ABSTRACT
Despite the efforts of its Victorian progenitors, any formal study of the sociology of education suffered a period of arrested development in Britain during the early decades of the twentieth century and got off to a relatively late start. The sociology of education is very much in the ascendant and, as the monthly spate of fresh publications indicates, this must be reckoned the fastest growing sector in the entire field of educational studies. The kind of educational sociology that found its way into university and college courses formerly was too often unsystematic and, worse still, implicated in moral commitments. As a science, sociology’s interests are strictly supra-personal: it is concerned not with people but with cohorts, age groups, subcultures, institutions, organization, networks, systems, structures, functions. In short, the claim of sociology to be a distinctive ‘discipline’ with an established methodology of its own is at once premature and pretentious.
