- Title
- My life with the sociology of education
- Creator
- Whitty, Geoff
- Relation
- Leaders in the Sociology of Education: Intellectual Self-Portraits p. 287-300
- Relation
- Leaders in Educational Studies 9
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-717-7_19
- Publisher
- Sense
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Soon after I was appointed as Director of the Institute of Education, University of London in 2000, someone referred to me as 'Geoff Whitty, who used to be a sociologist of education'. As the post of Director at IOE is roughly equivalent to President and Provost combined in a US higher education institution such as Teachers College Columbia, I have to admit that there were times during my ten-year tenure as Director when I was distracted from sociology of education by administrative and financial preoccupations. However. I have always seen my primary academic and professional identity as a sociologist and continue to do so, although. strictly speaking I only studied sociology officially as a postgraduate student, having studied history and political theory as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1960s. Yet it was a course at Cambridge on 'Theories of the Modern State' that introduced me in some depth to the works of the 'founding fathers' of sociology and from then on I never looked back. Formally, I had the words sociology in my job title only when I succeeded Basil Bernstein - of whom more later - in the role of Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education in 1992. My earlier posts were in Education more broadly or urban education in particular. but even in that context that I found sociological perspectives invaluable. indeed indispensable. as indeed I personally found them in school teaching (see preface to Whitty. 1985).
- Subject
- sociology; education; teaching
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1342723
- Identifier
- uon:29025
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789463007153
- Language
- eng
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