SOCIOLOGY IN SOME OF ITS EDUCATIONAL ASPECTS 1
V. V. BRANFORD, ESQ. Secretary of the Sociological Society, London
The establishment of sociological studies, especially in France, Italy, and America, was one of the outstanding culture advances of the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century. As part of this general movement toward a science of social phe- nomena may be counted the formation of the Sociological Society in Great Britain, in 1903. This country, as J. S. Mill pointed out, is habitually late in perception of, and response to, general move- ments of thought. Sociologically considered, British leadership, long maintained in economic teaching and investigation, has been the undesigned cultural reflex of the contemporary industrial evolution. British emphasis of economic science embodies and expresses the speculative and educational aspects of the industrial revolution. National development of coal fields and iron fields has of necessity its corresponding points of view and modes of thought in university, school, and press. Hence the belief, wide- spread both in popular and scientific circles, that economic science may be made to cover the whole social field with an elastic reser- vation for ethics and religion. This restriction of sociological science has seldom been explicit, but it has to a considerable extent limited the teaching of sociology. Against this national tendency to narrow the sociological field, protests and counter-movements have ceaselessly gone on. Chief among advocates and exponents of the larger sociological interests have been, in science, Spencer ; and in literature and journalism, Ruskin. But in respect of corresponding movements in education only two instances can be noted here, as main sources of impulse toward the formation of the Sociological Society. Needless to say both are extra-academic initiatives. In Edinburgh a broad conception of social science, as
1 Written for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Education.
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