Introduction

In 1970 Basil Bernstein wrote that ‘education cannot compensate for society’. This chapter argues that the main reason why is that we have an educational system that is enmeshed in, and increasingly driven by, the economy, rather than one that is capable of redressing economic inequalities. It is a system that both mirrors and reproduces the hierarchical class relationships in wider society. The chapter will draw on statistical data, showing, for example, the percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) going to wages versus profits. It explores the relationships between the economy and education, with a focus on processes of privatisation and growing business influences, and asks how the working classes are constructed within a new, neoliberal status quo that valorises exchange value over use value and economistic ends over educational ones. It also looks back to the more optimistic period in which Jackson and Marsden were writing and compares and contrasts two very different economies and societies, alongside images and representations of the working classes both then and now.

In Education and the Working Class Jackson and Marsden argued:

We are no nearer now to putting aside earlier attempts to select and reject in order to rear an elite than we were in the 1960s. In fact, in a period when the elite appear to be unassailable, it all seems even more difficult. Rather, our current political elite is engaged in a restructuring of the educational system, a retraditionalising of the curriculum and the reintroduction of policies, including the reintroduction of grammar schools, that work to mark out the working classes as educational losers.

A growing devaluation of the working classes in English society

This is not an easy time to write about the working classes, although perhaps there never was an easy time.