Across Europe, governments have cut educational spending and remodelled education systems. Some of this has been done in the name of austerity. Much of the rest is an attempt to ‘economise’ education, introducing private sector interests, market competition and business-inspired management regimes.
Governments in these ways try to replace one educational order – which allowed a space for critical education and a measure of egalitarianism – with another. It is a project that has in many countries been obstructed or explicitly resisted. This book is about the conflicts that have arisen in the process. Its chapters cover Italy, Spain, France and Greece – countries where high levels of youth unemployment and precarity exacerbate the tensions that have grown up around education’s restructuring. An introductory chapter sets English education in this wider European context, and a final chapter relates education to the segmented and sharply polarised labour markets of Europe.
Contributors – Rosa Cañadell, Guy Dreux, Nico Hirtt, Rosalind Innes, Ken Jones, Anna Traianou.
Education, Economy and Society 