The Light Bulb Test

My vision of the sociology of education comes out of identification with the aspirations of the nineteenth-century founders of sociology, many of whom, in Comte’s ([1851–1854] 1896) words, saw the new discipline as the ‘‘queen of the sciences.’’ For this founding generation, sociology could aspire to be the most important of the social sciences because it took the widest view, focusing not on a single set of social institutions but on all social institutions examined in comparative and historical perspective. Many of my teachers at Berkeley and Harvard shared something of this aspiration, and it was consequently easy for me to maintain it, however at odds it may have been with the main lines of development of the specialization area in which I was most interested. For someone who comes from this tradition, the questions are not, ‘‘What is the government funding now?’’ or ‘‘What is the most efficient way to obtain tenure?’’ Instead, the questions are, ‘‘How have human beings lived together over the centuries under different demographic and different technological conditions?’’ ‘‘What institutions and cultural understandings have they erected to organize action?’’ ‘‘How have they sustained social order?’’ and, ‘‘How and why did their institutions and social relations change over time?’’ When this perspective is applied to the institutions of schooling, a comparative and historical framework is clearly important. We would want to investigate, as Max Weber did, what the educational experience of sons of aristocrats trained for leadership and heroism looked like, what the education of mandarin Chinese preparing for a place in the imperial bureaucracy looked like, what the education of a middle-class German brought up under the philosophy of bildung looked like, and what the education of technical specialists in the age of bureaucracy looks like. And of course we would also want to look beyond the education of elites, as Weber failed to do. We would want to draw on those who studied the Lancasterian system of drilling the urban poor in industrializing England and the anthropologists who have studied the far-from-regimented schooling typical of rural areas in many developing countries. Not only do the worldwide sweep and comparative focus tell us about the possibilities of schooling in human societies; they can also bring our own situation into clearer relief. It is hard, for example, to know that the social status and pay of school teachers can vary dramatically with significant effects on professional style and expectations if one looks only at the contemporary United States, in which teachers are paid relatively poorly compared to other educated workers. Such a narrow perspective misses out altogether on the value the Germans and Japanese have placed on the teaching profession as evidenced by their teachers’ salaries and status in society. We might also be in a better position to judge how well our two-year community college system works in producing technically qualified labor if we compare it to the German dual system of apprenticeship training or the Japanese system of institutionalized network ties between secondary school teachers and employers. The broader perspective I commended in the essay can be completely compatible with present-day concerns and policy-related research. However, if this broader perspective prevailed, contemporaryconcerns and policy-related research would be appreciated as valuable applied arms of the field rather than its core. Given this background and these identifications, it will come as no surprise that I found much to appreciate in Rob Warren’s response to my essay, or that I emerged a little dejected from reading it. Warren’s analysis brings out