Looking back to look forwards: Expanding the sociology of education

Abstract

As we write these lines, sociology celebrates 50 years of the French publication of the book The Inheritors, written by Bourdieu and Passeron in 1964. This ‘classic’ was followed by a series of works in the sociology of education (mainly published in England, France and the United States) devoted to the inequalities inherent within disparate projects revolving around school democratisation.1 From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, if the paradigms of educational sociologists do not all ascribe to that of critical sociology,2 several common factors are involved in researchers’ overarching lines of enquiry: the development of statistical data on schools, conferences and publication of reports on education (see Coleman, 1966, in the United States; Plowden, 1967, in the United Kingdom), the structuration of school policies around democratisation underlying theories of human capital and the dependence of the school vis-à-vis the labour market and the stratification and socioeconomic organisation of societies.