Aimed at the layperson, this book discusses education for the man or woman in the street and the advantages to society of having an educated population, with the aim of not just convincing people of the importance of education but persuading them to take participate actively in education.

Inevitably a product of the time in which it was published this book discusses important questions of neuro-psychology as well as setting out the early 'nature versus nurture' debate. The author also argues for changes in the care and education of those with learning difficulties to enable them to lead fulfilling lives, rather than being incarcerated in institutions (as was routinely the case in 1928).

What unites the contributors to this book is an opposition to Thatcherite policies on education and an agreement upon the need for the development of democracy in education. This volume highlights the importance of an area of neglected theoretical and practical concern: the development of a critique of the philosophy and policies of the new Right, and of credible alternative policies.

The editors have compiled this critical and comparative study of changes which took place in the New Zealand education system in the second half of the twentieth century. For other Western societies who have felt the impact of New Right policies the New Zealand case is interesting because it provides some indication of how policies of decentralization in education might be used to develop egalitarian and democratic educational policies. In recent years there have been major changes to educational systems in the Western world. Often these changes have been justified by reference to successful educational practices in other countries. However, it is not always possible simply to abstract educational practices from one context and apply them in another successfully. Moreover claims that policies in one country are more successful than those in another have to be treated cautiously: there are always problems in making valid comparisons between the educational performances of different countries. It is important, therefore, that critical and comparative studies are made of educational systems which take full account of the contexts in which they are embedded.

The role of language is central in education - but there is much debate about the exact relation between children's language and their educational success. The author provides a clear guide to the basic issues in the debates over language deficit, standard English and classroom language, and in this edition he shows how work in sociolinguistics can give a better understanding of the place of language in education and society.

This volume discusses how the lay-person responds to written appeals to his intelligence and feelings with particular emphasis on education and culture. The author indicates a possible approach to the task of investigation rather than all that can be done with the method employed. The second part deals with educational questions relevant to the evidence and examines the social implications of this evidence.

One problem which continues to absorb social scientists is the way in which so much social deprivation stems from racial or class status. The discussion in this book is developed in two ways: firstly, careful attention is given to an examination of the way minority groups create and maintain collective identities and action. Secondly, the relationship between this movement and such topics as racism in schools, schooling, unemployment and West Indian involvement in sporting rather than academic activities is analysed, together with the nature of the educational experience of different class and gender groups.

Although the different contributions to this book range over a wide spectrum of substantive issues, they share a common interest. This is a concern to explore the ways in which notions of the relations between theory and practice, between belief and action, can be used to develop three kinds of sensitivity in the sociology of education. A sensitivity towards how school systems are created, maintained and made to function; towards developing a more refined, critical and constructive awareness of the reliability and validity of descriptions, analyses and explanations offered in this field of study; and a sensitivity towards the ways in which changes take place within the education system and how the insights and realisations generated in the discipline might be used to control such occurrences.

Originally written at a time of crisis in the education system of Britain - occasioned by cuts, contradictions and change - many of the issues discussed in this book are still relevant today. Debate in the book focuses upon an examination of the nature of the crisis, an exploration of the impact of the crisis upon school processes and upon the relationship between life in school and in the wider community, an investigation of the responses being made by pupils, teachers and educationalists to the day-to-day manifestations of the crisis and a consideration of how the current crisis is giving a particular poignancy to issues to do with the theories and methods employed in our study and interpretation of contemporary educational processes.

This book presents an analysis of the 'essentialist ideology', which is inherent to class-based societies. The author argues that essentialist ideology is efficient through its unconscious component and is imposed on everyone. It guides school selection and imposes on each class a language specific in its reference to concrete domination relations. It even unbalances the scientific objectivity of researchers in the social sciences, not only among those who abide by the theory of natural aptitudes, but also among its sharpest critics, such as Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu and J C Passeron, whose work is considered in this book.

The manner in which we variously come to an understanding of our world presents problems for us all, but the unified method by which we ought best to acquire such knowledge represents the particular problem of contemporary education. This important book seeks to explore some of the underlying practises and assumptions that go to produce and sustain both such sets of activities. As a result of its concerns with the social organization of knowledge at all levels, the sociology of education has become a central form of much contemporary sociological theory. All the papers in this collection are formulations of a 'reflexive' method of theorizing within sociology of education. This is a mode of address, deriving partly from social phenomenology, which seeks to display the grounds of the theorists' speech as itself an essential feature of any informative dialogue. Major themes in education and in sociology are considered in this way, including the social form of rationality, the constitution of curricula, normative beliefs about Learning, the nature of literary study as liberal education and the character of scientific knowledge in the social world.

This volume presents a short survey of education at the beginning of the twentieth century. It considered the main educational agencies of that time, the home, the Church, the school and the university and the role to be played by each in preparing the citizens of the future. The author maintains that religion and education are intimately connected and therefore he discusses education in its broadest sense: preparation for being not just a citizen in the United Kingdom but in human existence as a whole.

In this volume a streamed school is studied in detail and parents' responses are recorded. Eleven plus is (and has been) under criticism, but many children are selected by a 'seven plus' because they are streamed into A, B or C classes. Few children escape the label once it is pinned on them - less than six in one hundred change their stream. The study shows that on a national sample the date on which a child is born - irrespective of his ability - affects his or her stream at the age of 7 and his results at eleven plus. Finally ten streamed schools are compared, academically and socially, with ten unstreamed schools. In the final chapters the author makes practical proposals by which primary schools could recognise and increase the flow of gifted children.

The major theories explored are those concerned with social mobility and those which derive from a relativist position in Sociology, both of which see education as a selection mechanism for a stratified society. Social class, family, sociolinguistics and schools are among the topics discussed. In this analysis the author: defines key areas in the sociology of education gives access to important concepts of Marx and Engels strengthens sociological starting points by adding a Marxist element discriminates between radically different directions in education maps the main features of long-term working class goals This thoroughgoing Marxist critique of widely prevalent notions in the sociology of education provides a compass by which place and direction in this area of education may be found by students, teachers and parents.

In this study - the outcome of three years' participant observation in local authority primary and secondary schools - the classroom teacher is shown to have a far greater impact upon and responsibility for his pupils than is generally admitted. The teacher's perceptions of the children in his class are demonstrated to have a more important bearing on the pupils' attainment than the major factor of their social class. In carrying out this research, Roy Nash has moved outside the mainstream tradition of educational psychology to take into account the methods of anthropology and sociology. He shows, by looking at the actual behaviour of teachers and children in classrooms, and by following the pupils from several different primary schools through to the same local authority secondary school, how the teacher's expectations for his pupils can act as self-fulfilling prophecies. The author's illuminating research is illustrated with tables and with three Appendices.

In industrialized societies the needs of people living in remote and sparsely populated areas are easily overlooked, whilst in developing countries the needs of the rural population are at once so obvious and so enormous that our practical concern is blunted. In this volume it is clearly demonstrated that the relationship between environment and schooling is no less pertinent in rural areas than urban areas, although most recent attention has been directed towards the latter. Roy Nash seeks to redress the balance and in this wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis he examines the educational needs of rural people both in the declining periphery of urban Europe and in the resource-starved areas of the developing world.

To many education students, Russian and/or Chinese education is at the same time their introduction to Marxism, and many students go no further. This book sets the record straight by giving a thorough introduction to the writings of Marx himself as they relate to education. It shows what Marxism implies for education, as aim, method and content. It then proceeds to compare educational developments in the former USSR and China in the light of this analysis, attempting to answer the question as to how Marxist this has been, in the schools and outside them.

The problems this book discusses are the same now as they were 25 years ago: unemployment, poor housing, inadequate facilities, poverty, racism, violence. What is the function of a school in such a situation? Although many schools hold reformist ideals, their practice is constrained by organisational demands. School organisation is based upon a coercive theory of social control which is intolerant of expressions of individuality by teachers and pupils. Needs for individuality may be mistaken for deviance, and deviance is at least in part produced by, or exacerbated by, school organisation. The author maintains that schooling is therefore largely maladjusted to the needs of individuals.

In this ethnographic study of a secondary school in the UK, the author presents an incisive account of school life from the various points of view of the pupils, teachers and parents. He describes and analyses major areas of experience and methods of adapting to school for both the children and their teachers; school experience is shown to be widely varying from boredom, despair and humiliation, to gaiety, exultation and comradeship some of it officially and some of it unofficially sponsored. The description reveals a number of marked and interpenetrating divisions within schools: between teachers and pupils, parents and teachers, parents and children and between pupils themselves. These divisions are explored, analysed and related both to institutional factors and to factors outside the school. The study suggests how these factors influence pupil and teacher strategies, and hence how the details of school life relates to wider society.

This is an introduction to interactionist work in education during the 1970s and 80s. The interactionist viewpoint concentrates on how people construct meanings in the ebb and flow of everyday life - what they think and do, how they react to one another - and has in recent years established itself as one of the leading approaches in education. It has generated illuminating research studies which, by being firmly based in the real world of teaching and dealing with the fine-grained details of school life, have helped to break down the barriers between teacher and researcher. This volume presents the results of this valuable work, within a coherent theoretical framework, by focusing on the major interactionist concepts of situation, perspectives, cultures, strategies, negotiation and careers. By bringing them together in this way, the author demonstrates their collective potential for the deeper understanding of school life and the possibilities for sociological theory. His book therefore offers both a summary of and a reflection on achievement in the area of interactionism as it relates to schools.

The internal organisation of the school touches on many areas of contemporary debate. Is there such a thing as a 'good school'? Are large urban comprehensives necessarily impersonal? Are the charges of indiscipline, conflict and declining standards in modern schools based on a failure to understand schools as institutions? At the time this book was first published sociological analysis had neglected to consider schools as organisational entities, preferring to see them as either the sites for negotiated encounters between teachers and pupils or else as agencies of class reproduction. The author redresses this imbalance and by relating the various literatures on the school to the constitutive patterns of its internal organisation he demonstrates the need for a more intensive sociological study of this embattled institution.

The book describes the English school, especially the secondary school, as a hierarchical community in which the head-teacher (principal) is an autocratic ruler. After explaining how that particular organisation of the school developed historically from the market situation faced by the English public (i.e. private) schools in the developing industrial society of the nineteenth century it provides empirical evidence demonstrating that the hierarchies of knowledge, teachers and students that developed then were still in place when the book was published in 1975. They are still present today. It also looks at the challenges to the school as a hierarchical community presented by the ideologies of deschooling, progressive education and open education. Finally, it provides an explanation of why these ideologies were never put into practice in English schools despite some pioneering exemplars. Although first published over thirty-five years ago the issues examined in it raise questions that are still central to education today: Does size of school affect the commitment of teachers to the school, their colleagues and their students? How can the teaching staff be organised in a school? Do all need to work to the same ends? What is the role of leadership from the head-teacher (principal) in this? Is it possible to have a curriculum that is open without losing rigour? What should be the relationship between using local community knowledge and the educational wish to extend students' horizons? The result is a short, nuanced, and densely argued text that demands thought and reflection from any contemporary educator.

This book argues that politics, in the sense of the government of our social structure, holds the key to the resolution of educational problems in the early twentieth century; that the teacher will only be relieved of his or her sense of frustration through government and ultimately socialist action. The author looks at the inequality of British education in the early twentieth century and the failure of capitalist education. She suggests measures to change the situation and discusses the aims and methods of socialist education.

What do pupils actually do in school? There are remarkably few studies that take the pupils' perspective and reconstruct experience from their point of view within the context of their own cultures and careers. This volume brings together a number of research studies on various aspects of how pupils cope with schools. The theoretical papers consider amongst other issues a developmental model of the growth of pupil strategies based on primary and secondary socialisation; a discussion of 'interactionist empiricism' which argues for co-ordinated research between micro and macro perspectives and an extended overview of the general sociological background of work on teacher and pupil strategies. The empirical articles consider a number of themes ranging from strategies employed in answering teacher questions to the power and influence of the pupil peer group in the development of attitudes and behaviour.

This book takes as its focus the key interactionist concept of 'strategy', a concept fundamental to many current concerns in the sociology of the school, including the understanding of the links between society and the individual, a more accurate description of certain areas of school life and implications for the practice of teaching. 'Strategy' bears on all these issues. It concerns both goals, and ways of achieving them and short-term, immediate aims as well as long-term ones. The essays in this book share a common concern with teacher strategies, emphasizing the discovery of intentions and motives, alternative definitions of situations and the hidden rules that guide our behaviour. Amongst the areas investigated are the influence of factors outside the school in determining the role of the teacher, and the nature and influence of teacher commitment. The implications for practical action and policy making are stressed throughout, and by recognising and exploring the constraints and influences that operate on teachers, this work constructs a realistic appraisal of the teaching situation.