The sociology of education has a recognizable history from the appearance of Lester Ward's Dynamic Sociology in 18 8 3, with its reaction against Spencer's pessimistic view of social statics and its final chapter2 on education as the essential motive force of progress3 [73]. But this early identification of the study of educational institutions with human betterment was to prove a doubtful blessing for the disciplined development of the field. It was joined in the i8c)o's by educational reformers inspired by pragmatism, and Dewey's The School and Society [48 1 ], which appeared in i 8~~, was followed by an unusually diffuse and heterogeneous literature styling itself &dquo;educational sociology&dquo;.A great part of this literature had little relevance to the study of education as a social institution as expounded by Durkheim in the early years of the present century [Sz], and still less relevance to the sociology of the educational institutions of contemporary industrial societies. The pragmatism of William James, C. S. Peirce and John Dewey introduced normative considerations into the very approach to the study of education and vitiated much of the work which was, in any case, generally on an insignificant scale and methodologically weak.But by 1930 the application of sociology to education had become a well-organized movement. Text-books began to appear in America before the First World War, and, from 1916, to embody the term &dquo;educational sociology&dquo; in their titles. A department of educational sociology was established at Columbia in 1916, with David Snedden as its chairman, and by the mid-twenties nearly zoo institutions of higher education were offering courses in the subject. On this basis a National Society for the Study of Educational Sociology was organized in y2 and the Journal of Educational Sociology was launched in 1928. These latter developments owed a great deal to the energy of E. George Payne. His collection of Readings in Educational Sociology [16], published in i ~ 3 z, offers a fair illustration of the range of views held within the &dquo;educational sociology&dquo; movement by such men as C. L. Robbins, C. C. Peters [41], who was perhaps the strongest proponent of the view that educational sociology was a branch of education rather than sociology, Snedden [22, 44, 451 and Charles Ellwood [8]. The first rumblings of protest at the inspiration, tenor and technique of much of the work styling itself &dquo;educational sociology&dquo; also appear here in the contribution by Robert Angell.Only in Germany after the First World War were there more than the beginnings of a comparable movement. Here, too, ideological considerations-in this case, left-wing political rather than pragmatist-progressive-dominated the Science. 'I'he two authors assume equal responsibility for this issue of Current Sociology, and wish to record their gratitude to Miss Melville Currell, B.A., for the resourcefulness and care with which she performed the onerous task of checking the references cited.2 Actually an ab...
