The Political Sociology of Education

Abstract

The study of how the agenda for education is made up and translated into what goes on in schools was until very recently undertaken from a number of different and quite separate disciplinary bases. The approaches of educational administration and sociology of education differed considerably both in intensity and purpose, though they were on the whole mutually indifferent rather than mutually hostile. Political science, as Tapper & Salter pointed out in their first book (Tapper & Salter, 1978) has traditionally shown little interest in education, an omission which they set out to remedy in both that book and in the one under review here. However, over the last five to ten years, that situation has changed considerably. Expressions of doubt about the effectiveness of education as a form of social engineering began to appear. Some of these looked to the processes within policy formation and implementation for explanation of that failure; that approach is represented here by the Lodge & Blackstone book. More generally, it appears that in an era of educational contraction the political nature of educational systems is very much more apparent than in an era of expansion. Decisions about how to expand educational provision, we might be forgiven for assuming, are taken on educational grounds, while deciding where to cut is a political matter. It is certainly much harder to disguise the political nature of education in a time of contraction, and this has begun to lead all three disciplines to focus more directly on how political decisions effecting education are taken. Towards the end of the period unprecedented attention was devoted to the role of the civil service in government and its part in advancing or, more often, obstructing the implementation of party