ABSTRACT
A growing body of literature has developed to examine the contradictions between education, society and the economy. But what have received attention until now are the consequences these contradictions have for the social construction of youth itself. The extension of youth as a life stage upward in age, after all, has been closely tied to the expansion of post-secondary education and the promotion of education for social mobility. In the post-Second World War period, this same set of factors led to the expansion of post-secondary education, again initially for middle-class students in Europe and North America, and then increasingly for students from all class backgrounds and regions. The protests in the Philippines are one of a wave of student uprisings that have swept through global higher education in the wake of the financial crisis. The mainstream of the post-global financial crisis student protests centered on defending a politics of aspiration and social mobility, there were exceptions, counter-trends and alternative discourses.
