ABSTRACT
The new sociologists of education articulated the loss of liberal faith in the socially reformative power of education. They focused academic attention away from models of educationally facilitated individual mobility, toward the study of schooling's role in perpetuating social inequality and class domination. New sociology discourse was particularly displaced to an idealization of working-class resistance, although it was increasingly also drawn to modernist cultural theories' emphasis on discourse and its decomposition. This chapter analyzes socioeducational change by providing an institutional view: analysis of the historical change and recomposition of the organization and operation of social institutions as part of the collective action of historically significant groups of social actors. The social crisis is so sharp and it has brought to the surface so many social possibilities that even academic sociologists could be roused to a social analysis, but they fearfully continue to insist that sociology has no active role in social life.
