Durkheim and the Sociology of Education in Britain

Abstract

National styles of ‘doing sociology’ exist, all celebrating respective founding fathers’. Timid, British pragmatism has tended to misrecognise Durkheim ever since our barely transcended early 20th century origins. In relatively low‐status teacher education, even when sociology of education was popularly taught from the late sixties through the seventies, Durkheim was presented as a conservative anti‐hero. The only important exception to this condition was the teaching and research of Basil Bernstein, unfortunately buried by the excesses both of ‘New Directions’ and the neo‐Marxisms which recoiled from it in the seventies. His always numerous and active group of research students became the main carriers of his voice. There are now some signs that failure strewn, maligned and substantially dispersed sociology of education is evincing fresh interest in his and Durkheim's work. Bernstein's interest, since the middle 1950s, has been the study of symbolic systems which function as pedagogic relays. He alone in modern sociology has attempted to move from the seconds that make up the classroom moment, through institutional to societal power structures, in a way that not only insists on conceptual consistency but thinks it not worth having unless it produces both models and empirical markers.