This course considers how different traditions within the sociology of education explain the relationship between schools and society. We focus in particular on the assumptions each theoretical framework makes in its explanation of the role of schooling in creating or transforming gender, racial, and class inequalities. The course examines and compares the premises of structural functionalism with those of conflict, reproduction and transformation theorists. Our investigation proceeds by showing how each of these theoretical frameworks involves implicit and explicit normative assumptions about the purposes and effects of education in the larger society. These assumptions alter the interpretations, evidence, and methods used within each of the theoretical frameworks in order to explain the relationship between schools and society.

A major aim of the course is to teach students how to critically evaluate the normative assumptions of different sociological theories as well as the empirical research they generate. Often the gap is wide between the preparation teachers receive for teaching and the dilemmas they face in classrooms (particularly given the current rationalized conditions of teaching). It makes theory abstract, remote, alienating, and hence, obsolete. In a word, theory becomes suspect rather than being a useful tool relevant to daily concerns faced by educators and students. This course aims to render the process of critiquing various theories within the sociology of education as part of one's "really useful knowledge", as historian Richard Johnson suggests.

To that end, we shall discuss the wider popular cultural texts and contexts of education as they are experienced by different social and cultural groups. We shall examine how and whether youth construct their identities in relation to the representations of different social groups in the mass media (mtv, advertising, television, music, and radio), adolescent magazines and romance novels, classroom textbooks, and youth subcultural practices. How do the significant post-War changes in the economy and cultural expectations affect the transition youth make to adulthood? Is the ideology of adolescence useful to understanding that transition? We shall ask what is at stake in the rhetorical labelling of students as being "at risk" for dropping out, teen pregnancy, etc. Finally, we shall ask how the current rhetoric of crisis and reform in education shapes the vision of whose knowledge counts in the curricula and educational practice, as well as what constitutes meaningful democratic participation by all who are the subjects of education.

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