Human Resources: Students

Abstract

Previous chapters have dealt with the advent of neo liberal ideology in relation to other formerly hegemonic, contested and contesting discourses. They have discussed transformations in curricula and pedagogy in the macro context of wide-ranging Europeanising reforms and traced the latter’s uneven path through the erosion of collective identities and the emergence of a competitive individualism compatible with the knowledge economy. Here we attempt to sketch an outline of how all of this has impacted on contemporary student subjectivities, how they are constructed, disciplined and positioned in a context where economic discourses prevail and citizenship is weak; and how educational systems geared to the exigencies of the knowledge economy contribute to establishing the co-ordinates of a transformed and transforming symbolic framework. Of course, the extent to which any discourse is ‘heard, believed and obeyed’¹ depends on a variety of factors — social, semiotic and cultural — as well as those pertaining to an economy where huge structural differences in sectoral unemployment and real expectations heavily influence credibility levels. These factors, though sufficiently common for us to speak of shared experiences across Europe, also differ according to national circumstance.