1 . 1 What are schools for ?

Every parent and teacher needs to ask the question ‘what are schools for?’ They are not, of course, the only institutions with purposes that we should question, but they are a special case. Like families they have a unique role in reproducing human societies and in providing the conditions which enable them to innovate and change. Without schools each generation would have to begin from scratch or – like societies which existed before there were schools – remain largely unchanged for centuries. There are, however, more specific reasons why it is important to ask the question ‘what are schools for?’ today. Since the 1970s, radical educators and many critical sociologists have questioned the role of schools and have seen them in largely negative terms. I shall argue that despite having an element of truth which we should do well not to forget, these critiques are fundamentally misconceived. More recently, John White, the philosopher of education, has offered a critical but explicitly positive answer to the question (White 2007). However, like the negative critiques, by failing to specify what is distinctive about the role of schools, he does not take us very far. I begin this chapter therefore by reviewing these two kinds of answer. I then go on to explore the implications of an alternative approach that locates schools as institutions with the very specific purpose of promoting the acquisition of knowledge. For rather different reasons, the question of knowledge and the role of schools in its acquisition has been neglected by both policy makers and by educational researchers, especially sociologists of education. For the former, a focus on the acquisition of knowledge is at odds with the more instrumental purposes that are increasingly supported by governments. For many educational researchers a focus on knowledge masks the extent to which those with power define what counts as knowledge. However, there is no contradiction, I shall argue, between ideas of democracy and social justice and the idea that schools should promote the acquisition of knowledge.