Sociology of Education

In a world where the boundaries of educational institutions are continually eroded through the applications of technology-driven and neo-liberal reform, the foundational claims of the socially reproductive functions of schooling, on which the sociology of education has been hitherto based, must become increasingly destabilized and problematic. Without a firmer understanding of just how the articulation of the 'relations within' these pedagogic processes works, there is every danger, as Bernstein feared, that 'relations to' (i.e. of education to other relationships based on gender, class, race and ethnicity) would come to be seen as the main engines of educational and societal change.

In this exercise, it is necessary first to expose some of the ironies and contradictions in Bernstein's oeuvre, by contrasting his later writings on pedagogic discourse with the basic tenets of his earlier contributions to the sociology of education. These contrasts become more evident when one compares what Atkinson et al. (1995: xi) identify as the first and the third phases of his project (i.e. between his early Durkheimian writings on language and class and his later poststructuralist attention to text, voice and discourse). The model of the TPS could, in fact, be termed 'postmodernist', since it might well illustrate Jensen's (1995:5) definition of this term as based on 'an assumption that the relationships between signs, self, and society have been radically reshaped in advanced industrial societies during the past few decades, resulting in a culture of disintegration and recombination'.

Teacher education is a complex domain, encompassing the training of teachers for primary and secondary schools, for different subject areas, in 'theory' and 'method' courses, in pre-service and in-service provision, in modes which vary in the extent to which they involve schools and higher education institutions in instruction. Developing a sociology of education is therefore a complex undertaking, one which needs to concern itself with activities within, but also with regulation from without.

The nature of the discourses present in teacher training (involving intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary and academic and non-academic relations) must also be analysed. Inter-disciplinary relations refer to integration of the various areas of knowledge usually present in the pedagogic and scientific training of teachers (psychology of education, sociology of education, epistemology of natural sciences, science methods). Intra-disciplinary relations refer to integration of the various contents and this reflects the level of conceptual demand required in the training process. 'Academic and non-academic' knowledge relates to the knowledges that teacher trainers present to teachers and that which teachers already have from their everyday practice. Classification will be strong whenever boundaries between discourses are well defined and will be weak whenever they are blurred, as will the relations between teacher trainers'-teachers' spaces and teachers'-teachers' spaces.

During the latter half of the twentieth century the sociology of education, previously a marginal aspect of sociology, became a major influence on the theory and practice of education in Australia. It was a very late arrival. In the opening decades of the century teacher training in Australia had been improved by the establishment or restructuring of six state teachers' colleges, one in each state. But their main activity was the training of teachers for the recently reformed state primary schools, and educational theory played only a minor part in this training.

While the sociology of education may be seen as a subdiscipline of sociology, it may also be considered one of the component subdisciplines of education. Some writers have elaborated this bipartite character into a distinction between 'the sociology of education' and 'educational sociology'.