ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, a burgeoning literature has been generated by the ‘race’, gender and (to a lesser extent) sexuality debates in education, but it has to be said that much of this literature has been narrowly conceived, ahistorical and even apolitical in the sense that each of the debates has been viewed in its separate compartment, with little attempt made to relate the associated ‘issues’ or ‘problems’ to the broader social and political contexts out of which they grew. In particular, we have been in danger of abandoning the notion of class, which was so evident in the educational literature of the 1950s and 1960s.
