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Talcott Parsons did not leave us with a global and consistent sociology of education. Instead, different aspects can be found in Parsons's oeuvre in different theoretical contexts. This paper summarises these different parts of Parsons's sociology of education – his writings on the concepts of education and socialisation, the university, the school, the professions, and modernisation – and discusses central criticisms and perspectives for further theoretical development. The paper goes on to argue that the value of cognitive rationality serves as a common basis of Parsons's sociology of education and that Parsons's sociology of education should be characterised as normative functionalist. Since the current sociology of education does not deal very intensely with Parsons's theoretical approach, the paper also considers references to other authors and the relevance for current questions and research in the sociology of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following reflections by Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, this paper is concerned with the changing meaning of the profession as a sociological category for analyzing modern society. Professions are practical academic occupational groups oriented to certain social values, to which a special significance for society was attributed in the social sciences for a long time, thus marking a connection between professions' research and theory of society. This paper now describes that the causal relationship between profession and society is limited to a historically relatively early period. In the transition to modern society, this close network of relationships begins to dissolve, and now professions operate in the context of some function systems of society whose task is the professional assistance of single clients, such as in the fields of health, law, and pastoral care. However, the professions' highlighted position in the knowledge and action structure of single function systems seems to dissolve more and more today so that one can ask whether we can speak here already of an end of the social form profession. This would correspond with the observation that actually the professions no longer appear at all in the newer theories of society and therefore their function as an important mechanism of social structure formation is no longer attributed to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]