The ‘‘Collective Mind’’ at Work: A Decade in the Life of U.S. Sociology of Education

The following is a shortened version of a plenary lecture by Steven Brint presented at the inaugural meeting of the Portuguese Sociology of Education Society in Lisbon, January 23, 2009. You have asked me to speak about the current state of the sociology of education in the United States. The temptation is great in such an assignment to applaud the subdiscipline for following one’s own cherished positions or to lament its failure to do so. I will (for the most part) resist these temptations and talk instead about what a study of the ‘‘collective mind’’ of the field tells us about the current interests (and blind spots) of the field, the controversies that animate it, and the extent to which other possible discourses on education in society would be as scientifically productive. In using the term collective mind, I do not have in mind a Hegelian notion of the Spirit realizing itself in history, or indeed any integrated image of the collective mind. Instead, I have a pluralistic and fragmented image, based on counting each specific piece of work in the field. One can count the pieces of work to form an image of the whole. As this reference to counting suggests, my approach will be quantitative. I have read and coded the past 10 years of work in Sociology of Education, the leading U.S. journal in the subdiscipline, and will present a portrait of the collective mind of the field based on a content analysis of that body of work. Although I anticipate that you will find the results of this exercise illuminating, it is important to emphasize that my methodology has clear limitations. Many other journals publish work by U.S. sociologists of education, including the American Educational Research Journal and the American Journal of Education, to mention just two of the more prominent. Leading journals in sociology, such as the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology, also occasionally publish work by sociologists of education. And, of course, my methodology leaves out book publication altogether. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that the collective mind of U.S. sociology of education is only one part of a much larger collective mind defined by the intellectual field of education studies. This larger collective mind can be conceived as the aggregate of all journals and book publication related to education and educational systems from all countries in the world and on all topics, from cognition to pedagogy to classroom and school organization. Many of the silences in the collective mind of U.S. sociology of education can be understood as efforts to claim niche space within the complex ecology of the broader intellectual field. As I will show, the niche space claimed by U.S. sociology of education focuses on studies of educational achievement and educational attainment as conditioned by social inequality, family and student behaviors, and school organization. Although it is indirectly influenced by contemporary policy issues, Sociology of Education typically does not engage policy directly, because other journals do. It is relatively silent on comparisons of educational systems, because other journals and books examine educational systems from a comparative perspective. Given this intellectual division of labor, we can perhaps feel comforted that important issues neglected by the sociology of education are not entirely neglected by the larger collective mind.