Educational Reproduction Today

Abstract

If freedom is nothing but ‘the power of living as we choose’, reasoned Epictetus, then‘the educated only are free’. Two millennia later, the   reflexivity theorists would add that because more and more citizens of   the affluent West are being educated to ever higher levels, then that   freedom – that compulsory power to choose how to live – is diffusing   throughout the population and battering down the barriers of old.   A contentious claim for sure, but it has to be acknowledged that the   restructuring of the education system the proponents of reflexivity take   as their point of departure is well documented. As Western societies   have increasingly de-industrialized and turned to knowledge and service   provision as the principal activity of their economies, coupled with   the birth of a globally hegemonic neo-liberal discourse that emphasizes   the cultivation of human capital, post-compulsory and tertiary education   systems across the world have indeed begun to mushroom and   engulf larger tracts of their populations (OECD, 2008). The supposed   corollary is that further and higher education, and the new experiences   and options these deliver into lifeworlds, are no longer the exclusive   preserve of an elite few. Instead, across the nations of Europe, North   America and the Antipodes particularly, they are no less than mass phenomena   (Halsey, 2000; Trow, 2005). In the UK this has been evi denced   in the successive waves of expansion and increased student numbers   ever since the Robbins Report in 1963, with the transformation of   polytechnics into universities in 1992 and the drive for‘ widening   participation’ by the New Labour government being significant recent developments (Archer et al., 2003).