Sociology of Education as a Branch of Sociological Knowledge: Comparative Analysis of the Russian and Foreign Educational Discourse

The article traces the main stages of development of the sociology of education in the West and Russia from inception at the turn of XIX-XX centuries the main theoretical approaches and paradigms till the current state of development of this branch of social science. The authors note that the sociology of education is one of the rapidly developing branches of social science. At the same time, it can be identified problems such as a small number of methodological papers, thematic fragmentation, insufficient theoretical analysis and synthesis, study of pre-school, primary, secondary, vocational training and others. The article notes that in has occurred updating the methodological issues in the sociology of education the last decade and, despite the different assessment of her condition, the researchers agree on the need to find new approaches of theoretical study of the formation, which reflects the process of integration in theory and research methodology of macro processes and everyday life of people. The authors conducted an analysis of scientific publications on this subject, one of whose tasks was to determine the degree of popularity of qualitative and quantitative methods in concrete sociological research education. Despite the presence of a large number of scientific papers devoted to the qualitative methodology of sociological research in general in the Russian research practice retained a preference for the use of quantitative methods of collecting primary information; the status of qualitative methods can be defined as an auxiliary for clarifying, interpreting some aspects of quantitative information