Internal Goods in the Sociology of Education: Skills, Habits, Virtues and the Problem of Power

• In Event: 1211 - The Culture of Schooling

Abstract

Sociologists of education have tended to emphasize external goods over internal goods, that is, those goods that can be gained as a result of a certain practice rather than the goods intrinsic to the practice itself. The authors argue that such obfuscation is the result of a particular kind of procedural liberalism and an emphasis on skills over what John Dewey would call habits and what Alasdair MacIntyre would call virtues. The authors combine their separate ethnographic research in schools to show how sociologists of education can move beyond a nearly exclusive focus on stratification outcomes without giving up a theoretical and normative concern about power and inequality.

Authors

• Jeffrey Guhin, University of California-Los Angeles

• Joseph Klett, University of California-Santa Cruz