2つのシンポジウム「教育社会学の性格」を顧みて

抄録

In 1948 the Japan Society of Educational Sociology was organized by educationists who had little knowledge of sociology, and sociologists whose primary concerns were in sociological problems of education. By the next year, leading universities were offering courses in the field of educational sociology in departments of education exclusively. From these circumstances, the marginal status of educational sociology was derived.
In the first symposium on “What is educational sociology?” held in 1954 at Nagoya University, much light was thrown on the status of this new college discipline and its vague features in relation to a variety of perspectives. In the course of discussion, strong emphasis was placed upon a sociological approach to education, which was customarily referred to as the position of “sociology of education” in contrast with the “educational sociology.” And it became the main stream of its subsequent development.
The second symposium on the same subject, which was held in Tokyo in 1977, revealed to the audience the fact that considerable convergence had developed since the Nagoya meeting two decades earlier, regarding the scope of the discipline. Moreover, a new element was introduced by some debaters, who recommended that an “interdisciplinary approach” should be introduced to the field. Others, while acknowledging the value of the related social sciences, cautioned that the core of the field must continue to emphasize principally the sociology of education.
It was noted, however, that in the United States, for example, the sociologists of education were none other than sociologists, and none of them had ever conceived that “sociology of education” must be an independent discipline separate from sociology in general. To some, this posture could imply that an independent organization for educational sociologists in Japan, such as JSES, might be unnecessary.
Although the writer had expected the debaters to refer to the “new” sociology of education, associated with symbolic-interactionism and phenomenological sociology, none of them examined their theoretical perspectives.