Growing literatures highlight global shifts in education brought by spreading neoliberal values and marketisation. Parallel literatures address parenting styles. Parents, these literatures observe, are increasingly made responsible and/or voluntarily take responsibility for educational inputs alongside mainstream schooling. Much parental…

The main objective of this paper is to show to what extent and why students with the same academic aptitude but different social backgrounds have different odds of entering university. For our analysis, we separated primary and secondary factors of social origin in the formation of educational inequalities. The results show that the primary and…

Willis's ethnographic study "Learning to Labour" affirmed the education system as a site of the transmission of class inequality and showed that this transmission is not the result of mechanistic social reproduction but rather of cultural processes within schools. The study and Willis's thoughts on the subject since the study was…

P. Bourdieu provides one of the few coherent accounts of the central role that the schools have in reproducing social and cultural inequalities from one generation to the next, while allowing for human agency. Some writings using Bourdieu's work in their arguments are critiqued. (RM)

Refutes claims of Arnot and Whitty (v3, n1, 1982) that recent Marxist analyses of schooling are theoretically open and use empirical evidence to test social theory. Hargreaves argues that because contemporary Marxist sociology of education is based on a commitment to social change, it is theoretically closed and lacks empirical rigor. (AM)

Relates the liberal social theory of education to the current view of education as cultural reproduction and to a proposed critical social theory of education. Topics discussed include the continued existence of social structural contradictions, the rise of fundamentalist social movements in the United States, and using collective cultural…

Argues that curriculum changes which include content and pedagogical change contain within themselves new forms of social control. Reduction of teacher skill is also an outcome. The argument is based on research in a school employing such a curriculum. (Author/KC)

Three authors review the book by Harold Entwistle about the theoretician of Marxist social theory, Antonio Gramsci. Conclusions are that the book does not accurately reflect Gramsci's view on education. (KC)

Reviews recent publications concerning the sociology of education and examines the adequacy of different approaches to social change and continuity in education and society. Works reviewed include writings by sociologists Durkheim and M. S. Archer and by social historians P. McCann and R. Johnson. (KC)