a feature of modern societies &dquo;instruction&dquo; looms larger than &dquo;education&dquo; in
the broad sense of the term which is relevant to problems of personality formation
or the transmission of cultural values. Admittedly, the distinction between instruction and education must not be ridden too hard. There is evidently a point-and
this is especially clear when one considers the introduction of widespread formal
schooling into underdeveloped societies-beyond which one cannot instruct without
educating, since the use, not to say acquisition, of certain kinds of skill and knowledge
implies and requires a context of appropriate attitudes and values. The important
point is that these attitudes and values may be specific and need not be shared
throughout the society; consensus need not take the form of adherence to a set of
common values, and integration in differentiated societies need not be based on this
kind of consensus.
All this is not to say that in industrial society the strictly educational problem
of socialization, of &dquo;genetic psychology&dquo;, does not exist. Of course it does, and of
course formal educational institutions such as schools and universities
play a part
in the process of socialization. The point of these remarks is to emphasize that
socialization is by no means their only or even, in all cases, their prime function;
and that in any case, whatever the intentions of teachers and policy-makers, industrialism calls into being other latent and manifest social functions of educational
institutions and features of their organization, such as bureaucratization, which may
overtly or covertly overshadow, impede or transmute their educational function.
Thus, if for sociological purposes they are treated more or less exclusively in terms
of their supposed contribution to individual socialization and social cohesion, the
effect is at once to over-simplify and exaggerate their independent structural role.
Structural-functionalism, it is suggested, tends to play down problems of social
change, and is therefore, for this reason too, unsuitable for the analysis of modern
industrial societies. But it must be admitted that even where they are not burdened
by the methodological shortcomings of this approach, sociologists have not achieved
any great insight into the problems of education in relation to social change.
Until the recent rise of structural-functionalism, the discussion of these problems
was dominated by the American pragmatists with their offshoots in the advocates of
the community school. The belief that education can act as a direct agent of social
change was central to the convictions of men like Ward and Dewey, and reflected
the influence on their thought of rationalism and utilitarianism (which, it may be
remarked, also entered into the thinking about education of the Christian Socialists
or
I72
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and aroused the hostility of the Marxists, who saw education simply as a major weapon
in the class war). European sociologists, on the other hand, have always postulated
the dependence of education on the form of social structure, regarding it as an &dquo;adaptive&dquo; institution; that is to say, they have taken a fundamentally conservative view
of the social role of education.
Mannheim [ 5 8-6 2] drew heavily on both traditions; education was for him sociology
in action. His notion of &dquo;social education&dquo; was a notion of a planned educative society,
based on sociological understanding of the structural needs and possibilities of a
&dquo;democratic&dquo; (industrial) order and implemented with the aid of social psychology.
He did not fall into the common error of supposing education to be always and
inevitably either the dependent or the independent variable in social change. He had
no naive belief in the
powers of rational persuasion or the spread of &dquo;sweetness
and light&dquo; through education; nor, on the other hand, would he have subscribed to
the uncompromising view that education always follows and can never initiate
change. He well understood that &dquo;the causes of social change are motivated acts,
but the motives are shaped by changes in the conditions&dquo;,1 and he placed his faith
in the sociological analysis of conditions and the social-psychological (educational)
manipulation of motives. Nevertheless, his failure to analyse, among the conditions,
the characteristic structural position of modern educational institutions, is striking;
and this vital omission can no doubt be traced to his failure, also, to undertake any
analysis of the part actually played by education in various social changes which
would have illuminated its varying role-sometimes cause, sometimes condition,
and sometimes consequence of change.
Thus Mannheim was never able decisively to raise the level of the discussion of
the relation of education to social change; and this has generally been lamentably
low, geared to trivial and impoverished ideas of what is to be understood by social
change and a crude notion of a one-sided causality. Analyses of concrete examples
of the bearing of education on social change are singularly hard to come by. The
greater part of the relevant literature consists of hortatory and reformist tracts and
treatises, opposition to which has produced only some shift of allegiance, on the same
plane of rather fruitless abstraction, from belief in the force of &dquo;values&dquo; which it is
supposedly the job of education to influence, to a conviction that technological
innovations behave as independent social variables, bringing educational changes
more or less promptly in their wake. One may search almost in vain for discussion
of the unintended consequences of education, or of the social forces responsible for
changes in educational values and institutions, or of the subtle transformation of
function undergone by relatively stable educational institutions. And-to take a
single striking example-we confront the problems of technical assistance and mass
education programmes in underdeveloped societies today with virtually no understanding of the part actually played by education in economic growth; although
the social anthropologists have directed attention, for the most part in general terms,
to the potentially dysfunctional consequences and to the cultural obstacles to the
success of programmes of educational expansion in underdeveloped societies [SG].
Our thesis, then, is that the weaknesses of the sociology of education are the result,
in part, of the fact that too few professional sociologists have paid it detailed and
systematic attention, so that the new problems raised by the development of industrialism have gone unnoticed, or their theoretical and practical implications unexplored ; that the current interest of social anthropologists in education is proving,
for methodological reasons, a mixed blessing; and that the field of work for the
sociologist concerned with developed societies must be defined in institutional,
1
Ginsberg, M., "Social Change", B.J.S., IX, p.
2I3.
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I73
functional, terms-that is, in terms of the study of specialized educational institutions and their personnel, and not in terms of education as socialization, or an
exercise in &dquo;genetic psychology&dquo;. The sociology of educational institutions in
developed societies needs to be undertaken for its own sake and in the same terms
as the specialized study of other social institutions.
Only the detailed study of
educational institutions in relation to various aspects of the wider social structure
can
provide the indispensable framework for the analysis of their structure and
functioning and of their contribution to the perennial and crucial problems of social
organization-namely, the problems of socializing individuals, transmitting culture
and maintaining social cohesion-and we have ordered the following discussion and
classified our bibliography with this conviction in mind.
not
III.
EDUCATION AND ASPECTS OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE
.
Demography
The educational possibilities of a society and the actual functioning of its educational system are both conditioned by the size and quality of its population, and
these characteristics in turn are, to an important extent, functions of education. The
systematic study of these demographic and educational relationships has only a short
history, though with interesting antecedents in early work in the field of &dquo;political
arithmetic&dquo;,’ and is by no means independent of laborious and sometimes inadequate
private inquiry for the supply of relevant data.
Some information concerning the social distribution of education is available in
the public records of most modern societies and covers a period roughly coincident
with the history of the census in each case; but adequate description in sociological
terms of the educational experience of populations is rarely possible on the basis of
such raw material-and certainly attempts at international comparisons confront
almost insurmountable difhculties. Surveys of the &dquo;quality&dquo; of populations present
special problems which have inhibited oflicial sponsorship in the ordinary course of
government, except in the case of school-children and for specific purposes of
educational selection. It is true that the military exigencies of two world wars
have produced valuable mental surveys of male populations on a national scalein the United States and Great Britain, for example-but the problem of relating
their findings to those of censuses or other surveys of the educational experience of
the population has apparently proved intractable, and it has been left to academic
private enterprise to correlate distributions of ability and educational opportunity
and to relate both to fertility.
Where this work has been undertaken by demographers it has had the advantage
of a well-developed approach to the problems of measurement involved. In any case,
however, it has rarely been free from ideological inspiration which, where it has not
affected the precision and caution of the approach to the data, has frequently influenced
their interpretation. Thus, in England and in Germany eugenists have advocated
that expenditure on education be scrutinized in the light of the distribution of ability
revealed by mental surveys, and that educational selection be rigorously geared to
this distribution with a view to conserving resources and promoting talent. The
results of mass testing of recruits in the United States Army in the First World War
were widely discussed in similar
spirit [3751. On the other hand, these same data
were also interpreted from an environmentalist
point of view by such men as
’
1
E.g. Fletcher, Joseph, Summary of the Moral and Educational Statirticr of England
London, I850. Lavoisier, H. L., Réflexions sur l’Instruction Publique. Paris, I763.
174
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and Wales.
W. C.
Bagley [374~ ; and in England since the 193o’s and in post-war France
discrepancies in the social distributions of ability and educational opportunity have
been used to demonstrate waste of human resources through social-class discrimina-
tion in education. At the same time, social influences on the distribution of measured
intelligence have been emphasized, with the implication that it would be unethical,
as well as uneconomic and
impolitic, to gear educational selection too closely to test
results. Sooner or later the discussion runs up against fundamental problems, many
of which lie outside the sociology of education, of heredity and environment in
relation to education, and we have devoted a section of this bibliography to the
literature on social factors in educability.
The problem of education and the birth-rate, or fertility, has somewhat changed
its character since it excited the sustained attention of demographers and social
biologists in the 192o’s and 193o’s. The problem at that time was to diagnose the
reasons for a falling size of family and the downward trends in the
population of
advanced industrial countries, and findings pointed to the enhanced social and
economic importance of education and its increasing cost, both in money and real
terms, as primary factors in the reduced fertility of certain social groups. However,
indications since the last war, that the earlier decline in the average size of the family
has been arrested, have taken the edge off concern with the influence of the costs
of education on the birth-rate, and the tendency now is to make factual studies of the
fertility of particular social groups (such as teachers, or salaried employees) in which
the effects on the birth-rate of education (and of social mobility through education)
be systematically compared.
The eugenic effect of the relation between education and fertility is still an open
question, despite ambitious efforts in Britain to test the hypothesis of a falling national
intelligence by repeating in 1947 the mental survey of Scottish school-children first
undertaken in 1932. Since the hypothesis is logically impeccable, yet controverted,
albeit inconclusively, by empirical findings, the principal result of these efforts has
been to cast serious doubt on the value of intelligence tests for the purpose of genetic
investigations, and to re-open the vexed questions with which we deal below of
the environmental ingredient in test scores and social factors in educability.
can
Economy
No systematic sociological treatment of the relation between education and
economic systems has yet appeared. Its absence reflects contemporary lack of
interest in large-scale and historical comparative sociology. What is perhaps more
surprising is that there has been no direct attempt to trace the pattern of this changing
relationship over the history of the rise of industrialism. There are hints and partial
treatments in
social and cultural histories of education and discussions of considerable
interest in those chapters of general treatises by the older economists
like Mill or Marshall which deal with labour as a factor of production or with the
educational implications of rising productivity;’ but it is noteworthy that Marx’s
treatment of the subject is confined to the interesting but unsubstantiated assertion,
made in i875 in criticism of the Gotha programme of the German Workers’ Party,
that a general prohibition of child labour is incompatible with the existence of largescale industry.
A sociological analysis of the history of industrialism from this point of view
would show how and under what conditions changes in technology have altered
sociological
1
Mill, J. S., "The Probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes", Principles of Political Economy,
IV, ch. VII; also Marshall, Alfred, "The Future of the Working Classes" (I873), in Pigou, A. C.
Memorials of Alfred Marshall. London, I925.
(ed.),
See
Bk.
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I75
the
structure
of
occupational opportunities,
and have
set
up demands for the
educational systems of the industrialized countries to function as agents for the supply
and selection of a continually widening variety of manpower. At the same time
it would throw light on the fundamental problem of causal relations in social change
as between educational and economic systems. How far do changes in education
wait upon economic changes? How far have changes in educational structure
altered the distribution of supply, income and prestige between different types of
occupation? Questions of this kind have received but scant attention from sociologists, although there are scattered references in the literature to such important aspects
as the decline of primary accumulation in the nineteenth century, and the rise of
formal educational qualifications for entry to the expanding professional, administrative and white-collar classes. Economists, on the other hand, have paid some attention to the emphasis on technological innovation in advanced industrialist societies
and the consequent growth of institutionalized research, and some of the educational
and sociological implications of these developments have very recently been explored
by Drucker [i49J.
The problem of the relation between education and the economy
approached from the point of view of the question of allocation of
may also be
resources
to
education generally and, within an educational system, to different institutions.
Ascertainment of the facts of allocation presents many difficulties of definition
and interpretation of official statistics. Thus in England, Vaizey’s is the first major
attempt to measure trends in the amount spent on various kinds of education [i67J.
There are studies describing the basis of educational finance in the United States:
by Mort and Reusser [166] in the case of the schools and by Millet ( i 6 S in the case
of higher education. The Commission on Financing Higher Education which promoted Millet’s work also inspired the essays by Dodds, Hacker and Rogers (i S 8)
on the role of government in the financing of the British universities [168].
Such studies are for the most part either straightforward description or committed
to a particular view of income redistribution [160, I6I, i7oJ and as such represent
only the materials for sociological analysis. Nor does the type of study suggested by
Brim (2]-that is, of the attitudes and values held by the public and by key groups
towards educational matters-carry us much further towards an explanation of the
facts of allocation. For this purpose, as we have already argued in a more general
context, institutional rather than psychological analysis is required of the power
relations of the relevant groups.
Comparative essays of the kind undertaken by Conant [86] and Turner’ make
a beginning in this direction by examining the values underlying the emphasis
placed on selection in the British as contrasted with the American educational
system. In a broader context Raup’s analysis of the impact of organized interests
on educational practice in the United States (S 8~] indicates a line of investigation
which has been insufficiently exploited. Other studies of the determinants of allocation policy are usually ex post; for example, the question of the influence of Sir
Robert Morant on the development of grammar as opposed to technical secondary
education in England at the turn of the century [79].
At all events, such features of education as the relative paucity of grants to English
primary and secondary modern schools as compared with grammar schools documented by Vaizey [167] are only explicable in terms of the kind of analysis suggested by Raup and Turner. On the other hand, the facts of differential allocation between
white and negro education in the U.S.A. summarized by Ashmore [I I I] indicate
1
R. H. Turner, "Sponsored and Contest Mobility and the School System", a paper presented to
the Fourth World Congress of Sociology, of which an abstract is presented in the Transactions of
the Congress, Vol. III, International Sociological Association, London, I959.
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the need to distinguish between selective and discriminatory allocations [2, p. 27].
A third and related approach is by way of study of the supply and demand for
different types of manpower. For the most part this problem falls to the demographer and the economist, but the fact of an increasingly variegated demand for
skills in modern industrial countries and the consequent tendency for closer and more
complex links to develop between occupational structure and the educational system
raises problems for the sociologist of education.
Interest in the role of education from this point of view has engendered a growing
body of research which, especially in post-war America, promises to form the basis
of a fundamental understanding of the relation between education and the economy
under conditions of advanced industrialism. The problem has been tackled first
under the stimulus of war-time experience with the mobilization of human resources,
and more recently under the pressure of concern for competitive survival in the race
with Russia for technological prestige and military strength. Thus, for example,
the National Science Foundation has financed an exhaustive study by De Witt of the
Soviet educational system and its role in the production of scientific manpower
[193] and the creation of the Commission on Human Resources and Advanced Training in 1949 has led to Wolfle’s large-scale study of supply and demand for specialized
talent in the United States (i~~].
Again it must be noted that much of this work lies outside sociology, although
it is, of course, basic to a consideration of the sociological aspects of the problem
of the influence of educational institutions on the supply of manpower at various
levels of skill and responsibility. In part, this is a straightforward matter of the scale
of educational provision and of the social allocation of educational facilities. But
these matters can rarely be profitably considered in isolation from their context in
the wider social structure. The demand for qualified manpower is an economic
phenomenon, but its satisfaction is more than that. We have alrcady noted the
sociological terms in which any inquiry into the allocation of resources to education
must be cast if it is to go beyond the mere ascertainment of the facts. Similarly, if
we are to study the effects of the allocation, as reflected in the output of educational
institutions and their contribution to the supply of manpower, we are forced into a
sociological inquiry which will take into account the functioning of these institutions in relation to other aspects of social structure, and in particular to the system
of stratification. The economist will analyse the demand for labour at any given level
of economic development, and, with the aid of the demographer, the facts of the
supply and the output of the educational system also; but the sociologist is concerned
with the social and institutional determinants of the supply. Both its volume and its
fluidity are bound up with the way in which educational institutions select and
differentiate their populations in the context of a particular system of social stratification ; and although the system of stratification itself is largely conditioned by the
nature of the economy, the relation between them cannot be understood in purely
economic terms. In short, the problem of the role of education in relation to the
supply of manpower is a sociological one which can be analysed for the most part
in terms of the reciprocal relations of educational institutions and the system of
stratification, to which problem we turn in the following section.
Social Strati
fication
Education has two characteristic functions in relation to systems of stratification;
namely, differentiation and selection. In caste or estate societies education serves
primarily a differentiating function, maintaining the styles of life of different strata
and the supply of appropriately socialized recruits to them. In open-class societies,
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I77
especially those with advanced technology, the emphasis shifts to the selective,
the social rather than the socializing, function of education for the stratification
system. In societies where caste and class elements fuse, as in South Africa or the
southern United States, the differentiating and selective functions of education clash
and the result is discrimination.
Max Weber saw education primarily as a differentiating agency, aimed at cultivating
individuals for a particular &dquo;conduct of life&dquo; typical of and suited to each statusgroup in a particular &dquo;structure of domination&dquo; characterized by its position at some
point along the charismatic-bureaucratic continuum [io6 a-c]. But with the rise of
technological society since the turn of the century education has taken on an increasingly selective role and its differentiating functions have received diminishing attention from sociologists.
The only distinguished exception to this trend is Karl Mannheim [5 8-6z] with
his treatment of education as a &dquo;social technique&dquo;-&dquo;one of the methods of influencing human behaviour so that it fits into the prevailing patterns of social interaction&dquo;.
But in stressing the personality-forming functions of schooling in a democratic
age he took for granted the selective functions of education on which other sociologists since Weber have concentrated their attention. Thus he was rebuked by
T. S. Eliot [541 for ignoring the socially disruptive implications of the notion of
&dquo;democratic elites&dquo; perpetually renewed in free competition through educational
agencies. On the other hand, however, Mannheim never concerned himself in any
detail with the problems of education for leadership in a democracy. He simply
took it for granted that educational selection and educational segregation were
natural corollaries and that, given equality of opportunity, segregation presented
no social problems. He was concerned with the educative implications of the social
environment both inside and outside educational institutions and with pedagogical
problems of curriculum and organization, rather than with the structural problems of
educational systems and their social implications.
Interest in the study of social selection through education gathered momentum
more slowly in America than elsewhere, especially before experience in the y3o’s
began to challenge &dquo;the American dream&dquo;. Before that time the main preoccupation
of the schools was with personality training or &dquo;Americanization&dquo; for a society
assumed to be open. Lester Ward [73] had insisted on equality of opportunity in
the service of social progress through education, but later American sociologists
tended to take this for granted until the work of W. L. Warner and others [228, 484,
493, 503] emphasized the dual role of the schools in maintaining status as well as
promoting mobility for a minority of able lower-class children.
Research into education as an avenue of social and occupational advance began
with inquiries, on the one hand, into the educational antecedents of various 61ite
groups (IIL (ii)] and, on the other hand, into the social composition of schools and
institutions of higher learning (V. i (ii), V.2 (ii)]. Scattered attempts were made to
reassess the changing role of education in the process of social and, more particularly,
occupational mobility [216, 218]. But no systematic inquiry has yet documented either
historically or statistically the tightening bond between education and occupation
in technological society, though the ideal-type has been examined in Young’s amusing
fable on future developments in England. The link between education and status
is assumed to become perfect, and to lead through perfect equalization of opportunity to the reappearance of a rigidly stratified society ruled by a meritocracy (22~].
English work in the &dquo;political arithmetic&dquo; tradition has established the use of
clear measuring devices such as the statistical concept of &dquo;perfect mobility&dquo; [218],
&dquo;ability/opportunity ratios&dquo; [130] and the assessment of &dquo;class chances&dquo; of mobility
I78
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through education by relating the social composition of educational institutions
and occupational groups to that of the population from which they are recruited [49 5 ].
The spirit of inquiry in this field has been and, except in Germany, remains heavily
imbued with egalitarian ideals. Educational selection is studied in England, America
and France with a sharp eye to its possibilities as a manifestation of social discrimination. Once the facts of selection are established, inquiry is directed towards the
obstacles to &dquo;perfect&dquo; representation of the population at large within selective
schools and universities; and it is at this point that studies of the class conditioning
of educational chances are supplemented by research into the influence of class on
educational performance [IV.2 (iii)] and vocational aspiration (IIL2 (iv)]. Study of
selection for education is supplemented by study of selection through education
(V. (iii)]. This involves a revival of interest in the differentiating functions of
educational institutions, although the interest is now widened in scope and extends
to the study of the internal social structure and functioning of educational institutions
as such. Attempts are now made to understand how they perform their selective
and differentiating functions, and to account for their relative failure or success in
educating for leadership or in promoting and distributing talent, by relating the
background of pupils to the aims, values and assumptions underlying their organization. &dquo;Drop-out&dquo; in America and &dquo;early leaving&dquo; in England are treated as symptomatic as much of social as of academic selection. Educational and social performance
in schools and universities are examined both for conscious and unconscious discrimination in the teaching or assessment of pupils and for conscious and unconscious
resistance to learning in particular educational environments by children of given
social origins; attempts are made to detect distorting influences in schooling of
different types on occupational aspirations and choice.
The influence of egalitarianism on this type of research has been supported,
especially since World War II, by governments othcially committed to equality of
opportunity and responsible for ensuring the supply of high scientific manpower.
The early leaving report in England ( S o8] and the reports of the President’s Commission on Higher Education in America’ are examples of the fruits of this kind of
patronage. These developments, in the special social and political setting of the West
European &dquo;Welfare State&dquo;, have been analysed by English and German sociologists
[69, 217, 223]. We shall see, too, in the next section that the egalitarian impulse has
led to studies of minority and underprivileged groups in the same sociological terms
as those used in the study of education in relation to social class.
Ethnic and Other
Minority Groups
on this aspect of social structure in its relation to education
is American, though comparable problems have forced themselves on the attention
of sociologists in Israel in recent years (47~J. Social scientists in America have always
been aware of the sociological importance of such phenomena as &dquo;the melting pot&dquo;,
&dquo;Americanization&dquo; and similar characteristic features of the development of their
country. The cultural heterogeneity of the immigrant population has offered a fertile
field for sociological inquiry; it was the basis, for example, of the Chicago ecological
school in the ig2o’s. General surveys and histories of national and racial minorities,
of a more or less sociological kind, have appeared from time to time since the turn
of the century, among which that edited by Brown and Roucek is recent and
typical [3~2]. This volume contains a chapter by Payne which traces briefly the
importance and changing role of education in the assimilation of immigrants, but
Most of the literature
1
Higher
Education for American
Democracy,
6 vols.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, I947.
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I79
references to this crucial function of American education are surprisingly fragmentary
and the subject has received no full-scale sociological treatment [357, 358, 733, 748].
The main focus of attention for sociologists of education has been on the indigenous
North American tribes and on the negro.
In many ways American work on racial and ethnic minorities occupies a place
in the general body of sociological literature which is analagous to that of European
work on stratification. Indeed, in America the two topics are often linked. Thus in
the late y3o’s the heightened interest in the class correlates of education, which
took place against the background of depression and the New Deal, was closely
linked to the so-called &dquo;negro problem&dquo;, as, for example, in Dollard’s description of the caste patterning of education in a southern town [338]. The history
of the American negro, and not least of his education, provides many parallels
with the history of the European working classes, and is amenable to sociological
analysis in similar terms. Thus the interpretation of English social and educational
history put forward by T. H. Marshall in Citizenship and Social Class [22z] has its
counterpart in the policies advocated and promoted by Booker T. Washington for
the peaceful, piecemeal and gradual assimilation of the negro into full membership
of American society’ [88].
The sociological literature on negro education reflects a slow and still unfinished
story of transition from differentiation through discrimination to selection. In the
inter-war period much effort was devoted to the demolition of hereditarian bias
in the explanation of results of mental surveys of the population. In relation to the
negroes, the trend of scientific opinion is dramatized by the hereditarian emphasis in
Brigham’s influential book on the World War I army tests, published in 1923 [37S],
and his subsequent public recantation in 193 0.2 Throughout the period there has
been a regular flow of literature documenting the inequalities of educational provision,
enrolment, length of school life, teacher training and economic opportunities of
educated negroes as contrasted with whites [i io, I I I, 260]. And at the same time
the interpretation of these facts in environmental terms has been supported by studies
of the social and economic background of negro upbringing.3 Special mention must
also be made here of Charles Johnson’s monumental work on the negro college
graduate [248], which provides a detailed historical, sociological and statistical
analysis of this group from its beginnings in the i 82o’s.
A further impetus was given to the study cf negro education by the segregation
issue after World War II. Following Ashmore’s summary of the history of educational
discrimination in the south, a continuing series of sociological studies has appeared
[339, 344-7, 348, 349]. The Supreme Court’s decision itself bears eloquent testimony
to the immense influence of sociological writing on racial and ethnic inequality.
&dquo;From history and philosophy and custom we pass therefore to the force which
in our day and generation is becoming the greatest of them all, the power of social
justice which finds its outlet and expression in the method of sociology.... The
final cause of law is the welfare of society....&dquo;4
Studies of ethnic association and prejudice in educational institutions are similarly
1
Washington, Booker T., Up from Slavery, New York, I90I, and My Larger Education, New York,
I9II. Incidentally, Washington’s experience of European conditions impressed upon him the parallels
and encouraged his optimistic view of the possibilities of Negro progress—cf. his Tbe Man Farthest
Down. New York, I912.
2
In Psych. Rev., XXXVII, I56-I65.
8
E.g. those sponsored by the American Youth Commission in the late I930’s: Reid, Ira De A., Ina
Minor Key: Negro Youth in Story and Fact. Davis, A., and Dollard, J., Children of Bondage: the personality
development of Negro Youth in the Urban South, I940. Frazier, E. Franklin, Negro Youth at the Cross
Roads; their personality development in the Middle States. Johnson, Charles S., Growing Up in the Cotton
Bell. Warner, W. L., et al., Color and Human Nature: Negro personality development in a nortbern city, I94I.
4
Justice Cardoza, quoted by Kimball, S., in Spindler, G. (ed.) [7I], p. 282.
I80
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in the American literature [336, 353~ 354, 468, 472, 476], and
such studies have also appeared in England [470, 474(a)]. On the basis of this and
similar work a line of applied sociological inquiry has developed with the aim of
strongly represented
two
reducing prejudice through &dquo;intergroup education&dquo; [466, 4751.
IV.
SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF EDUCABILITY
The differentiated institutions of developed societies interact to condition the
educability of groups and individuals in their formal educational institutions. In
discussing the demographic role of education we pointed out that the quality of a
population is in part a function of education. We may now take the discussion further
by recognizing that educability is an aspect of the quality of populations which is
conditioned by the interplay of those aspects of social structure, which, so far, we
have discussed separately.
Of course, it is at this point in the selection of the bibliography that we have
encountered the greatest difficulty in making a practical delimitation of the field
from the adjacent psychological and biological territories. Two boundaries are in
question: first, the problem of the limits to educability set by genetic factors invites
trespass into human genetics, neurology and brain physiology as well as some of the
established fields of psychology; and second, the point at which studies of the interaction between individuals and their environments pass from sociology to psychology,
though it may be in itself a pedantic problem, sets a practical difFculty for the compiler of a bibliography. In fact, we have not hesitated to cross the boundaries where
necessary in order to give coherence to the bibliography, though our inclusions
from neighbouring fields have been chosen for their summarizing and reviewing
character; for example, Anastasi’s excellent survey of the state of knowledge concerning intelligence and family size [4oS].
The fascinating problem of what educational possibilities exist in man is partly
one of human genetics and, as such, lies outside the field
[402], but some of the literature bearing upon it is sociological in that variations in social structure exercise a
powerful influences over the genetic composition of populations, and hence their
innate educability [383].
Scientific study of the nature-nurture problem goes back to Galton’s researches at
the end of the nineteenth century into the genetic factor in intelligence. A review
of subsequent work would be partly a story of progress in the refinement of both
conceptualization and method, but also partly an essay in ideological history with
close parallels in the movement of attitudes towards the educability of difFerent
social groups. Racialism in Germany, liberalism in America’ and egalitarianism in
England have all left their mark on the record, and still actively inspire work on
heredity and environment in relation to education. Most of these studies have been
focused on twins and foster children with results which were surveyed and evaluated
by Woodworth [404] for the period up to 1941, and which have been further strengthened without major modification by more recent investigation [3951.
These researches fall into two broad categories. First, there are those which,
using correlational techniques, have studied the degree of resemblance between
parents, children and siblings in respect of a variety of physical and mental characteristics [376, 378, 387, 394]. Suf~cient evidence has now accumulated from such
studies to leave no doubt that resemblance is greater the closer the blood tie. A second
1 See
Myrdal, G., An American Dilemma. New York, I944, pp. I027-I064, and Fontaine, W. T.,
"Social Determination in the Writings of Negro Scholars" Am. J. Sociol., I944, 49, 302-3I5. Both
are quoted by Merton, R. K., in his Social Tbecry and Social Structure. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press,
I958, p. 245.
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I8I
line of inquiry, which brings us closer to studies in the sociology of educability, has
been concerned with the impact of various environments on the mean level of
measured intelligence of groups exposed to them. Among the best examples in this
category are the follow-up study of foster children by Skodak and Skeels [396] and
the work on the effect of school environment on later years by S. Smith [397] and
Lorge [390]. These studies are relevant to the larger question of identifying and
evaluating those aspects of environment which affect educability. As regards the
problem of the genetic factor in intelligence, they show that exposure to a favourable
environment will raise the level of measured intelligence and exposure to an unfavourable environment will have the opposite effect [4o3J.
The conclusions of these two lines of inquiry are not, of course, necessarily
inconsistent. There is, however, an unresolved controversy as to the fraction of
variation in intelligence which is heritable. Estimates of this vary up to 75 per cent
and Burt and Howard [378] have recently claimed as much as 88 per cent. It should
not be, though it often is, conceived of as a fixed ratio. The fact that societies evolve
socially and educationally implies a widening of environmental possibilities, and therefore of variation in the interactional effects of nature and nurture on educability.
While this fundamental question remains largely unexplored, the problem of the
social distribution of intelligence must remain somewhat ambiguous. As studies
have multiplied of differences in the average measured intelligence of racial, ethnic
or social-class groups, the trend of opinion has been away from the view that they
explicable in genetic terms, and especially from the view, held by Galton, that
negroes are on the average innately inferior to whites; although it seems that (outside South Africa, at least) the resistance to this trend of opinion is greatest in the
case of social-class differences.’ The issue is far from final solution. The extent to
which the social distribution of measured intelligence accurately reflects the social
distribution of innate capacities continues to excite controversy, but a major obstacle
to any solution of the problem is our ignorance of the relations between genetically
determined intelligence and fertility and social mobility.
This obstacle can hardly be overcome so long as it remains impossible to measure
innate intelligence. Intelligence tests for this purpose are under a cloud; even on the
most optimistic assessment of their accuracy-that is, however small the fraction of
variation in measured intelligence which is attributed to environment-the margin
of error would seem to be too wide for the purposes of genetic investigations. They
continue in use by psychologists and others for the purposes of educational and
occupational selection; that is to say, as indicators of educability: but a stringent
critique of the rationale and practice of intelligence testing has developed, especially
in the United States under the stimulus of work on social-class, racial and ethnic
sub-cultures [426, 427]. These criticisms stress the influence of motivation on test
performance and the fact that, for test purposes, intelligence tends to be defined in
terms of the demands of a given type of educational system. Not all psychologists
are prepared to accept the radical inferences drawn from this work, but realization
of the intrusion of non-genetic factors in test performances goes back to Binet himself, who fully recognized the difficulty, but could find no solution to it.
Thus, it would seem that attack on the problem of heredity and environment in
relation to education must be indirect for both psychologists and sociologists;
and, in fact, the general tendency among sociologists in recent years has been to by-pass
the problem of genetic limits to educability and to concentrate upon the strand in
the tradition of work which has concerned itself with environmental influences on
are
1
This trend of opinion, it should be noted, does nothing to alter the fact that differences
intelligence between groups may be created by social forces such as educational selection,
mating and migration, etc.
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in innate
selective
educational performance, whether measured by standard tests of &dquo;intelligence&dquo;
and attainment or by other criteria, such as teachers’ assessments, length of school
life or performance in public examinations.
It was, in fact, a psychologist, Cyril Burt, who carried out some of the earliest
and best sociological work on the influence of the social environment on educability
[4i~J; and, in general, psychologists have perhaps been somewhat more successful
than sociologists in coming to grips with the scientific problem. Despite the confusion engendered by their attempts to measure innate intelligence, and the proneness
they share with sociologists to draw unsound inferences from their work, the fact
remains that they have improved on the educational criteria by the development of
standardized tests of aptitude and attainment, and have thus made it possible to
relate studies of environmental influence to more precisely defined degrees of talent
or backwardness. And they have been mainly responsible for the systematic accumulation of knowledge of the relation to educational performance of two major aspects
of social environment; namely, socio-economic status and family size. The principal
contribution of the sociologists has been, and remains, to refine and extend the notion
of &dquo;social environment&dquo;; but it should be emphasized that the division of labour
between sociologist and psychologist is necessarily unclear in this work, and that it is
still further blurred with every step forward that is made.
English and American sociologists have a long-standing interest in the educability
of different social and racial groups. Local social surveys in England have almost
always included an account of the association of poverty, malnutrition and squalid
housing with restricted educational facilities, backwardness and poor scholastic
level generally [420, 42 I]. In America, the findings of the mental surveys of army
recruits in the First World War stimulated widespread interest in the problem [374,
37~], and apart from general social surveys there is a strong tradition of investigation
into the educative influence of street gangs, peer-groups and other informal social
groupings.
In Germany,
before the last war, attention to the problem was much more clearly
England and America, even to the extent of giving a name (Miliento
the
kiinde)
systematic study of its various aspects. The symposium edited by A.
Busemann [45 ZJ includes contributions from psychologists, psychometricians and
sociologists of the family, and of urban and rural life, as well as a comprehensive
discussion of the field of work by Busemann himself.
However, in so far as they have treated the problem directly, few sociologists,
whatever their ideological preconceptions, have been able to resist the temptation
to throw backward glances at the nature-nurture controversy, with the result that
the issues have generally been badly formulated, and the inferences drawn from their
work logically unsound.
In principle, the sociologist’s task is clear: it is to analyse the social factors which
influence the educational process from two main sources. There are those, on the
one hand, deriving from the family environment and general background of teachers
and pupils (and, in the case of teachers, also from their professional needs and habits),
and, on the other hand, there are those deriving from the social organization, formal
and informal, of schools, colleges and universities. In practice, the educability of an
individual, given his personal endowment, and unique life-history, is a function
of the interaction of all these social factors; that is to say, it represents his socially
determined capacity to respond to the demands of the particular educational arrangements to which he is exposed.
The explicit and implicit demands made on children and young people by the
schools and universities they attend is part of the sociology of educational institutions
focused than in
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I83
which is discussed below. We need do no more here than point out that it is as
yet poorly developed, and that although the selective function of these institutions
has been established, and is well documented through studies, in particular, of wastage
at the secondary level (&dquo;early-leaving&dquo; and &dquo;drop-out&dquo;), much work remains to be
done on the nature of the selective processes of which these phenomena are merely
the end-products or indices.
The emphasis on the contribution of family environment (&dquo;home background&dquo;)
to this wastage tends to be one-sided. The child may come to school ill-equipped
for or hostile to learning under any educational arrangement; but for the most part
his educability depends as much on the assumptions, values and aims embodied in
the school organization into which he is supposed to assimilate himself as on those he
brings with him from his home.
That the interaction of homes and schools is the key to educability has always been
evident to anthropologists (if not missionaries) in cases where the gulf between them
is wide, as when formal education is introduced into the tribal life of preliterate
peoples; and although detailed studies of culture-contact and social change through
education are rare, anthropological influence on the study of social factors in
educability has been important in broadening conceptions of environmental possibilities. It can be traced in the studies of the American negro from which stemmed, until
recently, the most illuminating works on social-class differences in the drive towards
educational success. Moreover, the most promising penetration of social-class
factors in educability has come from attempts by Allison Davis and his associates
to analyse child-rearing practices from the point of view of their adaptive value in a
competitive &dquo;middle-class&dquo; school system [426,43 I]; and in the study of ethnicity and
educability anthropological influence has transformed early efforts to correlate bloodmixture and measured intelligence into complex studies of motivational elements in
the family backgrounds of American Jews and Italians [417(a)]Horizons have thus been extended by this work; it has given the notion
of &dquo;environment&dquo; a new range and depth and induced a greater stress on motivational and institutional factors in the learning situation. It is increasingly recognized
that the educability of different social and ethnic groups is a function not only of their
postulated innate capacities frustrated or encouraged by their material environment,
but also of culturally conditioned attainments, attitudes and aspirations and of the
ethos of the educational institutions to which they have access.
Attempts have been made to unravel the differences in social environment which
underlie indices of class or status and their relevance for education. Generally
speaking, the emphasis in this work is shifting from the study of gross material
factors, such as poverty or malnutrition or overcrowding, to more subtle factors of
background affecting response both to learning in general and to particular kinds of
schooling. The work at Chicago on social-class differences in the experiences of early
childhood and their influence upon learning has already been mentioned. There is
some tradition of work on linguistic development (bilingualism) [444-;] and educational backwardness in relation to class and ethnicity; and some intriguing suggestions
have been recently put forward by Bernstein [407] for research into class differences
in the use of language. At a more superficial level, class-related elements of environment such as parents’ attitudes towards their children’s education and future occupation, the mother’s educational level, or her occupation before marriage, have becn
shown to be more highly correlated with measured intelligence and school performance than others such as income or the social grading of the father’s occupation
[49S and IV. (ii)].
Interest in problems of social mobility through education under conditions of
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general material prosperity in post-war England and America has stimulated investigation of family background and its influence on educational performance,
holding social class constant. Some of the British research (IV.2 (i)] suggests that,
within social-class groups, size of family is an index of differences in social environment ranging from gross differences in material prosperity, through differences in
attitude to schooling and vocational aspirations, to very subtle differences in linguistic
habit and development and emotional training. How far it is merely an index, under
certain social circumstances (for example, when not dictated by religious principle) of
a complex of educationally relevant attitudes and values on the part of
parents, and
how far it may be treated as a causal factor in the sense of itself producing an educationally favourable or unfavourable environment for children needs further investigation. Comparative studies are needed of family environment in groups of varying
social class, ethnic and religious composition; and in this work of studying in detail
the wide range of family attitudes and practices on which children and young people
draw in responding to school, college or university, not only psychologists and
sociologists but anthropologists, too, have a part to play.
V. THE SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
School.c
The character of schools
as communities and as social microcosms has
long been
recognized. Durkheim, writing well before World War I, made much of it and
adumbrated the principles on which the social functions of the school and its
formal and informal life should be analysed.1 American pragmatism, with its offshoot
in the &dquo;communit5·-school&dquo; movement, and the German &dquo;social education&dquo; movement, although deriving from radically different political and philosophical traditions,
both stimulated a widespread interest between the wars in the school as an educative
social environment. Neither offered any frame of reference for the systematic treatment of the school as a social institution, but both inspired work on the interaction
of schools and their social environment, and on the social psychology of formal
and informal school-groups. The first systematic analysis of the school as a social
institution was made by Waller in I9 3 [53 I]; his classic has never been repeated and
remains the only attempt at a comprehensive treatment of the sociology of the school.
He presented it frankly as a rough, inconclusive, and qualitative first-study of the kind
which, as he observed, should precede more precise quantitative investigation.
fact, many of his observations have by now been systematically explored and
documented, particularly in the last ten or fifteen years, with the application of a
In
developed social psychology than was available to him and of anthropological
techniques of observation.
Thus, for example, the functioning of schools as selective agencies has been
continuously and intensively, if not altogether systematically, treated by educationists
and sociologists since Waller wrote, and a considerable body of information both on a
national and a local scale has been collected and analysed (V. (ii)]. Recent work,
in America and England particularly, is yielding a closer understanding than can be
gained from Waller of the actual processes at work in social and academic selection
inside schools, and of their influence on their internal structure and functioning
[V. i (iii)]. Comparable advances have been made in the study of the social psychology
of school life. Waller’s statement of the problems in the third part of his book,
&dquo;Some Interpretations of Life in the School&dquo;, stands up well to scrutiny in the light
more
1
Cp. L’Education Morale [526] as well as Education et Sociologie [52]; see also his review of
by de Robertis, R., "La Psicologia Collectiva della Scuola" in L’Année Sociologique, I90I-2.
the
article
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I85
of
subsequent work. But although recent work on teacher-pupil and teacherprincipal relationships does no more, on the whole, than inject a desirable precision
into his qualitative analysis, our understanding of the social relations of adolescents
in school and of the &dquo;separate culture of the school&dquo; is far deeper than can be derived
even impressionistically from Waller’s chapters, admirable though they are, on that
topic and on &dquo;crowd and mob psychology in the school&dquo; [5 27, 328].
Nevertheless, we still await a fresh attempt at a systematic analysis of the school as a
social system. Two points concerning Waller’s own attempt are worth remarking.
Firstly, only one chapter of his book is devoted to the relations of the school with the
great society, and the functioning of the school as a selective agency is the only
aspect of these relations that is developed in any detail, or to which a substantial
contribution has been made by subsequent work. For the rest, almost all remains
to be done. A beginning has very recently been made with investigations into the part
played by the school in the socialization process and on the social pressures to which
it is subjected and the transformations of function it undergoes in modern industrial
societies [69]. But the sociology of its part in the economy and of its functioning
as a transmitter of values and promoter of social cohesion have barely been touched
upon. Roger Thabault’s illuminating description of the role of the village school
during the emergence and consolidation of the Third Republic stands alone [ioS].
Secondly, all Waller’s material and observations concern the school under rural
and small-town conditions and throw light only indirectly on the place of the school
in metropolitan life. Nothing seems to have been done to fill this obvious gap in
work on the school, although the possibilities of a typology of schools based on
the kind of community they serve have been brilliantly illustrated by Margaret
Mead [490]. Too many sociological studies of schools are, in fact, studies of the
social life of adolescents, and little account is taken of the more or less tacit demands
and pressures of the formal organization of school life and work. Even where the
school is treated as a social system it is usual to isolate for analysis particular roles,
such as that of principal, or particular relations, such as those between teacher and
pupil; it is rare to find an analysis &dquo;in the round&dquo; buttressed by accounts of the formal
constitution and social environment of the school. The art of making an effective
study of &dquo;the separate culture of the school&dquo; lies in &dquo;placing&dquo; it in relation to the
external social environment and in relating it to the historically determined purposes
and constitution of the school as an organization. In this way the investigator is
led straight to his task of identifying functional and dysfunctional elements in the
existing situation and assessing the drift of development and the possibilities or
likelihood of change [330].
However, one particular aspect of the local and national &dquo;setting&dquo; of schools in
America has received detailed attention from sociologists-namely, their control
and administration.
Inquiry into the part played in the control of education by school boards goes
back to George Counts’ work before World War II [510] on their social composition,
which demonstrated the extent to which public education was dominated by limited
class interests. More general studies of community power structure in relation to
school administration [342, S~o, 6oi] shade over into studies of schools in the context
of their local communities, such as Middletown or Elmtown [484], or of the national
social structure [ 5 89].
The study of educational administration has increasingly attracted the attention
of theorists in recent years [374, 380, 384, 383, 6oo]. Thus, in a review of the field in
195 2, Getzels (578] deplored the lack of systematic research and put forward proposals
for a framework for such research based on Max Weber’s three types of legitimate
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and Talcott Parsons’ pattern variables. Since that time a series of studies
of the role of the school superintendent has appeared, inspired by Parsons and
directed by Neal Gross at Harvard [S 8 i, 5 82, 5 83]. This work is expanding against
a background of increasing scale, complexity and centralization of
power in educational administration. Its findings could greatly enrich the sociology of the school
in America, if studies of schools were made in terms of a fully adequate scheme of
analysis-for instance, along the lines of the &dquo;models for the analysis of the education
process in American communities&dquo; suggested by Siegel [S 3oJ which obviate the
limitations of previous work to which we have drawn attention.
authority
Colleges and Universities
It is, perhaps, not surprising
that the ahistorical, social-psychological bias
characteristic of so much of the work on the sociology of schools is conspicuously
absent from the literature concerned with the universities. On the contrary, the staple
of sociological analysis here is the dialectical interplay of a distinctive corporate
organization with the rationalizing pressures of advancing industrialism.
We must briefly digress, however, to explain the special problems of selection
from the relevant literature. European higher learning has a self-conscious history
from medieval times which has deposited a voluminous literature of philosophical,
historical, critical and literary works of interest to the sociologist of the universities.
A good deal of this literature is more or less sociological in content, and the problem
of selection from it has been almost impossible. The innumerable histories, whether
of a general kindl or treating a single institution2 or group,3 though essential material,
are not sociological studies as such and could not therefore be included in the bibliography.4 For similar reasons governmental reports are excluded, though such reports
as that of the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge in 1 8 j o contains material
of great sociological value; and official investigations of more recent date, for example,
the President’s Commission on Higher Education appointed by President Truman in
1946,&dquo; have tended increasingly to use both sociologists and sociological methods.
Contributions to the long-standing discussion of &dquo;the idea of a university&dquo; frequently
consider the social functions of higher learning and thus contribute to sociology.
Complete coverage of this literature as well as related work surveying university
systems in the field of comparative education would not be possible in the space
available to us. Some twentieth-century books of this kind have been included
[607, 6og, 613, 616, 6z8]. The coverage is incomplete but, we hope, not capricious,
though many greater and lesser authors are omitted.
Modern sociology is a product of industrialism and the modern university has
been profoundly modified in its nature and functions by the same forces. The
explicitly sociological study of higher learning, therefore, has the consequences of
industrialism as its context. The two most distinguished discussions of this kind
both appeared in 1918. One came from America-Veblen’s celebrated attack on
&dquo;the conduct of universities by business men&dquo; [629]: the other was a university
lecture on Science a.r a Vocation delivered by Max Weber at Munich [630]. Independently, both writers seized on the need to understand the modern university as a
1
2
E.g. Rashdall, H., Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, I936.
E.g. Mallet, Charles E., History of the University of Oxford, 3 vols. London: Oxford University
Press,
I924-27.
3
E.g. Schmidt, George P., The Liberal Arts College: a chapter in American cultural history. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, I957. Armytage, W. H. G., Civic Universities. London:
Emest Benn Ltd., I955.
4
Though this has resulted in the omission of some valuable sociologically minded, historical
essays—e.g. Hofstadter, R., and Hardy, C. P., The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the
United States, New York, I952.
5
Supra, p. I79, footnote.
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of feudal origin in process of adaptation to the economy of
laid
stress on the demands set up by the modern economy for
Weber
capitalism.
specialists, the advance of bureaucracy in modern organizations and the &dquo;proletarianization&dquo; of the university research worker and teacher. These changes he saw as
further advanced in America than in Germany, where the career of the privatdo~ent
was still &dquo;generally based upon plutocratic prerequisites&dquo;. Veblen, too, saw the
scholar as a member of a thwarted class but, in his analysis of the power structure of
higher learning in America, stressed the functioning of the university as itself a
business enterprise in competition with other universities, bureaucratically organized
under its president or &dquo;captain of erudition&dquo; in pursuit of the ends of &dquo;notoriety,
prestige and advertising in all its branches and bearings&dquo; at the expense of scholarship
and to the accompaniment of a vast competitive waste of resources.
Subsequent work by sociologists on higher education has been concerned, albeit
fitfully and unsystematically, with various aspects of adaptation, usually belated,
corporate
structure
advancing industrialism. Thus the expansion of universities and similar institutions in response to the rising demands of the professional and managerial occupations
has not passed without notice. In America, especially, it is reflected in the results of
surveys of attitudes towards higher education, and in studies of talent loss and the
&dquo;drop-out&dquo; problem [V.2 (iii)] which extends into the universities in a society which,
on the one hand, has an enormous middle class and, on the other hand, has never
accepted the traditional European conception of the university as a preserving and
(for a minority) assimilating ground for 61ites. Alternative definitions of the possible
functions of higher education have been ignored in the European sociological
literature until recently [6 I I] and studies of the social origins of university students
(V.2 (ii)] have usually assumed therri to be entrants to political, professional or business
61ites, except where the focus has been explicitly on the problem of the intellectual
proletariat [184, 186]. Much of the American work is sound in method and some of it
is also cumulative. For example, the elegant studies by Knapp and his colleagues of
the characteristics of colleges which are related to the production of successful
scientists [673, 674], are carried further by Holland’s research [670] into the relationship between college choice among able students and type of paternal occupation.
The impact of the development of large-scale industry on the internal organization
of universities has received less attention, and, apart from Plessner’s essay written in
the early igzo’s [6zz], and its issue in the recent Gottingen investigations into the
changing recruitment and status of German university teachers [315, 316, 3 z2],
there has been no comprehensive analysis since Veblen [6291. W. H. Whyte has
recently shown the growth of the influence of large-scale business over the content of
the higher learning in America, and Riesman has produced a brilliant sketch of the
present scene with conscious reference to Veblen’s earlier essay [623, 631]. In England
there has been some discussion of the impact of technology on the internal life of the
universities [602] and the relation between the older and the newer foundations [612].
But the changing patterns of university organization-for example, the growth of the
research unit and its relation to industry and industrial sources of patronage-have
received nothing like the attention from sociologists which their importance warrants
to
[603, 6o6, 610, 6z5l.
from studies of the social origins of students there is a growing body of
and characteristically American, on various facets of student
life [V.2 (iv)]. This work is too diverse to permit easy evaluation or to reveal discernible trends. Some of it has appeared in the service of problems of educational
administration, some of it is fortuitous from the point of view of the sociology of
education, in that students commonly form convenient &dquo;captive&dquo; populations for
Apart
literature, mostly
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studies carried out in other fields. The bibliography offers a selection of what appears
be representative of recent and current work. The items range from general
studies of the student or &dquo;campus culture&dquo;, including both formal and informal
primary groups [685, 687], through studies of particular groups such as medical
students [679, 689, 692, 695], to research on diverse aspects of values, attitudes and
behaviour among students. One special group, the foreign student in the American university, has attracted a
good deal of attention in recent years [III.4 (iii)].
to us to
The Teachers
As social groups, teachers display markedly different characteristics according to
the educational level at which they practise. It is, of course, true that the separation
of identifiable groups is an aspect of the occupational differentiation which accompanies industrialism; but whereas the university teacher has played a crucial if changing
role in all types of civilized society, the sociology of school teachers tends to turn more
narrowly on their place in the stratification system of societies-especially industrial
societies-in which mass education exists or is developing.
The class and professional position of secondary and elementary or primary school
teachers has always been integral to any sociological analysis of these groups, since
they are as important in their capacity as representatives of the new middle class in
modern industrial society as in their capacity as professional teachers. Thus it is that
a work like Waller’s Sociology of Teaching [5 3 1 is unique. Teachers
appear in his book
as the personnel of schools, not as an
occupational group playing a part in the
general social structure. The book is, therefore, a contribution to the sociology
of the school in the same way as the studies of university teachers mentioned below
are a contribution to the sociology of the universities. However,
sociologists until
relatively recently have not interested themselves much in the sociology of the school,
and the greater part of all the studies of the teaching profession listed in the bibliography has been undertaken with an eye to problems of social structure, social
stratification, social mobility and the professionalization of the occupational structure,
which is why they have been placed in the section [III.3 (iii)] concerned with the
relations of education to social stratification. A certain amount of interest has been
evinced (mainly by psychologists) in motives for entering the profession, and the
characteristics of the successful teacher, and sociologists have worked on the internal
structure of the profession-stratification, career patterns, turnover and mobility.
But the emphasis has been predominantly on the social history of &dquo;education as a
profession&dquo; [291, 308], on teaching as an avenue of social mobility [271], the social
origins of teachers in different types of school and the changing social basis of
recruitment [z8.~J, on factors affecting the status of the profession [290], on its demographic characteristics (patterns of marriage and fertility, self-recruitment, morbidity,
etc. [z95, 303]) and on the teacher’s communal and social role outside the school
[285, 304, 306].
That these matters have educational implications is increasingly obvious as
problems of recruitment to the continuously expanding teaching profession become
more severe and as the secondary schools and universities in a mass education
service confront unprecedented tasks of social assimilation. Accordingly, there is
to be detected a shift of emphasis in the formulation of the problem and the interpretation of findings in the more recent work. As an example, we may quote the many
essays in the 1’ear Book of Education, IyI3 [314], the general intention of which is to
draw the educational implications of a sociological analysis of the teaching profession.
The recent work by Liebermann, Edtication a.r a Pro.fe.r.rion [291], likewise represents a
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I89
turning
of the traditional
sociological
interests and formulations
to
educational
account.
to draw out the educational implications of the sociology of teachers
occupational and social group, however, exposes the gaps in our existing knowledge and makes very clear the need to put further investigations on a sound footing
in relation to the key problem.
If school-teaching has always been an avenue of mobility (and, we might usefully
add, since it is so often neglected, an avenue of downward as well as of upward
mobility); if teachers marry late, or not at all, and as a group are infertile even by
white-collar standards; if they suffer from &dquo;status-anxiety&dquo; and &dquo;social isolation&dquo;;
if the profession is chronically stratified; then it is important to know how far these
professional traits are merely historically determined and fundamentally no different
from those found in other comparable occupational and social groups, and how far
they actually reflect intrinsic features of teaching as an occupation. This means
that we need to repeat earlier inquiries into the social characteristics of the profession
under the changed conditions of the post-war period, to make detailed comparisons
with other occupational groups, and thus to discover, if we can, how many of their
professional characteristics are attributable to their social characteristics and how many
to the peculiarities of their conditions of work.
The framework for a sociological understanding of the university teacher must be
extended to cover not only a wider variety of functions in relation to knowledge,
power and communication in society, but also to span the changing social context
from feudal to technological society in which academic life has been pursued. On
this broad definition the sociological task has yet to be attempted.
Where sociological study has been undertaken it has normally been conceived as a
contribution to the understanding not of a particular social or occupational group
but of the structure and functioning of institutions of higher learning, and it must be
noted that, in a sense, the university teachers are the university; together, in corporation they constitute the institution itself. It is also characteristic of this line of
inquiry that it arises from interest in the pressures put upon the traditional patterns
of recruitment and organization of university life by expansion, democratization
and rationalization as industrial society has developed.
Of the work produced so far the study of German university teachers by Plessner
[3 15, 3I6, 322] is both illustrative and outstanding in quality. No comparable study
exists in the other European countries. There is not even the kind of orderly description of recruitment patterns, amount and type of mobility, style of occupational and
social life, etc., which would lay the necessary foundation for an understanding of
university teachers either as social and professional groups or as members of their
corporate institutions. In America the situation is markedly better. Apart from Logan
Wilson’s Academic Man [333] a number of studies from before [3z6l and after [334,
620] the war add up to a description of modern conditions of recruitment, promotion
and mobility. Among the most recent publications that by Caplow and McGee [3 i 7]
deserves especial mention for its economical penetration of the current problems of
recruitment to and mobility within a rapidly expanding set of professions and a
lengthening hierarchy of institutions of higher learning (from the &dquo;top ten&dquo; to
&dquo;academic Siberia&dquo;).
The problem of academic freedom and integrity, though of great significance
to the sociology of the university profession, and not only in modern times, has
received patchy treatment. Something is known about the exodus of scholars from
Nazi Germany; little or nothing is known about political interference with university
teaching under communism. McCarthyism stimulated some American writing [32~J,
This attempt
as an
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including a study by Lazarsfeld and Thielens [3 z7J, of the reactions of social scientists.
An authoritative history of academic freedom in America has been contributed
recently by Hofstadter and Metzger [324J.
Adult Education
A sociology of adult education scarcely exists; yet its problems provide a clear
illustration of our thesis that, in the study of developed societies, the central task is
that of institutional analysis of the variable relation between education and the
various aspects of social structure. Materials for such an analysis, as may be seen
from the available bibliographies [704, 705 (aandb), 708,700), 720], have been accumulating from the second half of the nineteenth century mainly in the form of histories of
particular institutions, organizations and movements (7o S , 7Io, 716, 72 i and, more
recently, as increasingly comprehensive historical and comparative surveys. Sociologists have contributed a little in the way of surveys of educational provision and
the social background of adult education students, but have yet to exploit the
accumulated material for sociological study.
Literature of an historical or descriptive kind indicates that in relation to the
technology, the polity, the economy and the social structure of different countries
at different times, adult education has had at least four distinguishable functions;
remedial, assimilative, mobility-promoting and compensatory. In relation to the
economy the remedial function of adult education arises basically from the tendency
of technological change to outstrip educational reform and thus create shortages of
appropriately skilled manpower. In this sense British Mechanics Institutes and the
American Lyceum in the nineteenth century, and army educational corps and Fundamental Education Centres in the twentieth century exercise remedial functions.
Similarly, when educational development lags behind the extension of civil and
political rights to the mass of the population, as in Western Europe in the nineteenth
century, remedial functions in relation to the polity may be discerned in some forms
of adult education.
Assimilation through adult education and indirectly through the education of
dependent children has its most dramatic, yet sociologically neglected, example in
the Americanization movement at the high tide of immigration [733, 748]. It has its
counterpart in the assimilative stress on liberal non-vocational education which has
been characteristic of &dquo;the great tradition&dquo; [749] in English adult education [722,
743]. The assimilation of the working classes through contact with the 61ite culture
of the universities was challenged by various forms of independent working-class
education, especially the German Proletcult [744] based on a Marxist interpretation of
education as a weapon in the class struggle and insisting on revolutionary or nonassimilative adult education. In contrast to England, it is only since World War II
that the German universities have established any connection, and that a tenuous
one, with the adult education movement.
The promotion of mobility, occupational and social, through adult education
is related to and has often emerged from the exercise of the remedial and assimilative
functions. It underlies the vitality of many contemporary forms of adult education
such as the correspondence college, the English technical colleges and evening institutes [728], the American university evening colleges [732] or, to cite a single example
recently described by a professional sociologist, the School of General Studies at
Columbia University [731]. Yet nearly all the energy which has gone into the study
of this function of education has so far been lavished on schools and &dquo;full-time&dquo;
universities rather than institutions of adult education.
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I9I
conception of adult education as a mechanism for the provision of compensaexperience is consonant with sociological views of urban industrial society as
one in which, partly because of its high productivity, individuals are especially
likely to suffer from deficient or unbalanced satisfaction of intellectual and emotional
needs. The growing volume of discussion of &dquo;learning for leisure&dquo;, &dquo;automation and
education&dquo;, &dquo;the educational value of community associations&dquo;, etc., reflects recogniThe
tory
tion of this
function of adult education in advanced societies. In this connection
Havighurst’s
analysis of adult roles and their motivation as a basis for practical
guidance in the provision of educational opportunities for adults is especially valuable
new
recent
[ 754].
A more detailed analysis of the social functions of adult education than that at
which we have hinted here is needed in order to clarify the problems in this part of
the field. Meanwhile, the most general hypothesis which is in need of detailed exploration is implicit in Mannheim’s writings on education (S 8-62J; namely, that the
advance of industrialism shifts the focus of adult education from remedial and assimilative work to the promotion of mobility and the provision of compensatory or
&dquo;recreative&dquo; experience. Such an exploration, of course, implies comparative study
in which an approach would also be made towards explaining the striking differences
between the adult education movements of countries at roughly equivalent levels of
economic and technological development.
VI.
CONCLUSION
Our survey shows that the field is wide, but that it is emerging into clearer definition
under the increased attention it is beginning to receive from investigators working
in the traditions of sociology rather than of education or social philosophy. It is to be
hoped that the greatly enhanced importance of their subject-matter in a &dquo;technological society&dquo; will cause the numbers of sociologists studying education to grow,
and that systematic and cumulative inquiry will result.
On the whole, the most satisfactory work so far has been done on problems
amenable to treatment by the methods of demography and the social survey. All
of the countries covered by this report have made scientifically respectable contributions to what may be called, without derogatory implications, the &dquo;sociography&dquo; of
education. Populations have been mapped according to the distribution of mental
qualities, educational abilities and opportunities; and social selection and differentiation through education have been described. Work on these topics has been the most
cumulative despite, and sometimes because of, its ideological inspiration. Further
progress with them calls for refined analysis of the intricacies of social structure by
methods which have lain traditionally within the province of the social psychologist
and anthropologist; nevertheless, a great deal of &dquo;sociography&dquo; or descriptive work
remains to be done, and priorities must be decided in the light of the requirements of
analysis of education in societies of different types and at various stages of development. Such a typology of educational systems in varying relationship with the
societies they serve is indispensable to the development of a systematic sociology of
education; and it is probably also the best immediate goal of research.
It is important not only in itself but as the pre-condition of effective study of the
structure and functioning of educational institutions. Schools, colleges and universities to all appearances may be stable in their aims and organization, yet suffer quite
profound transformations of social function under the impact of pressures and
expectations generated in the wider social structure. Such tacit transformations of
192
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function have received some attention in the case of universities, but for the most
part the study of schools has been undertaken without regard to them.
This neglect of the influence of their wider setting is certainly one reason why work
on the schools is not more satisfactory despite the advances of the last twenty-five
years. Other reasons are of a methodological character. Thus, sociometric techniques
have a way of stealing attention from the very problems they might be expected to
elucidate; the potential contribution of anthropological methods has been made clear,
but by no means exploited; the applicability of role theory derived from the sociology
of organization, administration and bureaucracy is in an early stage of exploration;
and what structural-functional studies have been made have not escaped the disadvantages of the inherently ahistorical approach characteristic of this method.
The unsatisfactory state of work on the structure and functioning of schools is,
furthermore, itself an important factor in the failure of sociologists to make a full
contribution to the study of the fundamental problem of individual educability. There
exists a great deal of descriptive information about the educative influences of the
social environment outside the schools and universities; but the barest beginnings
have been made in bringing it to bear directly on the problem of educational potential
and performance. This is largely because these educative influences of family,
neighbourhood, or social class have not usually been studied in interaction with
those deriving from the schools and universities themselves, except in more or less
general terms. The historically determined aims and organization of these institutions and the tacit changes of social function they have undergone must be understood, as well as the more usually acknowledged informal demands and pressures
exerted by the professional habits and interests of teachers or the social life of children
or students.
Thus, the deficiencies of work at each level, from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic, translate themselves into the defects of work at the next, until we reach the
fundamental problem of individual educability-the psychologist’s synonym for the
sociologist’s problems of maintaining social cohesion, and transmitting and developing culture through socialization. We cannot afford not to work at all levels simultaneously. We must have a general typology of educational systems in relation to
social structure; we must apply it to the examination of the structure and functioning
of schools, colleges and universities and we must look at the learning process in this
institutional context. Finally, we must work with an eye to social change and to the
dynamics of educational development and in doing so we shall need to make full use
of the comparative method.
The
Bibliography
The selective character of the bibliography should be emphasized. Moreover, the
selection has had to be more rigorous in the case of references to the United States
than to West European sources, owing to the far greater number of relevant items
available and the principle adopted by the authors of giving preference to items of
European origin if comparable American work was already represented in the
bibliography.
It is
a
matter
for regret that it
work, although the authors
to
the
was
to review Scandinavian and Italian
of relevant contributions in both countries
impossible
are aware
sociology of education.
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I93