ABSTRACT
The cultural revolution that was expressed early in the student movement and that later appeared in paradigmatic critiques of academic social science has been contained. The form this containment takes is self-congratulatory. The main tendency in new sociology of education's recent past has been to attack the institutions and culture of liberalism, to criticize its educational concepts and practices. The new sociologists of education made a particular effective claim to analyze the social construction of meaning and to apply the social theory of knowledge neglected by their predecessors in the old sociology. Recognition of the increased importance of new mass cultural forms of symbolic communication does not erase the still-engaging power that organic attachments and interactional rituals have to determine social commitments and to form social identities. 'Education' ordinarily signifies a wide range of social practices that we think of organizationally as schools.
