ABSTRACT
The ‘new sociology of education’ that emerged in the 1970s made giant strides with problems like the schools’ relation to the economy, and the class bases of educational knowledge, but had curiously little to say about teachers. In the most influential text of the decade, Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America, teachers hardly figure as a problem at all; they were assumed to be more or less well-controlled agents of the capitalist system. No-one can talk seriously about the social relationships involved in schooling without having some way of referring to social class on the one hand, gender and sexuality on the other. Entry to tertiary education is mainly regulated by a set of competitive examinations taken at the end of secondary schooling, about the age of eighteen. Teacher training for the state system used to be done mainly in single purpose departmental Teachers’ Colleges.
