Two writers, Hickox and Hargreaves, who recently criticized Marxist sociology of education, largely misunderstand and misrepresent the work they criticize. Hickox attributes a position to Marxist sociologists of education which few hold. Hargreaves is insufficiently familiar with Marxist scholarship to grasp the nature of the Marxist project.…

This article is an attempt to sketch a realist framework for the sociology of education. The central questions may be stated succinctly. What are the properties of social entities and how can they be demonstrated? What properties of people are acquired as a result of socialisation and how do they influence their actions? What are the properties of…

"Critical" sociology of education has abandoned equality of educational opportunity as an imperfect objective, recognising it as one fully compatible with the competitive ideology of liberalism and, in as much as it is not even realised, one that serves principally to sustain the myth of equality in an unequal society. In this article, the author…

The existence of social differences in educational achievement as a social fact presents the sociology of education with a challenge to which it has responded with indifferent success. It is argued that contemporary explanations that dismiss the existence and relevance of differences in cognitive performance arising as a consequence of class…

Although Boudons distinction between primary and secondary effects, and its associated rational action models of inequality of educational opportunity, have been more influential in the field of social stratification and mobility than in the sociology of education, there is good reason to reconsider the theoretical and practical implications of…