ABSTRACT
Since the late 1950s there has been a steady outpouring of papers and books in the USA which are concerned with the education of children of low social class whose material circumstances are inadequate, or with the education of black children of low social class whose material circumstances are chronically inadequate. An enormous research and educational bureaucracy developed in the USA financed by funds obtained from Federal, State or private foundations. New educational categories were developed (the culturally deprived, the linguistically deprived, the socially disadvantaged) and the notion of compensatory education was introduced as a means of changing the status of those children in the above categories. Compensatory education issued in the form of massive pre-school introductory programmes, large-scale research programmes such as those of Deutch in the early 1960s, and a plethora of small scale ‘intervention’ or ‘enrichment’ programmes for pre-school children or children in the first years of compulsory education. Very few sociologists were involved in these studies as, until recently, education was a low status area. On the whole, they were carried out by psychologists.
