Seeing Education Relationally: The Stratification of Culture and People in the Sociology of School Knowledge

Abstract

The most widely used approaches to the study of the stratifying role of the school—the status attainment tradition and phenomenologically oriented ethnographic work—have undertheorized conceptions of class and economy. They do not often deal adequately enough with the cultural and political dynamics of education and do not have an adequate realization of the contradictory “functions” of schools. The sociology of school knowledge has made considerable progress in dealing with these issues, especially with the complicated relationship between educational institutions and the dynamics of class, gender, and race. A framework is offered for analyzing how these ideological dynamics produce the stratification of culture and people in education.