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.

This study illuminates how the everyday activity of teachers raises profound economic, cultural, ethical, political and research issues, and provides a new and fruitful way of examining the practice of teaching. The first part of the book offers a detailed description of sensitively recorded school situations, arising from work carried out in a number of British primary schools. From the analysis of their research the authors constructed a theoretical perspective for looking at schooling in the form of sixteen 'dilemmas'; the second half of the book is concerned with this perspective, and...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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,...