Education and the Crunch: Gloom and Opportunities

Abstract

Now that we are all, as Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson put it in 2007, “Waking up to the incredible economic, political and social illusions of the Blair era”, what would be distinctive about a Marxist assessment of the period for education and training in England? Possibly three things: firstly, an examination of the role of the state, seen as changing from one capitalist state form to another, as clearly exemplified in education and training. Second, particular attention is paid to social class, which we see as also in a process of transformation, a transformation to which schools, colleges, and universities have contributed. Lastly, there is an emphasis on the totality of the area under review—the whole of institutionalised education from infant to postgraduate schools, and including training on and off the job and in and out of employment. This contrasts with the typically empirical academic approach, which tends to subdivide and specialise so that different sectors of education (primary, secondary, etc.) and their particular “problems” are treated from different disciplinary perspectives (of psychology, sociology, etc.) separately from others.