ABSTRACT
This stencilled paper is a revised version of an article which first appeared in Working Papers in Cultural Studies No. 10, On Ideology, 1977. Written in late 1976 the article was centrally concerned with explaining the genesis and constituents of what was then publicly conceived of, and defined, as a ‘crisis’ in education. We attempted to explain the political and ideological nature of that ‘crisis’, against explanations which, on the one hand simply identified the debates on education as a smokescreen for the massive cuts in educational expenditure, or on the other hand identified the ‘crisis’ as the political projection of a unitary and monolithic state apparatus simply responding to the ‘needs’ of capitalist production. That is to say, we took as our object ideologies about education – which we approached historically and politically.
