ABSTRACT
Critical social theory, in Marxism and, to a lesser extent, in Frankfurt school philosophy and sociology, has been the main source of analysis and legitimation in new sociology of education. Discursive division and denial again contains and blocks development of a critical social analysis of education. The importance of symbolic theory for social analysis of education is that it addresses processes and effects of social changes that exceed even incipient social-institutional reorganizations of a potential corporatism. The relation of the new sociology of education to social practice has been twofold and contradictory. This view of the social historical basis and the critically practical value of symbolic theories is not the ordinary view, even among those who advocate the importance of literary theory for social science. Textualism, however, is a twentieth-century cultural form, which, though it inherits idealism's distrust of science and Romanticism's literariness, is itself a 'post-philosophical form'.
