Abstract
AbstractSociologists of education often emphasize goods that result from a practice (external goods) rather than goods intrinsic to a practice (internal goods). The authors draw from John Dewey and Alasdair MacIntyre to describe how the same practice can be understood as producing “skills” that center external goods or as producing habits (Dewey) or virtues (MacIntyre), both of which center internal goods. The authors situate these concepts within sociology of education’s stratification paradigm and a renewed interest in the concept of alienation, contrasting the concepts of skills, habits, and virtues to capital, credentials, and habitus. They close by connecting the argument to broader critiques of procedural liberalism and the ideology of meritocracy, then giving suggestions for an expanded sociology of education beyond the stratification paradigm.
Highlights
When sociologists of education study the experience of schooling, they often do so as a means of understanding later outcomes rather than as a means of studying schooling in itself
We suggest a focus on students’ practices that divides how these practices are experienced between skills, habits, and virtues, each a different way of thinking about practices that captures how students experience their own connection to practices
We suggest procedural liberalism as one potential cause and the reification of the achievement ideology as one potential result of the focus on external goods in education, closing with recommendations for how other sociologists could build upon the theory we develop here
Summary
When sociologists of education study the experience of schooling, they often do so as a means of understanding later outcomes rather than as a means of studying schooling in itself. The same practice (for example, solving a geometric proof) could be experienced as either a skill, a necessary hoop through which a student must jump, or as a habit or virtue with a good contained within itself This is the key distinction between an external good and an extrinsic motivation: while the question of motivation examines the reasoning for learning or undertaking a practice, the question of good examines the broader and sociologically constituted experience of the practice. Skills usually refer to those practices that achieve desired ends, ends which will meet with certain external goods in a market Whether those skills are reflexive or related to a broader sense of self is of only secondary importance and can usually be bracketed as part of a study of whether X skill is correlated with Y socio-economic outcome. This disconnect between the experience of the practice and the good of the practice is why skills are best understood as unrelated to internal goods and (at least potentially) alienating.
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