Asian Journal of Applied Sciences (ISSN: 2321 – 0893) Volume 9 – Issue 1, February 2021 Asian Online Journals (www.ajouronline.com) 23 Perspectives in Sociology of Education: Basil Bernstein and Popular Education Ivonaldo Leite Center for Applied Science and Education Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil Email: ivonaldo.leite [AT] gmail.com ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT---- This paper aims to describe some contributions of the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to Popular Education. In this sense, methodologically, it reviews Bernstein's main works and addresses some bases and perspectives of Popular Education. Thus, initially the paper develops an approach on Bernstein's thought and then focuses on Popular Education, taking into account its European and Latin American characterisation. It finds out three contributions in Bernstein's sociology that are important for Popular Education, namely, (1) the theorization about speech codes; (2) the approach on so-called communicative pedagogy; (3) the dimension related to social change. Keywords---- Bernstein, Popular Education, sociology, Latin America, Europe, school, students _________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION Basil Bernstein was one of the leading sociologists in the world, whose pioneering work illuminated our understanding of the relationship among political economy, family, language and schooling. He was born on 1 November 1924 and died on 24 September 2000. Son of a Jewish immigrant family and raised in London’s East End, Bernstein’s career reflected his concern for understanding and eliminating the barriers to upward social mobility, according to Sadovnik (2001). He served as an underage bombardier in Africa in the Second World War and worked in the Stepney settlement boys club for underprivileged Jewish children. He put himself through the London School of Economics by working various menial jobs and earned a degree in sociology. In 1960, Bernstein began graduate work at University College, London, where he completed his Ph.D. in linguistics. He then moved to the Institute of Education, where he stayed for his entire career. Bernstein developed a wide and diverse sociological approach. From his early works on language, communication codes and schooling, to his later works on pedagogic discourse, practice and educational transmissions, he produced a theory of social and educational codes and their effect on social reproduction. Bernstein’ s sociology drew on the essential theoretical orientations in the field - Durkheimian, Weberian, Marxist, and interactionist - and provided the possibility of an important synthesis (Sadovnik, 2001). Sometimes, his work was misunderstood and incorrectly labelled a form of ‘cultural deficit’ theory. I think that’s a big mistake. Bernstein (1961a) emphasized the defence of social justice and stated that he was committed to preventing the wastage of working class educational potential. 2. BERNSTEIN'S APPROACHES Bernstein’s early work discussed social class differences in language and raised important questions about the relationships among the social division of labour, the family and the school, and explored how these relationships affected differences in learning among the social classes. On the other hand, his later work (Bernstein, 1977) began the hard project of connecting power and class relations to the educational processes of the school. In this way, Bernstein’s work connected the societal, institutional, interactional and intrapsychic levels of sociological analysis. Some reproduction theorists, like Bowles and Gintis (1976), have also developed an approach similar to that perspective, but it ’s an overtly deterministic view of schools without describing or explaining what goes on in them. In his early work on language, Bernstein analysed the relationship among public language, authority and shared meanings, as well as began the development of code theory through the introduction of the concepts of restricted and elaborated codes (Bernstein, 1958; 1960; 1961b; 1962a; 1962b). Bernstein’s sociolinguistic code theory was developed into a social theory examining the relationships among social class, family and the reproduction of meaning systems. In this way, code refers to the principles regulating meaning systems. For him, there were social class differences in the communication codes of working class and middle class children, and these differences reflect the class and power relations in the social division of labour, family and schools. Then, he distinguished between the restricted code of the working class and the elaborated code of the middle class. Restricted codes are context dependent and particularistic, whereas elaborated codes are context independent and universalistic. Bernstein’s critics stated that his sociolinguistic theory represented an example of deficit theory, alleging that he was arguing that working class language was deficient (Danzig, 1995). But he rejected this interpretation.