Abstract
Raewyn Connell, an eminent Australian sociologist, has worked for more than four decades to unravel the forces shaping society and education, with a particular eye on inequities. In her most recent work her focus has shifted to knowledge itself; she poses two fundamental questions which we apply, in this book, to the issue of young people being forced to stay in school longer:
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What does this add to what we already know?
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What does this ask us to do that we are not now doing, as knowledge workers?1
Any question about compulsory schooling seems a no-brainer. More schooling is better for school students. It will increase their level of human capital, make them more employable, more likely to have a more optimistic, rewarding, and fulfilling employment career. But what if it leads to a more precarious future for young people? This suggestion is of course a heresy, a contradiction of the perceived wisdom that the more years of schooling you get, the better off you will be. Yet the research reported in this book suggests that many young people in schools in South-Western Sydney (SWS) have been adversely affected by the imposition of the unchallenged and unanimous decision to get them to stay at school longer. Why is this the case? The answer to this question—discussed in complex detail in the following chapters—sheds new light on schooling in the age of neoliberal globalization.
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Notes
R. Connell, “Using Southern Theory: Decolonizing Social Thought in Theory, Research and Application,” Planning Theory 13, no. 2 (2014): 210–223.
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G. Bearup, “What Prospects Do Burnie’s Young Unemployed Really Have?” The Weekend Australian Magazine, 2014.
R. Connell, Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change (Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2011).
R. Connell, “The Neoliberal Cascade and Education: An Essay on the Market Agenda and Its Consequences,” Critical Studies in Education 54, no. 2 (2013): 99–112; B. Lingard, W. Martino, and G. Rezai-Rashti, “Testing Regimes, Accountabilities and Education Policy: Commensurate Global and National Developments,” Journal of Education Policy 28, no. 5 (2013): 539–556; S. L. Robertson, “‘Placing’ Teachers in Global Governance Agendas,” Comparative Education Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 584–607.
Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society; M. Mills and B. Pini, “Punishing Kids: The Rise of the ‘Boot Camp,’” International Journal of Inclusive Education 19, no. 3 (2014): 270–284; Smyth and McInerney, Becoming Educated; Standing, The Precariat.
R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
R. W. Connell, Gender, Short Introductions (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press and Blackwell, 2002).
R. Miles, Racism after “Race Relations” (London: Routledge, 1993).
S. Westwood, Power and the Social (New York: Routledge, 2001).
C. Reid and H. Young, “The New Compulsory Schooling Age Policy in NSW, Australia: Ethnicity, Ability and Gender Considerations,” Journal of Education Policy 27, no. 3 (2012): 795–814.
C. Reid, “Public Diversity; Private Disadvantage: Schooling and Ethnicity,” in Controversies in Education: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Policy and Practice, ed. H. Proctor, P. Brownlee, and P. Freebody (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2015), 91–104.
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© 2016 Carol Reid and Katherine Watson
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Reid, C., Watson, K. (2016). Introduction: Compelling Educational Success for Disadvantaged Students?. In: Compulsory Schooling in Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518132_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518132_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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