Sociology and the Problem of Radical Educational Change 1

I want to consider in the course of this paper some of the problems which seem to me implicit in various manifestations of the ‘new sociology of education’ — a term applied by Gorbutt to those approaches to the sociology of education which are, in one way or another, informed by recent ‘new directions’ in sociology. ² In this discussion, I shall concentrate attention on that work within this emergent tradition which claims, explicitly or implicitly, to have some relevance to the possibilities and problems of change in prevailing conceptions of curricular knowledge. ³