Partly because of this in-built positivism, the consensus about the value of functionalism broke down and the sociology of education took a ‘new direction’ that adopted a radically different stance. The main expression of this new approach was Knowledge and Control edited by Michael F.D. Young and published in 1971.1 What united most of the papers in this book was a recognition of the persistent failure of functionalism to question the positivist assumptions on which much of the sociological research in education was based. In order to overcome this deficiency, the ‘new direction’ in the sociology of education endorsed a preference for an ‘interpretive’ approach derived largely from the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz2 and the sociology of knowledge developed by Berger and Luckman.3 This ‘New Sociology’ argued that society is not an ‘independent system’ maintained through the
relationship of factors external to its members.