The Educational Legacy of Durkheim

Abstract

Durkheim has justifiably been dubbed not only one of the founding fathers of general sociology, but also of the sociology of education, and is perhaps the most distinguished of those scholars who have ever held a chair in education. From his first appointment as a lecturer in Bordeaux, and throughout his later appointment to a chair in Paris until his death in 1917 he lectured on education as well as sociology. In this way not only was sociology introduced as a discipline into French universities, but education also gained a tenuous foothold. His audience were future primary and secondary teachers, and included the intellectual high-fliers of the Ecole Normale Superieure preparing for the agregation. Indeed over half of all his university lecture courses were in educational studies. His range was wide, but the theme of the historical development of the French education system, together with 'practical exercises', predominated. Of the other courses-moral education, pedagogy (which he defined as 'practical theory', 'neither the educational activity itself, nor the speculative science of education'), the education of the intelligence, and psychology applied to education-it was the first he professed most frequently. However, his publications on education are confined mainly to the courses he gave, and it is for his general sociological works that he is most remembered today. This French symposium presents an up-to-date assessment by French sociologists of his status today exclusively as a writer on education. Reviewing the collection of papers, one is struck by the little impact Durkheim has made on education outside his own country. In Britain his general sociology was discussed as early as 1904 at a meeting of the newly-formed Sociological Society. The previous year sociology had been introduced as a discipline at London University; undoubtedly pioneers in teaching the new subject such as Patrick Geddes and Westermarck were familiar with his work. Although Karl Mannheim gave a series of brilliant lectures at the London Institute of Education immediately after the war, sociology of education was hardly developed in Britain until the 1960s, and Durkheim's ideas would appear to have made little impact. A paper by Brian Davies makes the case for Basil Bernstein to be considered 'Durkheimian', but the educational repercussions of his work on social codes show little evidence of this, with the possible exception of his classificatory framework. (By contrast, as Henriot-Van Zanten points out, in France, where the part played by language in education is more seriously esteemed than in Britain, Bernstein's work has been influential. Viviane Isambert-Jamati, in another paper on Durkheim's view of the place of the humanities in the secondary school, quotes him (p. 176) as declaring language to be 'the common foundation of all