POSTMODERN TRENDS IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

The contemporary school environment is surrounded by an emerging cultural environment characterized by the proliferation through media of commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles.  A process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis is slowly eating into African societies. There is the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations. There is the collapse of cultural hierarchies. There is the decline of the university. There are societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase. There is a sense of ‘placelessness’ or generalized substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates through the functioning and effects of the new miniaturized technologies. These new waves impact on the school and on learning processes. They therefore call for a sociologically well grounded knowledge by educators of what postmodern imposes and demands from actors and agents in the school.