What is the relationship between learning and enjoyment? A schoolroom at Crunchem Hall in the film Matilda displays a sign warning ‘If you are having fun you are not learning’. In contrast, one of the slogans of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is ‘Share and enjoy’. Does that mean we've got something to look forward to? Or is the place of enjoyment becoming more complex as our subjective experience of pleasure at learning is drawn into the equation as a necessary function of what it is to attain knowledge? Perhaps we are being recruited into a kind of psychoanalytically structured regime of truth in which we are subject to a senseless superegoic imperative to enjoy. I enjoy learning, but I wonder if I am now obeying a command to learn and then feeling increasingly anxious that my students should enjoy their work.

Education is changing fast, and it sometimes seems as if the transformation in our relation to knowledge under capitalism is speeding up. This transformation is twofold. First, there is a bureaucratization of education institutions. This is proceeding apace in secondary education under ‘New Labour’ in Britain with the enforcement of Standard Attainment Tests (SATs). Not only does this bureaucratization mean that as much energy is put into assessment and recordkeeping as into instruction, with an increased administrative load on teachers, but the competition between schools that SATs-based league tables produces is also reflected in the strategies that individual schools and school students adopt.