Search

The article offers authors insight on educational research that can be related to social justice. Topics mentioned include distinguishing between value relevance and value freedom, the choice of sociology with political reasons, and the curriculum that brought all the differences between judgments of value or cultural priorities.

This paper is a response to that of Moore and Muller 'The Discourse of Voice and the Problem of Knowledge and Identity in the Sociology of Education', which appeared in Volume 20 of this journal. It starts by summarising and endorsing their criticisms of 'voice discourses' but argues that their case is weakened by their failure to distinguish clearly between the 'debunking of knowledge' associated with the postmodernist theories that underpin 'voice discourses' and the general propositions of a social theory of knowledge. The idea that knowledge has a social as well as an epistemological basis is now widely accepted in philosophy as well as sociology. The paper draws on a paper by Stephen Toulmin and makes a distinction between anthropological and sociological approaches to the idea of knowledge having a social basis. It goes on to use some ideas from the author's recent work on the issue of knowledge specialisation to suggest the kind of contribution that a sociological approach to knowledge can make to current curriculum issues as well as to educational policy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents opinion on information technology and the sociology of education. My own interest in what might be called a sociology or politics of technology relates to earlier attempts to develop a sociological analysis of school science. We started the Technology and Education Project, recognizing on the one hand the need to explore the problems and possibilities of the so-called new technologies and also to remain aware that the issues were not new or specific to particular technologies, but part of those more general processes of specialization, the hierarchies and forms of power relation associated with industrialization. Many teachers are aware of the shortages of available software, of the constraints imposed by local authority funding policies, and by the inappropriateness of the available programming languages for educational purposes. All these are important issues for both teachers and sociological research, but a concentration of them would in my view pre-empt discussion about more basic issues that have yet to be considered at least within education. Again it is important to stress that this is not an argument against the possible use of expert systems in education, which might broaden pupils' access to opportunities to realize their own purposes. It is rather to cause us to be much more explicit about those purposes and the extent to which particular divisions of labor and particular dependencies may become enshrined and mystified in software even more than in people.