ABSTRACT
Education, unlike modern work, has been much less directly shaped by capitalist forces of production. It has long been an arena of intense philosophical, religious and familial influence. Economic interests, though important, have more typically been constrained by those more primary cultural interests. The subjugation of work to economic reason appears now to have been normatively accepted. For education, that subjugation is a project still under way. Education, most particularly post-primary education, had historically predominantly served the interests of elites. Its historical governance under elite powers obscured the role of economic power through the guise of more overt cultural power and privilege. Education in Western countries was brought predominantly under public and professional governance during the mid-twentieth century. In that course, it was necessarily brought into close relationship with the state and public funds, but education retained effective plural interests in its institutions and socio-cultural roles. Programmes of reform and expansion of education in various national contexts during the twentieth century, most especially in primary and secondary education, saw a broad democratization of participation and distribution of many of the benefits of education. Expansion of higher education followed. Education’s classical raison d’être for human development and flourishing, certainly for elites, generally ensured its maintenance of plural interests and curricula in the course of the twentieth century expansions. Nonetheless, education now shares with the institutions of work a
subjectification to concerted neo-liberal political efforts for systemic reform. In the European model countries, and elsewhere, the macroeconomic policy agenda in pursuit of a knowledge-based economy of continual innovation contains an immense project for education institutions. That project intends the reform and re-orientation of education toward a seemingly singular politicaleconomic rationale. Education in all its forms, especially at post-compulsory levels of higher education and lifelong learning, and all its personnel, are targeted. Education has always been associated with economic interests. As state involvement in public education vastly increased in the twentieth century,
governments encouraged the involvement of industry in education, especially in contributing to the skills formation of secondary and technical school students. These collaborations appeared of mutual benefit and readily involved educationists and trade unionists in their promotion. Education institutions had maintained degrees of autonomy and pursuit of varied curricula for most students. However, the character and intensity of the new association of education with economic interests appear distant from the memory of relative collaboration. It may more accurately be described as an economic incursion with colonialist intent. Education is to be re-imagined as a subsystem of economy. Educational and social critics have protested against these developments that have been underway in recent decades. The subjugation of education to economic rationalizations and elite interests is a project that portends farreaching social and cultural consequences that contradict and undermine other cherished social aspirations in European societies. Nonetheless, that project appears strengthened in the early twenty-first century. The institutional reform of education takes a two-fold trajectory. The first,
more readily visible, is for the generation of higher levels of skills across a mass population and production of advanced techno-scientific research and knowledge. The second is for the rationalization, or “modernization” in policy language (European Commission 1998), of education in subordinate correspondence with the “scientific episteme” of neo-liberal governance. These developments, and the critical concerns they raise, are the subject of the discussions below. This chapter, in tracing the rise of a powerful economic conception of education in relation to the liberalized knowledge-based economy that is now generally in course, endeavours to inquire into the effects of economic reason and techno-scientific knowledge legitimating the ideological project of reform. As part of that effort, the discussion opens with a longer view in an exploration of the social institutional context of education in modern society more generally. That discussion focuses on two key features of the context of recent decades: that of the modern expansion of education and social-democratic notions of education for all, and the current feature of politicized economic interests in education, growth and wealth. The fields of education especially in mind are those of higher education and lifelong learning.
THE MODERN EXPANSION OF EDUCATION
