Currents and controversies in the sociology of education

Abstract

In this note one tries to summarize the origins, the main controversies and the theoretical currents that cross the sociology of education now. Reference is made to the works and the researches in course not only in the U.S.A. and Great-Britain but also in France, throwing into a special relief those that, in the author's opinion, deserve more attention. One underlines the researches made under a functionalist, marxist or of the «new» sociology of education perspective, making a certain number of fundamental critical remarks on each one of these currents, and referring to works and authors that contest them in a way or another. As a matter of fact, the present text intends to introduce, in a critical way, a discipline pratically unknown in Portugal. On selecting the currents and researches above mentioned, one has adopted an institutional criterium; this is the reason why the note suffers from the limits inherent to the organization itself of the sociology of education in the university departments of teaching and research. The sociology of education has been indeed submitted to an arbitrary and damaging segregation, what has led to the systematic contempt as to certain approaches, namely the historical one, the promotion of which, on the contrary, would be most advantageous.