ABSTRACT
The sociology of education in Britain is generally regarded as having gone through a paradigm shift in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In some ways at least, the emphasis on the newness of the new sociology of education is misleading. The orientation to educational and social change was typical of the early phases of the new sociology of education. It was based upon a particular interpretation of phenomenological sociology symbolized in the first course in Sociology of Education to be produced by the Open University (OU). In the early and mid-1970s, the new sociology of education therefore embarked upon a programme of empirical research to explore the nature and functions of the 'overt and covert knowledge found within school settings'. The attraction of Marxism was, of course, linked to an increasing realization that social reality was not quite as fragile as students of the 1960s and the new sociologists of the 1970s had imagined.
