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these approaches purport to achieve and what they are unable to achieve, and how they relate to each other. Second, if we are clearer about the different kinds of educational study and the different purposes for which it is undertaken it might be clearer where these are best located and what role they might play in the initial and continuing education of practitioners. It might even lead, in England for example, to a re-examination of current views about the irrelevance of education’s core disciplines (philosophy, etc.) to the initial education of teachers, though I will not be taking any bets on it. Third, for all these reasons, it is important that education shakes off the low status that is repeatedly lamented in the course of this book. Greater conceptual clarity about the diversity of approaches that educational study involves, and what one can expect (and what one can not expect) from these, will not by itself transform the situation – but it will help. The status of education in the academy may also be helped by greater attention to how findings are written up. Although not the worst offenders among scholarly communities – as recent incursions on my part into the realm of literary theory have shown – educationalists are often their own worst enemies when it comes to coating their observations with jargon, or failing to use necessary technical language in ways which suggest the presence of at least a hint of empathy for lay readers of their works. This volume contains some excellent scholarly writing; dense, rigorous and clear in its definitions of the heavy Bernsteinian terminology which permeates its pages. It also contains a small amount of less helpful writing, some of which could have easily been sorted out by a copy editor providing assistance to writers whose first language is clearly not English, but some of which does not have this excuse. When ‘social affairs’ are said to ‘transpire’ within a ‘plenum’, and ‘practices’ are said to form ‘fields, complexes, textures’, without any explanation of the specific meanings of these terms, one cannot help thinking that the main point – that learning takes place in different ways in different contexts – is being gift-wrapped to make it sound grander than it is, and unnecessarily obscured into the bargain. But this is a minor blemish in a book which makes the reader think about fundamental issues, not just those to do with the ‘production of educational knowledge’ but also the eternal questions underpinning this production about the aims of education.