ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I argue that social change has far-reaching implications for education and learning, focusing on two central elements: (1) what young people need to learn in order to thrive in late modernity, and the meanings and uses of education that they are shaping; and (2) the emergence of new mass education systems designed to meet the needs of emerging economies. Young people’s response to their changing world has involved new approaches to learning and diverse uses of both formal and informal education and learning. They expect to navigate their way in a context in which institutional pathways and structures are not able to provide certainty or predictability. This context of weakened institutional processes poses significant challenges for the design of a new generation of educational systems by governments. This is especially the case because many of the basic assumptions and structures on which the previous mass education sector (secondary education) is based have become increasingly less relevant in a post-industrial era. In most Western countries, education systems underwent a significant transformation in
the early 1950s, with the institutionalization of mass secondary education designed to serve the needs of industrially based economies. While different countries established distinctive secondary education systems, the options open to young people and the expectations of them were relatively similar within educational ‘streams’: technically based education or leaving school to go directly into the workforce prepared young people to work in ‘manual’ occupations and academically focused education, and engagement in further education at a university prepared young people for ‘professional’ or ‘white collar’ occupations. Educational policy was informed by the principle of structuring learning around: age-based groupings, normative expectations of young people at each age level, a deficit notion of ‘student’ and the strict separation of school and learning from the community, families and workplaces. The way young people were seen was based on an approach that focused on institutional control and normative behavioural expectations, supported by the rise of expert knowledge and the emerging discipline of developmental psychology. The nature and meaning of education and learning are fundamentally implicated in
the social changes that have occurred in Western countries over the past three decades.
The pace of change has meant that new skills need to be learned frequently and new circumstances regularly adapted to. Digital technologies have enhanced our capacity to access information and have created the expectation that individuals will learn how to use successive waves of new applications and forms of new technologies in personal life and in work settings. At the same time, the widespread emergence of flexible and precarious employment has meant that individuals need to be able to regularly learn new skills and take up new options in order to survive. This requirement for perpetual learning has meant that all stages of life require education and educating and all areas of life are learning opportunities. The idea of a ‘totally pedagogised society’ (Bernstein 2001), is taken for granted by young people as they actively seek to learn from their experiences, regardless of the setting (Stokes and Wyn 2007). For young people, formal education is only one site of learning and only one, sometimes marginal, part in a repertoire of learning approaches and sites. This means that in one sense young people themselves have begun to transform the contemporary meaning and uses of formal education and its relation to informal learning. At the same time, governments have a significant stake in shaping education systems to
ensure national competitiveness in a context where knowledge is a crucial resource as well as a commodity and an industry. Indeed, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) refers to contemporary ‘globalising knowledge economies’ that are connected locally and globally (OECD 2007a: 11). OECD reports, which inform the direction that educational policies in many Western countries take, promote the significance of higher education as the new mass education sector that will ensure economic development for nations, promote social cohesion and deliver prosperity to individuals (OECD 2007b). The completion of secondary education and participation in further or higher education have thus become normative for young people in late modernity. This development has put pressure on governments to transform education systems so that they are effective in meeting the needs of ‘knowledge economies’ (OECD 2007c). The completion of secondary education is normative and it is expected that young people will participate in post-compulsory education: tertiary education is the new mass education sector. Responding to the changing nature of social, economic and political life in the post-
industrial world, educational policies are focused on the production of young people who have the appropriate skills and dispositions to serve post-industrial economies. In late modernity, national investment in the education and training of young people is seen as a key to developing human and social capital as a basis for sustaining economic growth and competitiveness as well as for ensuring social inclusion and active citizenship. The transformation of education systems is based on the assumption that knowledgebased economies require workers with high levels of post-secondary and increasingly tertiary education who will return regularly to formal education throughout their working lives in order to stay competitive within labour markets that continuously require new sets of skills. Social groups that do not use education effectively will be marginalized from participation in economic activity (OECD 2007b). Increasing rates of participation in secondary education (OECD 2007b), combined
with high levels of immigration mean increased social diversity in school populations that include significant numbers of young adults. Yet, despite widespread recognition of the extent of social change, many elements of contemporary secondary school education, including ideas about young people and learning, date back to the 1950s. In general, secondary education has been more expanded than transformed, retaining older models
and assumptions about the nature of learners and the form that education should take, and the new mass sector (tertiary education) has been grafted onto secondary education. In countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the UK, where traditionally school leaving was the major option for after compulsory schooling at the age of 15, the expansion of post-compulsory education has mainly involved an increase in participation by older students, leaving the educational frameworks and assumptions that have been inherited from an industrial era intact. The challenge of educating young people in the period of late modernity and of con-
structing new education systems that meet their needs is thrown into clearer focus when we look at the nature of social change and how this has impacted on young people’s lives. The following section describes key conceptual approaches that have contributed to an understanding of the impact of social change on both young people and education systems. In the final section, I turn to the issue of educating young people to live well in late modernity.
Many researchers draw on the work of Beck and Lau (2005), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) and Bauman (2001) to provide a conceptual framework for considering the characteristics of late modernity and the impact of social change on society. These theorists argue that late modernity is characterized by the fragmentation of traditions and a weakening of social institutions, creating a situation where people’s identity has become a task rather than a given: ‘Needing to become what one is is the hallmark of modern living’ and the sources of collective identity that were characteristic of industrial societies have begun to lose their relevance (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: xv). Individuals have come to bear increasing responsibility for negotiating an unpredictable world. Despite the fact that social structures and processes that create inequality, marginalization and risk continue to have an impact on people’s lives, these processes appear to be less visible to individuals. These ideas about the nature of late modernity and in particular the process of individualization, risk society and the disintegration of traditional institutions have influenced many youth researchers (e.g. Leccardi and Ruspini 2006; Furlong and Cartmel 2007; Henderson et al. 2007 and White and Wyn 2008). There is a convergence of opinion that the social, political and economic processes of late modernity have meant:
