The Sociology of Education in Australia in the 1970s

This paper sets the development of the Sociology of Education in the changing Australian social structure, emphasising particularly economic prosperity, the influence of the rapid growth in the 1970s of the tertiary sector, the continuation of a relatively high level of migration, the egalitarian political ideology and the nature of educational administration. During this period many social pressures worked to support the political arithmetic tradition, though less so as the decade progressed. The sub‐discipline does seem by some measures to have become more mature by 1980, but at the very moment when economic stringency has been applied to the education sector.