Lecture from Prof. Andrew Penner: Does education really create equal opportunities for everyone?
WHEN: 9th December 2025 at 5 p.m.
WHERE: Lecture room 21
Debates in the sociology of education often center around the question of whether education is fundamentally an egalitarian or inegalitarian institution. Some educational categories have broadly egalitarian consequences: When societies enroll young people in school, making them students, they mark them as individuals who are worthy of rights. But other educational categories reinforce powerful social categories – including race, gender, and class – and ultimately reproduce social and economic inequality in society. Elite universities and tracking in primary and secondary schools provide not only different educational experiences, but also create merit and inequality by sorting students into categories that are defined by the students who are excluded.
In his lecture, prof. Andrew Penner will seek to reframe these debates by arguing that education should be understood as fundamentally an institution that creates not equality or inequality, but rather as an institution that creates categories. Categories and categorization are unavoidable in contemporary life, and because categories are defined by their boundaries, all categories are necessarily exclusionary and create inequality. Yet not all categories are equally inegalitarian, making it possible to create more egalitarian educational category systems. He will discuss the three competing logics that inform educational categorization – selfactualization, solidarity, and efficiency – and how we might create better educational categories.
About the lecturer: Andrew Penner is Professor of Sociology and the founding director of the Center on Administrative Data Analysis at the University of California, Irvine. Penner's work examines how society creates categories, sorts people into these categories, and the implications of categorization processes for peoples' lives. This work has been funded by a range of foundations and federal agencies; appeared in top general science (Science, PNAS), interdisciplinary (Nature Human Behavior), and disciplinary journals (the American Journal of Sociology); and been cited over 5,000 times. Much of Penner's recent work occurs in research practice partnerships and focuses on building unique administrative data infrastructure to answer pressing questions for educators and policymakers.
The lecture is part of a series of
international guest lectures in the doctoral program, where selected experts present current research topics in the field of theories of society.
Back to list of notificationsPublished: 03. December 2025