ABSTRACT
Sociologists have become more and more apparent in areas of professional training, especially in the field of teacher education where, since the introduction of sociology in the colleges of education curricula in the early 1960s, no course has been considered complete without the representation of that discipline. In some senses the sociologists appear parasitic upon the practitioners, for it is the latters’ places of work which they often study and their presuppositions which they analyse. More seriously it is the educators’ field of action and moral concern which is pre-given and thus invites all forms of sociological empiricism. Of interest here are some of the ways sociologists of education have chosen to move beyond strictly educational problems as given. To many students of education, however, it must appear that sociologists merely replace simple concepts like ‘the curriculum’ or ‘educational ideas’ by such phrases as ‘provinces of meaning’ and ‘professional ideologies’, and in-so doing seem to gain inner strength from their mysterious gods of phenomenology, ethnomethodology and even Marxism. The suggestion here is that such a judgement may not be as harsh as it would first appear.
