The Changing Relations between Education Professionals, the State and Citizen Consumers in Europe: Re-Thinking Restructuring as Capitalisation

Abstract

This article focuses on research about welfare state restructuring in education and its implications for the teaching profession. Several things are described and discussed. However, amongst the most important are pan-European developments in the social relations of production in education over the past 50 years with respect to the socialisation, habituation and commercialisation of education labour, and a suggested lowering of general standards of public education and increasing class differences in the amount and quality of education consumed by citizens. The idea expressed about this is that neo-liberal restructuring is leading to the creation of apparatuses through which education is objectified for economic accumulation through an outsourcing of functions that were formerly carried out within first domestic and voluntary, and then state arrangements to capitalist enterprises. This is part of a successive privatisation of education services for processes of capitalisation. It consists of an updating of the moral and legal determination of education services by the prevailing standards of market capitalism and an abdication of responsibility for the plight of negatively affected individuals, who, nevertheless, in some intriguing way still often support the system of transformation in question.

The marginalisation of social justice as a form of knowledge in teacher education in England

“…This is not insignificant at the present time, when the teacher is being increasingly exposed to influences from governments and other organizations outside the academic world (Beach, 2008(Beach, , 2011.…”

“…According to Apple (2001, 195) such knowledge is important in determining whether students in and after teacher-training will be able to understand the ideological and political restructuring that is going on around them and deconstruct the forces involved, in terms of their impact on working conditions and the content and meaning of professional labour (Beach 2005(Beach , 2008Beach and Bagley 2012). It provides, in other words, a tool for analysing trends and thinking critically and strategically in order to better serve pupils in school (Apple 2001;Darling-Hammond 2006;Zeichner 2010).…”

Changes in teacher education in Sweden in the neo-liberal education age: Toward an occupation in itself or a profession for itself?

“…They are divided into objectives that are grouped into the subsets of Knowledge and Understanding, Skills and Abilities, Values and Attitudes and there is no longer any reference to specialised content about the sociological, political, philosophical, economic and ideological characteristics of teaching as a profession or education as a professional field, nor of learning as a socially, culturally and historically embedded practice. This is absent in descriptions of examination requirements in the current NEOs and LEDs, even though this kind of content is necessary for teachers according to international researchers such as Apple (2001), Darling-Hammond (2006), Lawn andFurlong (2009) andZeichner (2010), if they are to grasp the development of their conditions of labour and employment or change their practices with scientifically founded professional assurance (Beach andBagley 2012, 2013).…”

“…It has also been noted in England and Wales by, amongst others, Lauder et al (2009) and Lawn and Furlong (2009), in Europe more broadly in, for instance, Goodson and Lindblad (2011: eds. ) and Beach (2008), and in the USA by Apple (2001), Sleeter (2008) and Zeichner (2010). In all cases, developments have been noted to have accompanied a broader neo-liberal transformation of the public sector.…”

“…1 However, in the last two decades the State has been radically transformed in a neo-liberal direction, including extensive decentralisation and marketisation of the public sector, with this bringing about significant changes in relation to education policy and the management and organisation of schools and teachers' work (Beach 2008;Lundahl et al 2013). These changes have also been extensively researched in this (Allan 2014;Lundström and Holm 2011) and other journals (Carlgren and Klette 2008;Solbrekke and Englund 2014) and the evidence of their existence and effects is compelling.…”