Leaps of Faith: Shifting Currents in Critical Sociology of Education

The sociology of education is fraught with noncommunicating paradigms, particularly between "critical" and "mainstream" approaches. This article outlines and explains this paradigm split and the resulting shifts of critical theories from "reproduction" to "resistance" to "post-Marxist" versions, then explains how these approaches differ from the mainstream and what their internal dynamic is. The article argues that the "immanentism"-the practice of asserting a necessary movement of history that confers subordinate groups with objective interest in radical change-of critical approaches is the source of theoretical difference and that the trajectory of critical theories reflects shifting conceptions of how this change will occur.