Shooting the Rapids of 21st-Century Intellectual Turmoil.

This paper presents the author's opinion on articles about educational sociology in the 2001 issue of Sociology of Education. Carolyn Riehl addresses the multifaceted interdisciplinary conversation around the study of education that marks intellectual life in general at the beginning of the 21st century. Riehl suggests that a critical question for sociology of education now concerns how the field will be defined. If we incorporate too many other disciplinary and substantive perspectives we lose our focus. If we become too skeptical of the theory and scientific-systematic data gathering we risk solipsism. Charles E. Bidwell takes as his central problematic the question of why the technology and structure of schools has remained so static over the century. Bidwell makes no mention of arguments for the critical importance of principals in the effective-schools literature and good deal of the literature on school change both analytical and empirical. In his article Paul W. Kingston argues that the concept of cultural capital has been applied so loosely that it is losing its usefulness. It is completely appropriate to ask whether the culture that schools demand is either arbitrary or exclusionary.