Making the Difference to Sociology of Education: Reflections on family-school and gender relations

In the context of the 1970s, the focus of critical theorists was on education and cultural and social reproduction. Emphasis had shifted from a family-education link to a school-economy link, placing the family as a subsidiary institution in the framing of social inequality. Published in the early 1980s, Making the Difference (Connell et al ., 1982) was a timely and much needed intervention in bringing back into focus the realities of the lived experience of young people, and providing sophisticated theorizing around class and gender relations within and between the family and the school. Social class and gender relations, Connell et al . argued, could be found within the dynamics of family, school, and industrial life simultaneously. Twenty years later, we are reaping the benefits of their analysis in terms of understanding the hegemonizing influences of the school--the many subtle and indirect ways that schools produce (rather than reproduce) class and gendered identities, at the same time recognising the increasing dissonance of gender values within class formations.