Brave New World? Aspects of Office Skills Training in a College of Further Education [1]

One of the main concerns of the sociology of education has been the analysis of the part played by schooling in the transmitting and maintaining of social inequalities. Given this potentially broad, comprehensive framework the focus of sociological attention has remained surprisingly narrow. The experience of girls and women has been prone to neglect and has not been fully incorporated into social theory that purports to explain the process of schooling. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of female students on full‐time secretarial courses in a college of further education in the south‐west of England. Student behaviour in the classroom could broadly be described as ‘conformist’ in that there is no overt challenge to teacher control. Interview data are used to expose the creative activity beneath superficial appearances. The paper concludes with a plea for a more systematic cartography of educational terrain that would include such neglected features of classroom life as conformity.