JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. Cultural knowledge is selected by educational authorities, organized into national school curricula, and transmitted to children in mass school systems. Despite national variation in political, economic, or social structures, primary school curricula are very similar throughout the world. This similarity is not predicted by existing theories. We argue that mass educational curricula are closely linked to the expansion of the nation-state system and the increasing dominance of standardized models of mass education. The nation-state and mass education -promoted by intellectuals and nationbuilders to achieve national progress and social equality -have generated strikingly similar national educational systems and school curricula. C lassical theorists in the sociology of knowledge such as Marx, Durkheim, Mannheim, and Scheler sought to establish that the content and validity of ideas are ultimately tied to the social and economic interests in society (Mannheim 1936; Durkheim [1912] 1954; for reviews, see Coser 1968; Kuklick 1983; Eisenstadt 1988). Subsequent research has focused on how sociohistorical conditions influence the production, validation, and justification of different types of knowledge. Few scholars have examined an important corollary: how knowledge is selected, organized, and transmitted by socialforces (see Wuthnow 1987). This neglect was forcefully stated by British sociologists of education (Young 1971). Sociologists, they argued, should treat "the knowledge ('transmitted' in education) as neither absolute, nor arbitrary, but as 'available sets of meanings' which in any context do not merely 'emerge' but are collectively 'given"' (Young 1971, p. 3). "How a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control. From this point of view, differences within and change in the organization, transmission and evaluation of educational knowledge should be a major area of sociological interest" (Bernstein 1971, p. 47). National educational institutions -which presently enroll about one-fifth of the world's inhabitants (United Nations Educational Social and Cultural Organization 1987) -have become the most important mechanism for organizing and transmitting knowledge to the young. Although sociologists have shown great interest in the expansion, improvement, and equalization of educational opportunity, they have had little to say about the nature and social basis of the formal knowledge transmitted by the...
