ABSTRACT
English infant education has been the subject of two important sociological case-studies, which are featured in this extract and that by King (pp. 258-62). Sharp and Green’s study was conducted with the headteacher and infant teachers in one junior and infants school and, though small-scale and exploratory, raised a number of important issues, both for theoretical work in the sociology of education and for primary school policy and practice. The authors provided an abstruse but thought-provoking critique of ‘progressive education’. Their main argument (summarized in the first paragraph of the extract) is that such an approach may not be as liberal or emancipatory as it appears; they suggest it ‘is an aspect of romantic radical conservatism’, since it involves a subtle process of sponsorship and stratification among pupils (equally as effective as the process of differentiation in traditional approaches to education) and it provides enhanced opportunities for the exercise of social control ‘in both the narrow sense of achieving discipline in the classroom and the wider sense of contributing to the promotion of a static social order generally’ (see also pp. 233-5). Their interpretations (both sociological and educational) have not gone unchallenged.
