ABSTRACT
Attention to social microdynamics showed how much questions of identity or self are at the heart-even the absent heart-of social relations. Yet, new sociology of education, as Stephen Appel (1992) has persuasively shown, largely avoided these questions, or at best placed them under an amorphous umbrella called ‘culture’. Perhaps, as Appel argues, there is a denial of depth psychology, or of all psychology, on ideological grounds. After all, new sociology of education flourished as an alternative to the bourgeois twins of functionalism and individualism, of system and idiosyncrasy. The sad effect is an absence of a social psychology in new sociology of education, and a failure to attend to socially patterned self-dynamics in school.
