Toward a cosmic sociology of education

Abstract

We old warriors of ideology critique and wissensoziologie should not be too hard on ourselves for having forgotten reflexivity and the labors of putting paradigms, including our own, back into the context of history and social movement. Normal science is our necessary bread and butter. We achieved a lot by shaking the liberal foundations of sociology of education, although in America, despite a mandatory ‘inclusiveness’ in educational studies, in the higher science of sociology of education, liberalism still holds sway, underneath the triumphant pyrotechnics of advanced multivariate analyses. You may have some qualitative research, however, even focused on studies of race and gender. Still, class analysis did, and again now, does, make a dent, accumulating careful empirical research, both in ethnographies and models of statistical causality. Likewise, when postmodernism took the stage, curriculum studies added new light and meaning to understanding the school text. More recently and less prominently, ‘spirituality’ now revitalizes interest in ‘holistic’ education, even ‘transcendental learning’, as Miller calls his revival of the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist movement, in education.

Keywords:

• cosmology
• post-secular
• religion
• secularism
• sociology of education

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philip Wexler

Philip Wexler is Professor of Sociology of Education and Unterberg Chair (emeritus), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was recently Visiting Bronfman Professor at Brandeis University and is currently Visiting Professor of Social Pedagogy and Social Politics at the University of Wupertal, Germany.