Against the closing of educational thought: Open concepts and educational research

This chapter explores the relationship between ‘open systems’ and ‘open concepts’ in the context of educational policy and the research that sociologists of education engage in to analyse and inform it. Education should, it is argued, be seen as an open system where factors that include – but are certainly not limited to – teacher quality, curriculum design, and the social backgrounds of students in the classroom are inevitably variable and can be seen to have interdependent yet not entirely predictable influences on students' learning opportunities and outcomes. This chapter contrasts this ‘openness’ in education with a review of some recent policy initiatives that attempt to conceptualise education more narrowly as a closed system subject to improvement through the implementation of prescribed practices and curricula. It seeks to expose some of the problematic assumptions of these closed conceptions of educational practice and, by drawing specifically on some distinct but replicable features of Basil Bernstein's sociology of education, to chart a way back to a more open future for educational thinking.