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Education and inequality: historical and

sociological approaches to schooling
and social stratification
a b
Alan R. Sadovnik & Susan F. Semel
a
Department of Urban Education , Rutgers University‐Newark ,
New Jersey, USA
b
City College of New York, Department of Urban Education, and
School of Education , CUNY Graduate Center , New York, USA
Published online: 25 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Alan R. Sadovnik & Susan F. Semel (2010) Education and inequality: historical
and sociological approaches to schooling and social stratification, Paedagogica Historica:
International Journal of the History of Education, 46:1-2, 1-13, DOI: 10.1080/00309230903528421

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 Paedagogica Historica
Vol. 46, Nos. 1–2, February–April 2010, 1–13

INTRODUCTION
Education and inequality: historical and sociological approaches to
schooling and social stratification
Alan R. Sadovnika* and Susan F. Semelb
a
Department of Urban Education, Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, USA; bCity
College of New York, Department of Urban Education, and School of Education, CUNY
Graduate Center, New York, USA
(Received
CPDH_A_453306.sgm
Paedagogica
10.1080/00309230903528421
0030-9230
Original
Taylor
2010
sadovnik@andromeda.rutgers.edu
AlanSadovnik
0000002010
1/2
46 and
& Article
Francis
;(print)/1477-674X
Francis
final
Historica
version received)
(online)

The 30th International Standing Conference on the History of Education was held at
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Rutgers-Newark from 23 July to 26 July 2008. The conference theme, “Education and
Inequality: Historical Approaches to Schooling and Social Stratification” reflected our
decade-long interest in both historical sociology and sociological history. One of us,
a sociologist, has written historical sociology1 and the other, a historian, has written
sociologically informed history.2 Our collaborations have attempted to combine
history and sociology to understand the history of progressive education and the role
of women in progressive reforms.3 Based on these works, the conference theme was
an outgrowth of our interest in integrating history and sociology to understand impor-
tant educational problems. The role of schools in either reducing and ameliorating or
reproducing and exacerbating social inequalities has long been the subject of debate
in both disciplines. Therefore, the papers presented at ISCHE 30 and those included
in this special issue of Paedagogica Historica all examine the theme of education and
inequality through a sociological and historical lens.
The study of education and inequality has been a central theme in the sociology of
education since the 1960s. Sociological studies have focused on a number of ques-
tions. First, what does the empirical evidence tell us about the nature and extent of
social class, race, ethnic and gender achievement gaps? Second, what are the causes
of these educational inequalities—that is, are they caused by factors inside and/or
outside schools. Third, what do the answers to these questions tell us about the role of
education in ameliorating or reproducing existing inequalities?

*Corresponding author. Email: sadovnik@andromeda.rutgers.edu

1
A.R. Sadovnik, Equity and Excellence in Higher Education: The Decline of a Liberal
Educational Reform (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).
2
S.F. Semel, The Dalton School: The Transformation of a Progressive School (New York:
Peter Lang, 1992).
3
S.F. Semel and A.R. Sadovnik, “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What Happened
to Progressive Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 2006; A.R. Sadovnik and S.F.
Semel, Founding Mothers and Others: Women Leaders During the Progressive Era (New
York: Palgrave, 2002).

ISSN 0030-9230 print/ISSN 1477-674X online

© 2010 Stichting Paedagogica Historica
DOI: 10.1080/00309230903528421
http://www.informaworld.com
 2 A.R. Sadovnik and S.F. Semel

Numerous sociological studies have documented the extent of achievement gaps,

in the United States and internationally.4 In the simplest terms, students from higher
social classes have higher achievement levels than students from lower social classes.
This is also true of race and ethnicity, where dominant groups outperform subordinate
groups. The case of gender is more complicated, with girls closing the gap over the
last 30 years and now outperforming boys in almost all categories except mathematics
and sciences. Longitudinally, social class, race and ethnic gaps, at least in the United
States, declined from the 1970s to the late 1980s and then increased from then to the
late 1990s. Since 2000, these gaps have decreased slightly.5
Sociological research has examined the causes of these inequalities. These find-
ings can be broken down into those that emphasise factors external to schools and
those that emphasise school-based factors. In 1966, the Coleman Report concluded
that forces outside schools, especially neighbourhood and peer-group effects, were
more important than measures of school or teacher quality, and other within-school
variables.6 At a time that liberal educational reforms as a result of Lyndon Johnson’s
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Great Society produced optimism in the US, the Coleman Report cast doubt on the
ability of schools to ameliorate inequalities on their own. In the 1970s, the work of
political economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis7 and sociologist Christopher
Jencks,8 which concluded that schools reproduced inequalities or had little effect on
them, furthered this sceptical orientation. This tradition continues today, with Jean
Anyon arguing that educational inequalities are caused by political-economic condi-
tions, often related to poverty, and that without significant economic transformations
school-based reforms are doomed to failure.9
In response to this pessimistic perspective, a number of researchers argued that
schools, often independent of the demographic characteristics of their students, had
the potential to reduce inequalities. Ron Edmonds’s work on effective urban schools
with low-income and African-American students in the US indicated that schools
could interrupt the process of social and class reproduction.10 More recently, propo-
nents of no-excuses schools such as the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) argue
that schools can compensate for societal problems.11
In the 1970s, sociologists of education argued that it was imperative to examine the
process of schooling, or what goes inside schools and classrooms, to fully understand
the limits and possibilities of schooling in ameliorating or reproducing inequalities.

4Although the following discussions of the sociology and history of education focuses
primarily on the fields in the US, they reflect larger disciplinary trends internationally. One of
the strengths of ISCHE and Paedogogica Historica is their inclusion of a comparative and
international perspective, one that is reflected in the set of articles in this special issue.
5See Education Trust: http://www.edtrust.org for detailed data on achievement gaps.
6J.S. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1966).
7S. Bowles and H. Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
8C. Jencks et al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Role of Families and Schools (New York,
Basic Books, 1972).
9J. Anyon, Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education and a New Social
Movement (New York: Routledge, 2005).
10R. Edmonds, “Effective schools for the urban poor,” Educational Leadership 37, no. 1
(1979): 5–24.
11A. Thernstrom and S. Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
 Paedagogica Historica 3

Studies of school inputs, including school funding12 and teacher quality,13 and school
processes, such as tracking14 and teacher expectations,15 analysed the ways in which
schooling contributed to social stratification or provided the possibility of reducing it.
In Europe, Basil Bernstein16 and Pierre Bourdieu17 analysed the connections
between family and school to show how social class advantages resulted in differ-
ences in educational and communication codes (Bernstein) and in social and cultural
capital (Bourdieu) and how these resulted in educational inequalities.
Based on the evidence, two competing sociological theories on education and
inequality have dominated over the past four decades.18 The first, functionalism,
tracing its roots to nineteenth-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim and
twentieth-century US sociologist Talcott Parsons, has argued that although schooling
has not eliminated inequalities it has on balance provided an important vehicle for
upward mobility, at least in the US. The second, conflict theory, tracing its roots to
nineteenth-century social theorist, Karl Marx, nineteenth-century sociologist Max
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Weber and twentieth-century sociologists, such as Randall Collins, has argued that on
balance schools have reproduced existing social inequalities.
The history of education has similar theoretical debates, especially concerning
education and inequality. The different interpretations of US educational history
revolve around the tensions between equity and excellence, between the social and
intellectual functions of schooling, and over differing responses to the questions:
Education in whose interests and education for whom? The US school system has
expanded to serve more students for longer periods of time than any other system in
the modern world; however, most advanced nations have caught or are catching up.
In the US this occurred, first, by extending primary school to all through compulsory
education laws during the Common School Era (1820–1860); second, by extending
high school education to the majority of adolescents by the end of the Progressive Era
(1890–1940); and third, by extending postsecondary education to the largest number
of high school graduates in the world by the 1990s. However, historians and sociolo-
gists of education disagree about whether this pattern of increased access means a
pattern of educational success.
Democratic-liberal historians believe that the history of US education involved
the progressive evolution, albeit flawed, of a school system committed to providing

12P. Tractenberg and others, Don’t Forget the Schools: Legal Considerations for School
Finance Reform (New Bruswick, NJ: Institute on Education Law and Policy, Rutgers
University, 2006).
13R. Ingersoll, Who Control’s Teachers’ Work; Power and Accountability in America’s
Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
14J. Oakes, Keeping Track (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; 2005).
15R. Rist, “Student social class and teacher expectations: The self fulfilling prophecy in
ghetto education,” Harvard Education Review 40 (1970): 411–51. R. Rist, “On understanding
the processes of schooling: The contributions of labeling theory,” in Power and Ideology in
Education, ed. J. Karabel and A.H. Halsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 292–
305.
16B. Bernstein, Class, Codes, and Control: Vol. 1; Class, Codes, and Control: Vol. 2; Class,
Codes, and Control: Vol. 3 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, 1973, 1975).
17P. Bourdieu, “Cultural reproduction and social reproduction,” in Knowledge, Education,
and Cultural Change, ed. R. Brown (London: Tavistock, 1973), 71–112; P. Bourdieu and J.C.
Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977).
18See A.R. Sadovnik, Sociology of Education: A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge,
2008).
 4 A.R. Sadovnik and S.F. Semel

equality of opportunity for all. Democratic-liberal historians suggest that each period
of educational expansion involved the attempts of liberal reformers to expand educa-
tional opportunities to larger segments of the population and to reject the conservative
view of schools as elite institutions for the meritorious (which usually meant the
privileged). These historians have portrayed the Common School Era as a victory for
democratic movements and the first step in opening US education to all. Furthermore,
they portray the early school reformers such as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard as
reformers dedicated to egalitarian principles. Lawrence A. Cremin, in his three-
volume history of US education and in a study of the Progressive Era, portrayed the
evolution of US education in terms of two related processes: popularisation and multi-
tudinousness.19 For Cremin, educational history in the United States involved the
expansion of both opportunity and purpose. That is, as more students from diverse
backgrounds went to school for longer periods of time the goals of education became
more diverse, with social goals often becoming as or more important than intellectual
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ones. Cremin did not deny the educational problems and conflicts; he noted the
discrepancies between opportunity and results, particularly for the economically
disadvantaged. Moreover, he never relinquished his vision that the genius of US
education is in its commitment to popularisation and multitudinousness.20
Although democratic-liberals tend to interpret US educational history optimisti-
cally, the evolution of the nation’s schools has been a flawed, often conflictual march
toward increased opportunities. Thus, historians such as Cremin do not see equity and
excellence as inevitably irreconcilable as much as the tensions between the two as
resulting in necessary compromises. The ideals of equality and excellence are just
that: ideals. Democratic-liberals believe that the US educational system must continue
to move closer to each, without sacrificing one or the other too dramatically.
Beginning in the 1960s, the optimistic vision of the democratic-liberal historians
began to be challenged by radical historians of education. These radical-revisionist
historians of education provided a more critical, less optimistic analysis. These
historians, including Michael Katz, Joel Spring and Clarence Karier, argued that US
education expanded to meet the needs of the elites in society for the control of the
working class and immigrants, and for economic efficiency and productivity.21 In
addition, radicals suggested that expanded opportunity did not translate into more
egalitarian results. Rather, they pointed out that each period of educational reform (the
Common School Era, the Progressive Era and the Post-Second World War) led to
increasing stratification within the educational system, with working-class, poor and
minority students getting the short end of the stick.
One of the problems with this view, pointed out by other radicals who generally
agreed with this interpretation, is that it views the expansion of education as imposed
on the poor and working class from above and often against their will. An alternative
radical view is that the explanation of educational expansion is a more conflictual one
rather than a simplistic tale of elite domination.

19L.A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York: Harper & Row,
1972); American Education: The National Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1980);
American Education: The Metropolitan Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
20L.A. Cremin, Popular Education and Its Discontents (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
21M.B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1968); J. Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1972); C. Karier, ed., Shaping the American Educational State (New York: Free Press, 1976).
 Paedagogica Historica 5

Overall, radical historians agree that the results of educational expansion rarely
met their stated democratic aspirations. They suggest that each new expansion
increased stratification of working-class and disadvantaged students within the
system, with these students less likely to succeed educationally. For example, political
economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis noted that the expansion of the high
school resulted in a comprehensive secondary system that tracked students into voca-
tional and academic curriculums with placement, more often than not, determined by
social class background and race.22 Furthermore, the expansion of higher education in
the post-Second World War period often resulted in the stratification between
community colleges that stressed vocational education and four-year colleges and
universities that stressed the liberal arts and sciences. Once again, radicals argue that
placement in the higher education system is based on social class and race.
Thus, the radical interpretation of US educational history is a more pessimistic
one. While acknowledging educational expansion, they suggest that this process
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benefited the elites more than the masses and failed to produce either equality of
opportunity or results. Further, they underscore the ironic nature of the debates
concerning equity and excellence: Those who bemoan the decline of standards often
seek to re-impose excellence with little regard for equality.
Although the sociology and history of education employ their own methodological
tools there is theoretical overlap between them with regard to education and inequal-
ity. Democratic-liberal historians share functionalist sociologists’ faith in schooling;
radical-revisionist historians share conflict sociologists’ pessimism.
Despite their overlapping concerns, there are insufficient sociological studies that
make use of the insights and methods of history and few historical studies that make
use of the insights and methods of sociology. There are of course important exceptions.
Charles Tilly’s work represented the model for historical sociologists.23 Theda
Skocpol, likewise, provided a model for comparative historical sociology.24 In the
sociology of education, Jerome Karabel’s sociological analysis of changes in admis-
sions to America’s elite universities, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, employs rigorous
historical methodology and provides a powerful historical sociology of patterns of
inequality over time.25 Kathryn Neckerman’s historical sociology of race and immi-
gration in Chicago combines history and sociology to analyse the ways in which urban
schools treated white immigrants and blacks differently with resulting unequal
outcomes.26 Historian John Rury has incorporated sociological methodology, espe-
cially quantitative analysis, into his historical work.27 Also Joel Perlmann’s history of
schooling for immigrants and blacks in a nineteenth-century American city makes
valuable use of sociological research and methods.28 Finally, in sociology of education,
22Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America.
23C. Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
24T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
25J. Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale,
and Princeton (New York: Houghton, 2005).
26K. Neckerman, Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).
27J. Rury, “The variable school year: Measuring differences in the length of American school
terms in 1900,” Journal of Research and Development in Education Spring (1988): 29–36;
Education and Women’s Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban
America, 1870–1930 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).
28J. Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish. Italians, Jews
and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
 6 A.R. Sadovnik and S.F. Semel

institutional theory, developed by John Meyer and applied by his colleagues over the
past three decades, has provided a comparative historical and sociological analysis of
the rise of mass educational systems worldwide.29
This collection of articles presented at ISCHE 30 represents the attempts of
historians to use sociological perspectives, insights and methods to understand the
historical context of educational inequality. We have organised them thematically
rather than chronologically in order to show how schooling has ameliorated or
reproduced inequalities across a variety of settings and at different levels.

Social class, race, gender and ethnic inequalities

As noted above, inequalities of social class, race, ethnicity and gender have been at
the heart of sociological and historical research on educational stratification. The first
article by Nancy Beadie provides a comparative historical analysis of the role of educa-
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tion and social capital in state formation. “Education, social capital and state formation
in comparative historical perspective: preliminary investigations” develops a theory of
the relationship between education and state formation through an empirical study of
the northern United States. This theory emphasises voluntary and market-based support
for schools that developed before the formal role of the state, and analyses how the
capital accrued by schools as businesses and voluntary organisations became increas-
ingly controlled by the state. Using the sociological concept of social capital, the article
analyses the significance of schools in creating and distributing social capital, and poli-
tics and policy are related to these resources. Through a comparative historical
approach Beadie illuminates many of the central processes outlined by institutional
theorists but with far more historical specificity and demonstrates how social capital
and markets are related to state control of educational systems and how these processes
became the foundations for later social class inequalities in schooling.
Racial inequalities have been central to the history of the United States. From its
inception, the US was built on the exploitation of the slave labour of Africans, who
were systemically denied education. From after the Civil War to the present, struggles
for equality of educational opportunities for African-Americans have been an ongoing
part of Civil Rights and educational reform movements. In “Black hopes, White
power: emancipation, reconstruction and the legacy of unequal schooling in the US
South, 1861–1880,” Ronald E. Butchart analyses the origins of unequal education for
African-Americans during the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction. As slavery
collapsed in the United States, freed African-Americans expressed a significant
demand for schooling and displayed their abilities for academic achievement. Despite
this interest and capacity, today many African-American students resist academic
achievement as “acting white”. Butchart traces the post-emancipation dreams of
universal literacy and African-American academic success to the continuing vast
racial achievement gaps in the US. Immediately following the Civil War, African-
American education was met with violence and terrorism by Southern racists and
white supremacists, which were codified in segregationist Jim Crow laws and Plessy
v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that ruled separate but equal was

29J. Meyer, “The effects of education as an institution,” American Journal of Sociology 83,
no. 1 (1977): 55–77; F.O. Ramirez and J. Boli, “The political construction of mass schooling:
European origins and worldwide institutionalization,” Sociology of Education 60, no. 15
(1987): 2–17.
 Paedagogica Historica 7

unconstitutional; which was not overturned until the Brown v. Board of Education, the
1954 Supreme Court decision that ruled that separate but equal education for African-
Americans was inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional.30 Butchart argues that
the historical legacy of institutional racism is at the heart of current racial inequalities
of academic achievement.
In “‘We have a long way to go’: H. Councill Trenholm, educational associations,
and equity” Carol F. Karpinski provides a historical and biographical account of the
life and work of H. Councill Trenholm, a largely unknown and ignored African-Amer-
ican educational leader. As president of Alabama State College (ASC), located in the
Deep South, he directed the college into the largest teacher training college (for Afri-
can-Americans) in Alabama. When he wrote that “we have a long way to go”, he fully
understood the barriers that African-Americans faced in attaining educational equity.
Karpinski’s case study explores Trenholm’s methods for gaining support as a member
of the National Education Association American Teacher Association Joint Committee
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and obtaining accreditation of the African-American colleges and high schools in the
region by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Her article
demonstrates the essential role of African-American educational leaders in increasing
access and opportunity for blacks, albeit in a still segregated pre-Brown South.
Gender inequalities have been among the most pernicious and complicated around
the world. In advanced liberal democracies such as the United States and the United
Kingdom, the gender gaps favouring males have been reduced and in some cases elim-
inated over the past three decades, with women outperforming men in reading, writing
and the humanities and men still outperforming women in mathematics and sciences.31
In these countries, women have higher secondary school graduation rates and college
attendance and graduation rates. In the same period, womens’ representation in profes-
sional schools of law and medicine increased dramatically to the point of equity, but
they are still unrepresented in engineering and other scientific professions and over-
represented in the professions of education and social work. However, in other less
developed non-secular societies, women are still denied equal access to educational
opportunities and in some cases denied education completely. In “Cosmopolitan
women educators, 1920–1939: inside/outside activism and abjection” Joyce Goodman
examines the scope of women’s international organisations in the interwar period and
how they were related to the more bureaucratised international educational associations
that developed in Europe. Within these organisations the inequalities in the education
of women and girls and the status of females as academics, teachers and educational
policy-makers were discussed and debated. This article examines these organisations
and the development of international knowledge regarding girls’ education in the Inter-
national Federation of University Women (IFUW). Goodman emphasises Amelie
Arato’s “L’Enseignement secondaire des Jeunes Filles en Europe”, published in 1934
under the auspices of the IFUW. She argues that international data indicated that girls
and women benefited from increased education, but that conservative ideologies in
some countries continued to limit educational opportunities for girls and women. This
article provides an important historical analysis of the paths to greater access to educa-
tion for girls and women and the resistance to these progressive developments.

30R. Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black
America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage, 2004).
31M. Arnot, M. David and G. Weiner, Closing the Gender Gap: Postwar Education and
Social Change (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999).
 8 A.R. Sadovnik and S.F. Semel

Kay Whitehead’s article, “‘A decided disadvantage for the kindergarten students
to mix with the state teachers’”, complements Goodman’s as it examines gender
conflicts in Australia concerning kindergarten education and the training of their
teachers. In early twentieth-century Australia, men administered coeducational state
training colleges, but teacher education programmes for kindergartners were operated
by the free kindergarten movement, which was dominated by women. The Kindergar-
ten Training College in Adelaide, South Australia, was established in 1907 with
Lillian de Lissa as its principal. Whitehead examines a proposal to merge it with the
state training college in 1909–1910. During this period de Lissa and her largely female
supporters did not support the proposed merger, which male administrators and
academics favoured. This opposition was related to gender issues, and differences
related to social class and progressive education. De Lissa argued that the aims of
the two institutions were inexorably opposed because of the differences between
kindergartners and state teachers with regard to social class and pedagogy. De Lissa
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and her supporters proved victorious, and kindergarten training colleges in other
Australian states also remained separate from state training colleges until the 1970s.
This article illustrates the complex relationship between gender, social class and
progressive education, one that is sometimes overlooked in both historical and
sociological examinations of the history of kindergartens.32
The next article provides an analysis of how religion has often been a less progressive
force in the education of women. “The elusive access to education for Muslim women
in Kenya from the late nineteenth century to the “Winds of Change” in Africa (1890s
to 1960s)” by Rashida Keshavjee examines the effects of religion on educational oppor-
tunities for women. It presents the historical inequalities of education for Muslim
women of the Ismaili persuasion in Kenya during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and examines the debates with regard to education for Muslim girls, in terms
of both traditional Muslim beliefs, and colonial ideology concerning ethnic/racial
minority groups. Keshavjee describes new approaches aimed at increasing opportunities
and examines women’s life histories and experiences that often resulted in positive self-
identities and increased participation in civil society. This article provides an important
comparative historical examination of the role of religion in non-Western societies and
how it often limited women’s access to education, as well as women’s abilities to resist
these barriers in the pursuit of schooling. Given the ongoing challenges to women’s
education in many Islamic societies, this article provides important historical lessons
for contemporary movements to increase women’s access to education.
The next article, “Ethnic segregation in Malaysia’s education system: enrolment
choices, preferential policies and desegregation” by Santhiram R. Raman and Tan
Yao Sua, examines ethnic segregation and educational inequalities in Malaysia, a
multi-ethnic society where the ethnic relations have been central in political and
institutional arrangements, and public policy. Despite the fact that the education
should have been a cohering force for the country’s many ethnic groups, ethnic
segregation has become a developing aspect of Malaysia’s education system. The
foundational problem is that at all levels of education in Malaysia, different curricular
systems exist for the immigrant Chinese and Indian communities compared with the
mainstream state education offered to the indigenous, Malay majority. These different
tracks or streams have become divided along ethnic lines and this resulted in

32Frances Maher, “Progressive Education and Feminist Pedagogies: Issues in Gender, Power
and Authority,” Teachers College Record 101, no. 1 (1999): 35–59.
 Paedagogica Historica 9

discrimination against the ethnic minorities in education and limited their equitable
participation in the labour force and economy. This article examines the development
of the educational policy and examines two main factors that affect ethnic segregation
in its education system: enrolment choices and preferential policies. This article
provides an important analysis of inequalities of ethnic opportunities in a non-Western
society and complements the work of Butchart and Keshjavee on the ways that
education has been used to limit the life chances of particular groups in very different
societies.

Curriculum, pedagogy and educational opportunities

The first set of articles examined inequalities of education based on social class, race,
gender and ethnicity. Over the past 150 years, the state and its educational institutions
have responded to these inequalities at the national and local levels with policies
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aimed at changing the practices within schools that reproduce them and implementing
reforms aimed at increasing the achievement of under-achieving groups. In
“L’enseignement du français à l’épreuve de la démocratisation (1959–2001)” (The
impact of school democratisation on French literature and language curricula and
pedagogics) Clémence Cardon-Quint examines the way French language and litera-
ture teachers have addressed the question of social inequities at school in France from
1959 until today. The article, which received the ISCHE 30 award for the outstanding
paper presented by a postgraduate researcher, begins with a discussion of the Classical
Humanities, which historically formed the foundation of elite education for many
centuries, and were criticised from the eighteenth century on as being inadequate to a
changing society. She describes the new criticism of the nineteenth century that
argued against classical education: it was considered as a way of reproducing the
domination of the bourgeoisie by setting academic barriers for lower-class students,
who attended primary schools, and were thus excluded from this classical curriculum;
and the democratisation of the French school system, through changing the primary
and secondary systems from dual social-class-based systems into a more uniform set
of degrees, which was characterised by the development of a new subject: French
literature, whose purpose was the creation of a common culture. According to Cardon-
Quint, the creation of the “Agrégation de lettres modernes” in 1959 represented the
culmination of this evolution, shortly after reforms had opened the secondary schools
to all students regardless of social class or gender. However, by the 1960s this
common curriculum was attacked by the left as continuing to reproduce educational
inequalities for lower-class students. Using life history analysis, the article shows how
teachers addressed these issues and attempted to reform the curriculum and connects
this to how curriculum debates and reforms were part of the larger difficulties of
reducing educational inequalities.
The next article, “Concentration and civilisation: producing the attentive child
in the age of Enlightenment”, by Noah W. Sobe examines an important aspect of
educational thought concerning how best to develop children’s abilities to pay
attention. Classroom management, which depends on keeping the attention of
students, remains central to the dual goals of modern schooling to develop the
individual child and to integrate the individual into a community. Sobe argues that
the Enlightenment marked a significant shift in educational literature and practice.
The article examines eighteenth-century pedagogy manuals, instructional texts for
parents and related documents that became a means for producing the attentive child.
 10 A.R. Sadovnik and S.F. Semel

Through his analysis, Sobe connects the pursuit of attention and concentration to
definitions of “civilised” peoples. Sobe ties this to the essential role that systems of
knowledge play in educational stratification. Finally, he provides a historical lens on
pedagogic practices through which some groups can be labelled as “uneducable” and
others labelled as “educable”.

Educational movements for access and opportunity

The next set of articles examines social and educational movements that have
attempted to expand access and opportunities to children of historically marginalised
groups. As a group, they demonstrate how groups and educational leaders have been
central in the democratisation of educational opportunities and making schooling
more available to more citizens at increasing levels of schooling. Once thought of as
a privilege in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, beginning in the twentieth
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century schooling increasingly became seen as a right of citizenship, first at the

secondary level and later at the higher, tertiary or post-secondary education levels. In
“La Franc-maçonnerie et le droit à l’instruction: de l’Unité italienne jusqu’au début
du XXème siècle” (Freemasonry and the right to an education: the case of Italy from
unification to the beginnings of the twentieth century), Gianfranco Bandini examines
how Italy has handled issues of educational inequality and increased access. He argues
that at the point of unification illiteracy was a critical problem, especially in several
regions of the South. He outlines how during the first years of government a unitary
system of education became implemented. The article examines how the problem of
education of the masses, starting from the basic elements of literacy, was related to
freemasonry, which had a continuing role in the state and in political and cultural life.
Bandini demonstrates the contribution of masonic thought and the importance of the
compulsory education law, inspired by the principle of equal access to education. He
argues that because education was free of charge and because of the expansion of
schooling, compulsory schooling improved the condition of the population, and set
the foundation for the expansion of industrial development beginning in the twentieth
century.
The next article in this section, “Educating the people: Cours d’adultes and social
stratification in France, 1830–1870”, by Steven E. Rowe examines the development
and social effects of adult education classes in France during the nineteenth century.
These classes began before the formation of France’s national education system and
became part of the expansion of primary schooling for the working class, or more gener-
ally for the masses. Supported by the French state beginning in the 1830s as part of
France’s first major reforms of primary schooling (of which adult education classes
were seen as a part), educational reformers, such as France’s education minister in the
1830s Francois Guizot, saw these state-supported classes for adults as a way of provid-
ing social stability, particularly in urban centres where the working class was rapidly
expanding. Educational reformers thought these classes would encourage workers to
develop moral and responsible behaviours, as well as keep them sober and off the streets.
Rowe argues that adult education classes were thought to be critical in ensuring the
social order in France during a century of continual upheaval, and critical to the repro-
duction of the social hierarchy. Rowe’s examination of the curriculum, pedagogical
practices and participation in these adult education courses provides a more complex
analysis of this one-dimensional conclusion of the effects of adult education on social
stratification in nineteenth-century France. He argues that writing instruction in these
 Paedagogica Historica 11

classes often challenged social hierarchies in France at this time, particularly hierarchy
based on social class. Furthermore, he argues that adult education in nineteenth-century
France was often connected to challenging these unequal arrangements. Rowe
concludes that although adult education classes from the 1830s to the 1860s in France
were sometimes part of reproducing the status quo, they were also part of workers’
empowerment, with the potential to challenge existing social inequalities. Rowe’s arti-
cle illustrates one of the basic principles of critical educational theory that the dialectic
of schooling is its capacity to both reproduce the social structure, while simultaneously
providing the critical capacity for citizens to challenge it.33
In “James Bryant Conant and equality of educational opportunity” Wayne J.
Urban chronicles the life and work of James Bryant Conant, one of the most important
figures in American education during the mid-twentieth century. President of Harvard
University for close to two decades, Conant was appointed high commissioner for
education in Germany after the Second World War. He also served the Educational
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Policies Commission from the 1930s to the 1950s, where he interacted with elemen-
tary and secondary school leaders and became aware of their social, political and
educational concerns and values. Finally, Conant completed two studies of American
education in the 1950s and 1960s, the first on the American high school and the
second on teacher education. Urban’s article examines Conant’s notion of equality of
opportunity and its effects on his educational practice, at Harvard, in Germany, and in
studying high schools and teacher education programmes. He argues that Conant’s
educational ideas were meritocratic, rather than aristocratic, a view that Urban consid-
ers antithetical to his educational philosophy. The article describes and evaluates
Conant’s meritocratic views and frames them within the larger debates about
American education in the twentieth century. Urban concludes by arguing that Conant
is neither a “Cold War manipulator of society”, as revisionist historians such as Joel
Spring argued, nor a democratic-liberal advocate of realistic educational strategies, as
Diane Ravitch, a critic of revisionism, maintained.

The effects of democratisation movements: access to higher education

Efforts at democratisation during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
were aimed primarily at the primary and secondary levels in industrialising countries
such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Australasia. Nonetheless,
the movement to provide access to post-secondary and university education for
working class and low income students has its roots in this period as well. Although
widespread access to higher education would not exist until the 1960s, the expansion
of higher education began much earlier. In “Extending the educational franchise: the
social contract of Australia’s public universities, 1850–1890” Julia Horne and Geof-
frey Sherington examine the expansion of higher educational access during this
period. They argue that the concept of the “public university” was not unique to North
America for throughout the Pacific the settler societies of the Australia and New
Zealand were creating public universities from 1850 – a decade before the Morrill
Act, which provided the land grants for many public universities in the US. This arti-
cle explores questions of social stratification, meritocracy, social class and gender

33S. Aronowitz and H. Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); H. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in
Education (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1983).
 12 A.R. Sadovnik and S.F. Semel

with a strong focus on the interaction between universities and schools. It discusses
the establishment of Australasian public universities during three periods. In the first,
Australian universities were pioneers of the new idea of the “University” in the British
Empire, shifting from colleges associated with religious denominations to become
secular institutions in urban settings. Their mission was to serve “public interests”
through the production of a male meritocracy of political leaders and professionals
admitted through examinations and supported by scholarships. At this stage, the
students were socially and religiously diverse. The second period occurred in New
Zealand as part of a process of developing both secondary schools and universities.
As with the Australian universities examinations still created a meritocracy with
students coming from lower middle-class backgrounds and unlike them began to
admit women. The final period came in the first decade of the twentieth century with
public school systems broadened to include state secondary schools for both males
and females. According to the authors, the Australasian public university was
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regarded as model of a public education system with state examination boards.

Universities founded during this time were all portrayed as democratic universities for
the masses. In effect, the new and the older universities became even more merito-
cratic with scholarships and other assistance designed to provide access to capable
students, including those from working-class backgrounds, to attend university.
In the final article, “Brewing bachelors: the history of the University of Newark”,
Harold S. Wechsler chronicles the history of the University of Newark, now Rutgers
University-Newark, the site of ISCHE 30, from its inception as the New Jersey Law
School in 1908 to its merger with Rutgers University in New Brunswick in 1946.
Wechsler analyses the role of progressive reformers such as Richard Currier, John
Cotton Dana and Frank Kingdom in the founding of the law school, the Dana College
of Arts and Sciences and their subsequent merger with Rutgers University, originally
a private colonial college, which became Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
in 1945. Wechsler chronicles one of what has been termed a “streetcar” college,
whose mission was to provide access to higher education for working-class students.
Located in industrial cities such as Newark, these colleges were part of the American
tradition of access, opportunity and meritocracy through higher education.
The history of higher education in the United States has involved the progressive
opening of access and opportunity to students from historically underrepresented
groups, including low-income students, women, immigrants and students of colour.
At the same time, as higher education opportunities have expanded, the system of
higher education in the US has become more stratified, with affluent students more
likely to attend elite private colleges and public research universities, and historically
underrepresented groups attending less elite state colleges and community colleges.
Throughout its history, Rutgers-Newark has attempted to balance the tensions
between equity and excellence in order to provide meritocratic access to generations
of first-generation college students. Wechsler’s article examines the history of the
university from its inception 100 years ago as the New Jersey Law School to its
merger with Rutgers in 1946. At present it is an 11,000-student research university
that is part of Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey, and has been for 13 years
running named the most diverse research campus in the United States, by US News
and World Report. This article was the first presented in the conference’s closing
keynote symposium, which examined the tensions between equity and excellence, the
role of the urban research university, the effects of the 1967 Newark riots, the tensions
 Paedagogica Historica 13

between town and gown, the effects of student diversity, power and privilege in
academe, and the maintenance of student diversity at a research university.
As a whole, the articles in this special issue illuminate the role of education as a
means of reproducing and/or reducing inequality. Through historical and sociological
analyses they demonstrate that the role of schools has been complicated, often
reproducing existing inequalities through a system that corresponded to the dominant
groups in societies, but often simultaneously responding to demands for greater access
and opportunities for students from less privileged groups based on social class, race,
gender and ethnicity. They illustrate how, despite the best intentions of educational
reformers to reduce inequalities, schools more often than not contribute to their
maintenance. However, they also demonstrate that over the past three centuries
educational reforms have resulted in the expansion of opportunity to these groups and
how, although an “imperfect panacea”,34 schooling remains an essential part of
democratisation and the reduction of social inequalities.
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Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Tara Davidson, the conference administrator, who handled all of the
administrative duties related to the conference and to the selection of articles for this special
issue; and Diane Hill, the Director of Campus and Community Relations at Rutgers-Newark,
who ensured that all campus-related issues were handled effectively. We also want to thank
Frank Simon and Ian Grosvenor, whose input into this issue and comments on the articles were
invaluable. Finally, we would like to thank all of the contributors to this issue for their excellent
articles and for their clear and concise abstracts for the ISCHE abstract book, which we have
relied on and paraphrased liberally for this introduction.

Notes on contributors
Alan R. Sadovnik is professor of education, sociology and public affairs and co-director of the
Institute on Education Law and Policy and Newark Schools Research Collaborative at Rutgers
University, Newark, USA. His publications include Equity and Excellence in Higher Education
(1995); Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein (1995); and Sociology of
Education: A Critical Reader (2007); “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What
Happened to Progressive Education (1999, with Susan F. Semel); Founding Mothers and
Others: Women Educational Leaders During the Progressive Era (2002, with Susan F. Semel)
and No Child Left Behind and the Reduction of the Achievement Gap: Sociological Perspec-
tives on Federal Educational Policy (2008, with George Bornstedt, Jennifer O’Day and
Kathryn Borman).

Susan F. Semel is professor of education at the City College of New York and the CUNY
Graduate Center, USA. Her publications include The Dalton School: The Transformation of a
Progressive School (1992), “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What Happened to
Progressive Education (1999, with Alan R. Sadovnik) and Founding Mothers and Others:
Women Educational Leaders During the Progressive Era (2002, with Alan R. Sadovnik). She
is the co-editor (with Alan R. Sadovnik) of the History of Schools and Schooling Series at Peter
Lang Publishing, the Urban Education Series at Palgrave Macmillan and The Global School
House Series at Greenwood Press.

34H.J. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1995).
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