First published in 1975, this book offers a critique of some of the new perspectives in the sociology of education. This is achieved through a case study of a progressive child centred school.
The book suggests that a liberal approach to education fails to appreciate how thoroughly a complex, stratified industrial society penetrates the school. It argues that the practice of progressive education may be a modern form of conservativism and an effective form of social control both in the narrow sense of achieving classroom discipline and in the wider sense of contributing to the promotion of a static social order. It cautions against naïve utopian solutions which see the freedom and self-development of the child as an individualized process, unrelated to a social context which may undermine the ideals of freedom and spontaneous self-development.
