ABSTRACT
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in the United Kingdom one of her rallying cries was to ‘roll back the state’, and in justification of this policy she frequently cited the size of the bureaucracy needed to run the affairs of the Welfare State and pointed to the fact that this is an expensive operation, the cost of which came from the pockets of the taxpayers. Certainly, the civil service has been viewed by many as a large bureaucratic institution, so that it could justifiably be claimed that the modern state is a bureaucracy. There are certain aspects of bureaucracy that have been transferred to the educational system which is, after all, a part of the state bureaucracy, and in this chapter these will be explained. The first part of the chapter examines the concept of bureaucracy itself, and the remainder of the chapter examines some aspects of bureaucracy that have been introduced into the education system, especially in the education of adults, in recent years, such as literacy, modularisation and standardisation. Finally, there is a brief evaluative comment on these current trends.
