ABSTRACT
I shall make no attempt, in introducing the present text to the English-speaking reader, either to set these lectures within the context of Durkheim's achievement as a whole or to provide a synoptic guide to their principal places of interest. I am not sufficient of a Durkheim scholar, a sociologist or an historian to attempt the former and there is a more urgent prefatory task than the latter which needs to be undertaken.1 For this book consists of a series of twenty-seven lectures originally delivered in 1904 as part of the compulsory curriculum for that elite cadre of French graduates destined to compete in the agrigalion where success would lead, in the majority of cases, to academic careers to be begun by filling the year's vacant positions in the lycies. Prima facie, therefore, there would seem to be good grounds for doubting whether the book can be of much interest to present-day, Englishspeaking students of education. It may, indeed, be that such doubts on the part of publishers and even students of Durkheim have brought about the situation which Steven Lukes characterises by saying: 'It [the book] has been almost completely ignored by writers on Durkheim and on the history and sociology of education, though it is unquestionably a major work that deserves to be translated.'2 Nevertheless, I wish to claim not only that Lukes's evaluation is more than amply justified-the book will show that - but also and more surprisingly that Durkheim's treatment oflarge-scale but always concrete educational issues has as much to teach us about the problems which confront us today as almost anything we are likely to encounter in the writings of modern educational theorists. Far from being irrelevant, parochial, out-of-date, narrowly historical and only of interest to Durkheim scholars, this book is imbued with that insight and
wisdom which transcend spatia-temporal limitations and which are characteristic of the genuine classic.
