The Reality of Teaching: bringing disorder back into social theory and the sociology of education

Abstract

Abstract There is a strange dissonance between on the one hand the rather disordered and unstructured everyday reality of teaching as noted in literature on teachers’ knowledge and on the other hand the tendency among leading social theorists, such as Bourdieu and Giddens to emphasise the ordered and structured nature of education and social life in general. Among the possible reasons for the lack of awareness of and sensitivity to the reality of teaching in contemporary social theory, it is suggested that the predominant educational practice in institutions of higher education, the culture of the lecture hall, might have conditioned social theorists to expect a higher degree of order, rationality and predictability than is actually the case in ‘real life’. Studying the reality of teaching as an area close to real life can help social theory to reorient itself towards a more realistic picture of modern societies, taking into account a higher degree of disorder and unpredictability than recognised in conte...