I recall having a dispute, all very mid-Surrey and polite, around the issue of the importance of teachers for their pupil’s future accomplishment. It was with two teachers, both very experienced and I suspect very good at their jobs. They each insisted that teachers play a vital role in upward social mobility, while I dissented. I agreed that teachers can and do have a profound effect on individual pupils, sometimes boosting them towards further study and success. But, I added, ‘the evidence is’ – there’s that telling phrase again – that it is equality of condition not equality of opportunity that matters most for social mobility. In other words, parental qualifications, jobs and salaries are critical predicters of the accomplishments of their offspring. In vain did I cite Bukodi and Goldthorpe’s study.
Experiential knowledge has to be contextualised. The problem is that although everybody – understandably, inevitably and rightly – has ‘lay’ views about how things are and why, they are surprisingly often wrong; and whereas people are aware that physicists and chemists know stuff they don’t, they are only to ready to assume that the knowledge acquired by sociologists is on a par with their own. This is a special challenge for sociologists teaching practitioners in fields like teaching or medicine, or students who’ve inherited parental views or mature students with ready-made world views.