We explore social justice advocacy and education from the vantage point of elite theory as articulated in the works of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. Elite theory is applied here to re-appraise the explicit and implicit educational means and ends inspired by contemporary social justice along three inter-related dimensions: the place of…

Educational reforms and introduction of compulsory schooling for nobility are rightly counted among the most important changes introduced by Peter I in Russia. This article employs a large sample of records from the Heraldry, a government agency in charge of registering nobles for their mandatory service, to assess the spread of literacy among the…

This paper examines the roles of parental social class and cultural capital in inequalities in English school qualifications. The analytical focus is the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). Integral to Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction is the conception that inequalities in cultural capital explain the unequal scholastic…

The educational system in nineteenth-century Sweden was, as in many other industrialising states, segregated by social class. Children of the economically and politically marginalised classes were educated in basic primary subjects in the nationwide "Folkskola" (primary schools). From 1868 to the early 1940s, the government issued,…

The goal of this paper is to extend research on parental involvement in education and its relationship to social class and inequalities. We do so by developing a new theoretical framework that helps us to better understand and explain cross-national and cross-cultural differences in how parental involvement in education differs across…

Dewey's idea of the secondary school emerged during the first thirty years of his academic career as he responded to historical realities and contemporary changes in secondary education in the United States. His advocacy of applying subject matter to the life of the student and to the life of society, integrating subject matter, an expanded…

Is the American dream that exists for the middle class equally available to the working class? Using extensive interviews with parents and a variety of data sources, this book examines how social contexts and culture affect parenting decisions. By analyzing class differences in neighborhoods, schools, and networks, as well as their relationship to…

There has been strong advocacy for educators to extensively examine pedagogical assumptions to design more inclusive and accessible classes. However, our assumptions about inclusivity and the interplay of privilege and students' "common sense" have received little attention. As such, a common sense gap exists, where faculty may regard…

This paper offers a qualitative analysis of decisions of 64 community-college students in seeking a transfer in Hong Kong. In weighing a number of educational options and then offers, with a similar level of desirability in some cases, in order to achieve their transfers, advantaged-class and disadvantaged-class respondents struggled with…

In this article I examine and analyse: 1. Marxist analysis of Social Class; 2, Late Western Capitalism, it's economic class war from above; 3. Fascism, Pre-Emptive -Fascism/ Neo-Fascism; 4. Repression by and Resistance to Capital(ism); 5, Marxist analysis, program and strategy regarding Capitalism and Resistance. Here, I stress that revolutionary…

In this paper, I argue a new politics of ordinal differentiation and its instruments for governing education aims to make invisible a 'low intensity civil war' against the labouring classes. It does this through the elevation and ubiquity of actuarial and quantitative measures aimed at producing a new form of differentiated belonging: that of…

This paper analyzes the development of social inequality in the Polish higher education system during its expansion after 1990 using data from the Polish General Social Survey. Focusing on the special case of a former socialist society, where higher education expansion has been very rapid and achieved mainly through marketization, this paper…

Forty years ago, leading communist educationalist and "FORUM" editor Brian Simon wrote a chapter entitled 'Why No Pedagogy in England?' In it, he argued that English education had failed to develop a science of learning, due to its class-divided history, and that the time was ripe for the development of such a science. This article…

This paper explores how, in what ways, and with what outcomes, deep structural transformations have reconstituted higher education in England, and are deeply implicated in the rise of authoritarian populism. We focus particularly on the ways in which our understandings and lived experiences of class, social mobility, meritocracy, social…

Sociological research has long been interested in inequalities generated by and within educational institutions. Although relatively rich as a literature, less analytic focus has centered on educational mobility and inequality experiences within graduate training specifically. In this article, we draw on a combination of survey and open-ended…