ABSTRACT
Liquid modernity is primarily a consumer society in which everything, including educational experiences and outcomes, are potentially things – commodities – to be desired, consumed and quickly abandoned. Consuming education is also part of the consumerist vocation in that a successful educational performance ultimately rests on the selection of the most desired educational services offered by the market, which are accessed by the deployment of consumer skills individually obtained. In solid modernity one of the central ‘adiaphorizing’ influences of educational institutions was the successful patterning of the behaviour of people at the bottom end of the class system in an effort to get poorer people to conform. In both solid and liquid modernity educational institutions are adiaphoric vehicles. Education institutions are used for such diverse purposes as generating the state’s preferred sexual identity and identifying vulnerable individuals who are at risk of radicalisation and involvement in terrorism.
