Concepts of education–a comparison between school policies of a tracking and a non-tracking school system

Analysis of different forms of tracking reveal that they correlate with differences of pupils’ SES and reproduce inequalities. Against this background, this paper examines the concepts of education and the ‘virtual social identities’–or visions what the individual pupil should be–in school policy. This is done by analysing and comparing extracts from school acts and additional documents from the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where all pupils are segregated into vocational and academic tracks, and from the Canadian province of British Columbia, where there is no tracking during compulsory schooling. The reconstruction of these concepts is anchored in Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge. This comparative examination reveals different concepts of education and pupils: naturally given abilities that can hardly be influenced by pedagogy and an interactive development of ability through education. These understandings go along with different expectations of teachers’ actions.