ABSTRACT
The provision of a general education to all has never been a satisfactory business. On the one hand, it has expanded ‘meteorically’ (Maton, Chapter 15, this volume) to the furthermost reaches of the world, so that there are virtually no communities left which it does not touch in one way or another. But the touch of the education machine is inexorably uneven. This continues to be the case within and between communities and between countries. Saying so was not popular in Basil Bernstein’s time, and Brian Davies (2001: 3) records Bernstein’s irritation at the way his particular account of this educational imponderable was ‘steadfastly misread’ over at least a decade, probably longer. Not much has changed and the messenger is still regularly blamed for somehow becoming an obstacle to egalitarian reform by pointing out the persistence of structural educational inequality. However unjust, one upshot of this misunderstanding is a standing challenge to educators in general, including Bernsteinians, to display good faith by moving beyond an analytic of inequality to what Philip Wexler (1984: 406) once called (somewhat derisively, let it be said) a ‘put-up or shut-up sociology’.
