ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses what the sociology of the experience of the school is about, because much of it seems to him to be incoherent and probably self-contradictory, as well as being rather conservative in its implications for pedagogy and for the location and the role of education in the social structure. The background of this study is an attempt to operate broadly within the aspects of a Marxist or historical materialist framework for considering schooling. In primary education there appeared to be a move from formal authoritarian classroom organisation to more open egalitarian teacher-pupil relationships and curriculum construction, and in the sociology of education there was a movement from functionalist systems approaches to a courting with symbolic interaction, to what seemed to us as an energetic slumber with ethnomethodology, and a more recent possible awakening with some kind of Marxism and critical theory.
