First published in 1975, this book offers a critique of some of the ‘new perspectives’ in the sociology of education. This is achieved through a case study of a progressive child centred school.

The book suggests that a liberal approach to education fails to appreciate how thoroughly a complex, stratified industrial society penetrates the school. It argues that the practice of ‘progressive’ education may be a modern form of conservativism and an effective form of social control both in the narrow sense of achieving classroom discipline and in the wider sense of contributing...

This book tackles three choices that face developers of L2 writing assessments: defining L2 writing abilities; collecting evidence of those abilities (usually by getting L2 writers to write something); and judging their performance (usually by assigning a score or grade to it). It takes a historical view of how assessment developers have made those choices, how contemporary practices emerged, and of alternative techniques that have risen and fallen over time.