Towards a Sociology of Educational ‘Ideal’: Powerful Knowledge, Knowledge of the Powerful, and Beyond

Abstract

This paper examines how the Durkheimian approach to the ‘ideal’ delineates a possible way of straddling the dilemma between the normative orientation of ‘powerful knowledge’ accounts and the critical orientation of ‘knowledge of the powerful’ accounts. It argues that the normative aims are embedded in the fabrics of the sociological description with which the Durkheimian notion of ‘elementary form’ is concerned. To see where this enterprise can lead, this paper turns to the sociology of education of Bourdieu and Bernstein. Both draw on Durkheim’s writings on primitive classifications in education and society, working towards uncovering the regularities of the world of knowledge classifications. Keeping in line with Bourdieu and Bernstein, this paper argues that one has to make the same refusal to the advocates of an abstract ideal of educational knowledge that is dissociated from its social conditions of historical realization in pedagogic contexts, and to the advocates of a cynical relativism of ideal that rejects any necessities socially established.

Keywords:

• Basil Bernstein
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Emile Durkheim
• ideal
• powerful knowledge
• knowledge of the powerful

Acknowledgement

This paper is primarily based on my Ph.D. thesis which looks at Bernstein’s sociology of ‘boundary’ and its theoretical relationship to Durkheimian tradition. I need to thank Weihe Xie, who is the supervision of my Ph.D. thesis. I need also thank Michael Young, Johan Muller for tireless reading and discussion of this and other manuscripts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

The funding for this study was provided by National Project for Education Sciences Planning (Project No.: EAA230469), Ministry of Education, China.

Notes

1 At the 1977 Conference of Association Francaise des Enseignants de Francais, Bourdieu argued that ‘[o]ne of the principles of sociology is to challenge that kind of negative functionalism. Social mechanisms are not the product of Machiavellian intention. They are much more intelligent than the most intelligent of the dominant agents’ (Bourdieu 1993, 71).

2 It was not until the end of the Middle Ages that intellectuals and academics shifted from ‘intellectual workers’ in the working world, to ‘hereditary aristocracies’ integrated into privileged groups (Le Goff 1993, 61, 124). Against this background, a significant evolution occurred: ‘knowledge became a possession and a treasure, an instrument of power and no longer a disinterested end in itself’ (126).

3 ‘[P]edagogic work is that much closer to explicit pedagogy to the extent that it resorts to a greater degree of verbalization and classificatory conceptualization’ (Bourdieu and Passerson 1977, 48–9)