ABSTRACT
The discourse of new sociology of education, particularly among educationists rather than sociologists, meanwhile continued in the process of paradigmatic rationalization, elaboration, qualification and diffusion. The view that education operates as a means of social reproduction, despite contestation and resistance, is central to new sociology of education. Reification of an historic social accomplishment the collective production of social relations is one of the ways that reproduction theory supports the naturalistic, ahistorical and organicist logic that is revived during the cultural restoration. Research in the new sociology plays a socially conservative role as an ideology, in its operation as a social technology, in its confirmation of historically suppressive social relations, and as a locally defined instance of a new imperialism. An alternative to the ideology of a theory of reproduction, objectivist research, and decontextual practice, is to reconnect theory, research and practice in the new sociology of education to historical movements in society and education.
