Breakthrough Books: Education

Scholars sound off about the books that shaped how we think about education.

Richard Arum (sociology and education, New York University):

James Coleman’s The Adolescent Society, published in 1961, foreshadows some of the central insights that sociologists of education have explored over the past half-century. Coleman empirically examined student understandings, status systems, and network relationships in a set of ten high schools. His work describes in vivid detail how, in most school settings, students were deeply embedded in peer networks that encouraged a focus on social as opposed to academic pursuits: cars and clothes, appearances and athletics. Coleman argued that “to improve those institutions designed to educate the adolescent toward adulthood” requires one to understand “how adolescent societies function, and beyond that, how their directions may be changed.”

David B. Bills (education, University of Iowa):

“The student-teacher relation in high school is one of the few authority relations in modern society whose maintenance is consistently problematic.” That is the provocative opening sentence of Arthur Stinchcombe’s 1964 Rebellion in a High School . For years nearly impossible to find (my copy somehow found its way to me from the Phoenixville, PA, Public Library), Rebellion in a High School states clearly and boldly that the roots of student rebellion, including dropping out, are not in individual pathology and attitudes but in the mismatch of one’s anticipated future and current performance. Well before sociology of education’s turn toward organizations, power, and institutions, Stinchcombe had caught on to how working class kids get working class jobs.

Audrey Devine-Eller (sociology, Grinnell College):

Tim Clydesdale’s The First Year Out explores American teens’ experiences as college freshmen. Published in 2007, Clydesdale quickly dispels the myth that college is a transformative experience in which students embrace the life of the mind, overturn narrow worldviews, and renegotiate identities. He finds most freshmen spend their time adjusting to new adult roles: getting the laundry done, functioning without a curfew, paying for leisure time. They “actively resist efforts to examine their self-understanding” and become “cognitively sharp yet intellectually immune.” I do not find Clydesdale’s work pessimistic; it forces me to re-evaluate what both schooling and teaching are for. And knowing where students are coming from helps me to guide them where I want them to be.

Annette Lareau (sociology, University of Pennsylvania):

Jerome Karabel and Albert H. Halsey shook up the world of sociology of education in 1977. In a long introduction, the editors critically assessed the field in a way that has rarely been done—before or since. They showed us what sociology of education had been as well as what it could be. The book strengthened my resolve to help develop new ethnographic research that would be better. Power and Ideology in Education was exacting, comforting, and inspiring. And it is still worth reading today.

Michael Young (education, Institute of Education, University of London):

Sociology taught me that schools discipline pupils’ minds and reproduce social class relations. Why then was I not a de-schooling disciple of Ivan Illich? I had no adequate answer until I came across Emile Durkheim’s lectures to student teachers, translated as Pragmatism and Sociology in 1983. The book never mentions education. It is about knowledge and how the most important thing for those becoming teachers to understand is why they must trust the knowledge they want their pupils to engage with—and this has nothing to do with what they believe. He does not make teaching any easier, but that was not his point.