Basil Bernstein 1924–2000

Abstract

Basil Bernstein died from cancer on 24 September 2000 aged 75. He was our greatest and most original social theorist, and, like Emile Durkheim, whose thought inspired him, he placed education at the centre of his theory. He was born in the East End of London in 1924 and on returning from the Second World War worked in a Stepney boys' club for underprivileged Jewish children. He was himself the son of Jewish immigrants. He trained as a teacher and taught in Shoreditch. He gained a sociology degree at the London School of Economics and in 1963 a post at the University of London Institute of Education where he remained for a career that culminated in his holding the Karl Mannheim Chair in Sociology of Education. He is survived by his wife Marion, to whom he was married for 45 years, and their sons Saul and Francis. The flood of appreciations that have appeared in print since Bernstein's death has made very visible not only the immense affection and respect in which he was held but the sheer scale and variety of the research that his ideas have engendered worldwide. Perhaps, more than anything, it is the global character of his impact and following that is so striking. Scholars and researchers from every continent are represented in the volumes in tribute to him that appeared in recent years before his death and in the appreciations that have followed it. The research conference, in Lisbon in June 2000 (Morais et al. 2001), for instance, included European scholars from Norway and Portugal, from Britain, France and Greece, and others from Africa, Australia and Singapore, from the east and west coasts of North America and from the southern continent. The topics covered ranged from mothers reading to their pre-school children to hypertextuality, from an analysis of urban and suburban schools in New York to the European sociology curriculum, from educational evaluation to intellectual fields, from the relationship between tacit and formal knowledge to discussions of boundaries, power, the subject and identity, from activity theory to the teaching of art in the secondary school. This range is not only a tribute to Bernstein's theory, it also says something significant about the theory: that it is of a kind that makes such activity possible. It is a theory that can be put to work. It does things! It is well known (because he was never reticent about it) that Bernstein was impatient with much of what passes for sociology of education. He complained that far too much