ABSTRACT

It has become something of an orthodoxy, from Williamson (1974) to Demaine (1980), that the so-called ‘new sociology of education’ of the early 1970s abandoned the Fabian policy-oriented tradition of the Halsey-Floud era and substituted for it a belief that the sociology of education could itself transform the world via its radical critique of the assumptions underlying the classroom and professional practice of teachers. It has become a further orthodoxy that, on finding the consciousness of teachers less than easy to transform and indeed not the root of the problem anyway, the new sociologists abandoned the world of educational practice in the mid-1970s and adopted a pseudo-revolutionary stance which refused to have any truck with the educational institutions of the capitalist state (Reynolds and Sullivan, 1980) or with reformist political parties such as the Labour party (Demaine, 1980). This has led, according to some of these commentators, to a misguided and dangerous theoretical dogmatism on the part of neo-Marxist sociologists of education, which has sanctioned political inaction by the left and led it to neglect real possibilities for practical and policy interventions in and around state education in contemporary Britain.