Three stages in the institutionalization of educational sociology in the U.S.A. are identified, i.e. (1) sociology for teachers, up to the 1910s, (2) sociology for education in the 1920s, and (3) sociology of educational problems, in the 1930s. After the war educational sociology became an established sub-discipline of sociology, called sociology of education, which has roughly three approaches, namely (1) cultural anthropological, (2) social psychological, and (3) historical-in-stitutional. In the 1960s the crisis of education provoked by the explosion in enrolments led to the wider interest of sociologists in education. They analyzed the crisis and cooperated in planning remedies. In the 1970s a “new” critical sociology of education emerged, particularly in Britain, which opposes the functionalism and optimism of the “old” sociology of education.