ABSTRACT
This paper begins with an account of the author’s positive experiences as a student of Michael Young at the Institute of Education in the late-1960s and early-1970s, when ‘New Directions’ for the sociology of education were emerging under the leadership of Young and others (Young, 1971). This led to a writing partnership between Young and the author in the mid-1970s that produced two edited books (Whitty and Young, 1976; Young and Whitty, 1977), which sought to move beyond the crude binaries of the so-called ‘new sociology of education’. The chapter then suggests that Young’s subsequent distancing of himself from this work in his insistence on ‘bringing knowledge back in’ (Young, 2008), and more especially his emphasis on ‘powerful knowledge’, may have led him to neglect earlier sociological insights concerning the ‘knowledge of the powerful’. It concludes with a discussion of Young’s somewhat surprising rehabilitation of the work of Bernstein and suggests that, in focusing on the curriculum, Young has sometimes understated the importance of pedagogy in the reproduction or transformation of patterns of educational opportunity.
