The neoliberal capitalist assault on comprehensive education: ensuring the production of labour power and combating the threat of ‘over-education’
FORUM - ISSN 0963-8253
Volume 66 Number 2 (2024)
The neoliberal capitalist assault on comprehensive education: ensuring the production of labour power and combating the threat of ‘over-education’
Stephen Beresford, Alpesh Maisuria pages 131-139
DOI: 10.3898/forum.2024.66.2.15
Abstract
In this article, we posit a Marxist critique of the way that neoliberal capitalism has thwarted the possibility of comprehensive education. We begin with an explanation of the unique productive capacity of human labour, and the centrality of labour power for capitalism. We go on to show the importance of the education system for continually renewing the conditions and supply of labour power for contributing to the reproduction of the capitalist social order. This provides the basis to argue for the efficacy of the concept of ‘over-education’ to demonstrate how comprehensive education is inherently an anathema to the logic of capitalism and the interests of its ruling class. The final section expresses comprehensive education as a moment of assault to maintain the status quo. Against this assault, we promulgate the necessity for comprehensive education and provoke consideration of this possibility following an incoming Labour government at the next general election, however unlikely this seems given the alignment of the Labour Party with capitalist interests after the 1980s. Irrespective of the result of politics, rekindling of the comprehensive ideal will come from workingclass collectives, and the struggle for socialist transformation, both within and without the state. It is only through this that the comprehensive ideal becomes feasible in reality.
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To cite this article
Stephen Beresford, Alpesh Maisuria (2024) The neoliberal capitalist assault on comprehensive education: ensuring the production of labour power and combating the threat of ‘over-education’, FORUM, 66(2), 131-139. https://doi.org/10.3898/forum.2024.66.2.15