ABSTRACT
To reflect the advance of the ‘market’, educational libraries will soon be full of books on ‘marketing in education’: in the same way, the past twenty years have witnessed a growth of books on evaluation in the wake of accountability debates. Already, at the beginning of 1992 in the UK, two universities and one polytechnic are running Masters courses in business administration, directly targeted at the educational market. (It will be noted that even the language we use is redolent with the subliminal messages we wish to convey.)
In my childhood, shops had customers, solicitors clients, British Railways (sic) passengers and schools pupils. Of course, distance lends simplicity and enchantment to days when rationing was seen as a fair way to share out resources amid post-war shortages and when consumerism was but a gleam in J.Walter Thompson’s eye.
