In the broadest perspective, education refers to all efforts to impart knowledge and shape values; hence, it has essentially the same meaning as socialization. However, when sociologists speak of education, they generally use a more specific meaning: the deliberate process, outside the family, by which societies transmit knowledge, values, and norms to prepare young people for adult roles (and, to a lesser extent, prepare adults for new roles). This process acquires institutional status when these activities make instruction the central defining purpose, are differentiated from other social realms, and involve defined roles of teacher and learner (Clark 1968). Schools exemplify this type of institutionalization.

The central insight of the sociology of education is that schools are socially embedded institutions that are crucially shaped by their social environment and crucially shape it. The field encompasses both micro- and macro-sociological concerns in diverse subfields such as stratification...