ABSTRACT
One of the major criticisms that sociologists of education have made of social democratic education policy is its tendency to neglect the significance of the content of education and concentrate on increasing access to elite styles of education. The agenda of Labour's Great Debate reflected an acceptance by the party leadership in parliament of the claim that the sort of progressive education that had developed in a period of relative professional autonomy in the 1950s had produced at least a decline in the rate of increase of educational standards and was ill-suited to the needs of British industry. Many observers have regarded all these developments as part of the same generalized tendency to functionalize education for a new phase of capitalism. We saw that Holloway and Picciotto insisted that their argument allowed for the fact that the outcomes of any crisis could not be read off from the requirements of capital but were contingent upon a process of struggle.
