THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE CURRICULUM.

This article discusses the sociology of knowledge and curriculum planning. People interested in problems of the curriculum of schools can be divided into two groups. The first group, by far the largest, is mainly interested in the practical problems of the curriculum, of which bringing about some desirable change in the curriculum might be one. The theoretical basis for much of the work in this particular volume is to be found in a sub-discipline of sociology known as the sociology of knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to provide some account of the sociology of knowledge and to explore the implications for the study of the curriculum of this particular viewpoint. The author proposes to do this first by looking at the sociology of knowledge as it was formulated by researcher Karl Mannheim. Although Mannheim was by no means the first to put forward a set of ideas as the sociology of knowledge, he is the thinker who made these notions through his writings accessible to the English speaking world. Mannheim drew attention to two other features of political and social theories.