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The institution of education in the Western world is as old as Greek antiquity. Greek city-states maintained academies within which youth were taught the arts and sciences of the times and prepared both physically and mentally for leadership roles in the society and economy of their generation. Sociologist Emile Durkheim founded the modern concept of education as the transmission of culture in his writings on the institution at the turn of the nineteenth century.

It is the postindustrial, postmodern era of the second half of the twentieth century that has transformed education. The institution, at all levels from preschool through graduate professional schools, has increased greatly in importance even while it has declined in clarity. Enlargement of participation in schooling in the United States began to accelerate immediately after World War II. The G.I. Bill, which paid for schooling for millions of war veterans, multiplied tremendously the scale of enrollment in both colleges and vocational-technical schools. Concurrently, high school enrollments swelled as youths who previously would have gone directly from grade 8 or 9 into the work force now continued into high school. With the advent of the Baby Boom, elementary and secondary school facilities had to be expanded enormously between 1950 and 1970.

Two kinds of forces impelled this growth. First, technology was changing rapidly in scope and complexity, requiring a more highly educated work force to operate and control it. This included electronic communications, air transport, and new modes of manufacturing, for example. Second, the central societal question concerning schooling has long been that of who shall be educated. When economic production was fueled principally by the availability of abundant unskilled labor, education was of importance primarily to the upper classes and to those seeking to enter the learned professions and scientific or technical occupations. As recently as 1940 in the United States, and in most nations of the West, only about one-third of each generation's youths attended high school and even fewer graduated. By 1955, that proportion had expanded to three-fourths. The enlargement of education also affected systems other than schools: government and industry created training systems that together were larger than all of public schooling combined; radio, recording, television, and later the Internet provided educational alternatives that were vast in both scope and capabilities.

As educational involvement expands, its nature and operations become less understandable. Public assumptions about what is entailed do not keep pace with changes in the institution; at the same time, cultural and technological changes occur so swiftly that the institution often lags far behind the imperatives cross-pressuring it to modernize and adapt. This increasing lack of clarity, as well as frustrations generated by the change process, have made education a fertile field for social scientific analysis and for applied contributions to its redesign or articulation in line with the needs of the time.

In the years from 1910 to 1930, a subgroup of sociologists who called themselves educational sociologists emerged. They worked in government agencies, school districts, college and university administrations, but above all in departments of social foundations that had been established in normal schools for teachers and then state teachers' colleges and eventually in land-grant universities. These departments brought together professors of philosophy, history, sociology, economics, government, and anthropology. The great American philosopher John Dewey was such a professor. Foundations' faculty often collaborated closely with faculty in social studies, where they helped to shape curricula in high school and junior high school history and geography.

The educational sociologists never became heroes in the annals of academic sociology because they practiced their profession as opposed to building the academic discipline. Their mission was to use the knowledge of their field in educational administration and planning and to help prepare teachers by providing knowledge about the family, community, religion, and other contextual institutions. They go unsung because they stepped out of the mainstream of the American Sociological Association; because they did not seek to build a science of sociology; and because they partook of the moral zeal inherent in the culture of schoolteachers everywhere. This zeal did not appear to academic sociologists to fit neatly into the cool, dry distance they regarded as appropriate to scientific inquiry as the field came into the 1950s.

They also get overlooked in the history of the profession of education itself because that profession has been dominated by psychologists and psychological theories and research for a century. Schools of education and training-system managers alike draw most heavily from the ranks of psychologists. The American Psychological Association and most large faculty departments of psychology include specialists in learning theory, child and adolescent development, educational psychology and psychometrics, counseling and clinical psychology, and cognitive psychology, for example, and each of these specialties in turn provides conceptual and empirical resources to branches of professional education. There are at least twenty psychologists who focus on education, in one sector or another, for every one sociologist of education.

In the 1930s, a sociology of education emerged from the work of the Committee on Human Development within the School of Education at the University of Chicago. The work of William Lloyd Warner (Warner and Havighurst 1945), Allison Davis (1947), and later Robert Havighurst, among others, showed how sociological inquiry could have substantial practical utility for education. They broke through the boundaries between the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and sociology, and collaborated very fruitfully with educators. These sociologists built on the philosophical thought of John Dewey, William Cooley, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lester Ward. The Committee became a world-class center for thought, empirical inquiry, and practical experimentation in education.

New York University's School of Education put similar importance on applied social research in that period. There, public school teachers and administrators became applied sociologists and vice versa, as the quest for solutions to educational problems became increasingly scientific. Dan Dodson was one of the leaders of this group. He catalogued and described many of the practical consequences of the applications of that time (Dodson 1952). Just six years later, Orville G. Brim (1958) opened the current era of the sociology of education, just as the door to educational sociology was closing.

Sociologists at Johns Hopkins University, under initiatives begun by James S. Coleman, Peter H. Rossi, Edward L. McDill, and James McPartland, created a research and development center called the Center for the Study of School Organization, which worked in the mid-1960s on kindergarten-through-grade-12 educational questions. Over the past thirty-five years, the name of the center has changed repeatedly as different requirements were imposed by contracts with the U.S. Department of Education, but the mission has remained very constant. The Center focuses on solutions to inequality of educational opportunity among racial and ethnic groups in the United States, and on organizational and curricular strategies for remedying those inequalities and closing the achievement gap between ethnic minorities and white students and between low-income and higher-income students. As a result of close collaboration between the Center and the Johns Hopkins Department of Sociology, a cadre of sociologists have earned their Ph.D.s by doing research and development work at the Center.

The career of Dr. Lee G. Burchinal also exemplifies the tradition of involvement in education by American sociologists. Burchinal joined the department of sociology at Iowa State University in 1956 as a traditional academician and teacher. In 1962, he accepted a position with a federal social research program and became a grants manager. With the advent of the War on Poverty in 1964, Burchinal became deputy director of the Division of Research in the U.S. Office of Education (the precursor to the current Department of Education). . .

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