ABSTRACT
This reordering of higher education, and its relationship to a variety of educational and social processes, is still a neglected area of the history of higher education and of relationships between knowledge and its professional embodiments, on the one hand, and wider social changes and processes on the other hand. There is no social history of the social sciences, and their position in higher education has been viewed largely in relation to the history of ideas and ideologues and founding fathers, of curriculum content and subject methodologies. As in the last chapter, problems in the history of education need to be seen as shared with and illuminated by other historical processes. Education rightly relates not only to social science and social science organizations, but also to the structure of university departments and the management of academic learning. The history of American school curricula relates to that of expectations of and by the changed pattern of higher education in the late nineteenth century, and in turn to the social groups for which higher education catered, and the social and economic structures to which it contributed and from which pressures were felt. The history of school curricula in England relates similarly to elements in and surrounding higher education, but ones which were differently ordered and differently felt, contained different emphases and had different outcomes. The visible differences between schooling in England and the United States, therefore, include different statuses of subjects, different levels of student choice, different approaches to curriculum content, structure and sequence, and different structures of assessment, guidance and rewards. Less visible are such areas as differences in channels and expectations of accountability. The nature, extent and availability of higher education, and the changing relationship of the whole educational system to the labour market, are major ingredients of the history of education at any level. The establishment and strengthening of the separate social sciences is a case study in these complexities.
