especially the labour market and the occupational structure. With
the creation of mass systems of education, initially compulsory,
now post-compulsory/higher, educational stratification articulates
with other, more powerful, forms of stratification which affect most
life chances, including education, mental and physical health and
well-being, housing, leisure, consumption, crime etc. In this sense,
the operation of education systems undermines, in Tomasevski’s
terms, both acceptability (quality and values) and adaptability (to
children’s human rights).
A further issue in this context of ‘universalised reproduction’ is that
education is currently dominated by discursive imperatives of
globalisation, where the ‘needs’ of the economy have become
educationalised, with reference to familiar notions of the
knowledge society or knowledge economy (Lingard, 2000; Lauder
et al, 2006). Here the economic structures of society are viewed,
not through the prism of global capitalism, but through a lens which
abstracts products, operations and modes of
advantage/disadvantage from social structure and social relations,
and privileges education as the sole mechanism of access to, and
instrument for, the distribution of opportunities. Nation states claim
incapacity to influence economic globalisation; instead education is
prioritised as the sole possible state response to the apparently
transcendental nature of globalisation. Thus access to education
has become transformed into human capital development for
social inclusion. Neo-liberal nation state education policies view
education as creating incumbents of the occupational structure, or
as factors of production, and as the main source of national
competitive position and economic growth, not as educating
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