ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author concerns the introduction of the term 'experience' into educational sociology. He suggests some questions and orientations he believes to be worth while. In short, experience could be a totem pole for the politically blinkered. While staff-pupil ratios increase, and material provisions are reduced, the sociologists could feel righteous. The discussion so far also is a reflection of author's own researches into how children who refuse school have experienced school as part of their lives. Different schools and writers make differing mistakes from which much can be learned. For instance, a critical look at the neo-behaviourists highlights that the prevailing cultural imperative is to get recalcitrants back to school, not necessarily to remove the causes of disturbance. In Hargreaves' and Lackey's secondary school studies, for instance, schoolboys appear to be little more than a bundle of stereotypes, expectations and cognitive reactions to the world-out-there.
