ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author takes recent developments in teaching of social studies in schools as a case study in the sociology of school knowledge. He begins to carry out research in field of social studies teaching, it very soon struck how closely the epistemological basis of prevailing orthodoxy corresponded to this 'culture of positivism'. The author argues in his paper 'Sociology and the Problem of Radical Educational Change' that parts of Marx's critique of the Young Hegelians in The German Ideology serve equally as a critique of such idealist tendencies within the sociology of education. He also argues there that he need to maintain a distinction between the consciousness-raising process of demystification (or theoretical dereification) and the practical social task of experiential dereification which necessitates a political challenge to the social relations upon which the prevailing form of life is predicated.
