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This paper examines the sociology of education from the perspective of its recent history and attempts to assess the current state of the field. The authors argue that cognate disciplines such as economics and social policy have taken over some of the key questions that were once the preserve of sociology of education. This raises the question of what is lost if the sociology of education is no longer making a significant contribution, in key areas, to the major educational, social and economic issues of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has Harry Judge's career reproduced in a lifetime the centuries-old history of Brasenose College and the University of Oxford? His biography and the history of his college in relation to Christian belief and modern university reform are briefly recapitulated. All tell a story of adaptation and modernisation, the man short, the college long, the university in ceaseless change from a clerical foundation through an association of colleges as finishing schools for the Establishment to a collegiate university aspiring to place itself in the 'world league' of research centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

* This is the slightly amended text of the fourth Charles Carter lecture, delivered at the University of Lancaster on 15 November 1984. The General Editors are grateful to the Registrar of the University of Lancaster for permission to reproduce it here. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the authors' reply to the review symposium on the book Origins and Destinations by Martyn Hammersley. Our own view of the future for the political arithmetic tradition is not quite so gloomy, however. We see it as a developing tradition, evolving new techniques of analysis, hybridising with related species and occupying a distinct and secure ecological nature. To put the matter less metaphorically, we believe that the large-scale random sample on which the book was based is ideally suited to answering a specific and limited but nonetheless important set of questions about men. These questions by no means exhaust the subject-matter of the sociology of education and there are some for which they would be quite inappropriate. Change may not always be for the better but we believe that a vigorous tradition of political arithmetic must always be learning and experimenting. But what Hammersley seems to have missed is that the independent schools contained a much larger proportion of boys from propertied backgrounds than did grammar or direct grant schools. Our intention was not to investigate the vexed question of whether and in what ways intelligence affects attainment. Instead we wish to judge the selective system on its own terms.