Education has been cast as a cause of and saviour from the long depression that has adicted the West since the 1970s. Governments have criticized those who teach, what has been taught and the achievement levels of students, whether it be in schools, colleges or universities. Reform has begot reform, with each phase used to assert and reassert education's instrumental purpose in helping generate a creative dynamism in societies such as the USA and UK. Two decades into the twenty-first century, this goal remains elusive. Since the 1970s, in the USA and Britain, a significant expansion of post-compulsory education provision has accompanied the narrowing of the prevailing view of its purpose. Prior to its massification, for example, university provided the vehicle for the education and professional development of a civic, commercial and political elite. Its public purpose, whether funded privately or by the state, was implicit if not always openly expressed. The rapid state-supported expansion of the sector strengthened its claim to be a public good - a benefit to society that extends beyond the individual recipient of the education itself. But, paradoxically, widened participation has witnessed its erosion. For many critics, the main cause of this erosion has been education's marketization.But the argument presented here suggests that this narrative, adopted albeit for different purposes by governments and critics alike, does less than justice to the centrality of the state in the transformation of education in contemporary society. The two nations most closely identified with the ideologies of the market - the USA and Britain - are used to illustrate how the state has used the sector to mitigate and contain the effects of an unprecedentedly long depression. Rather than its subordination to the exigencies of market relations, education has assumed a significant role in sustaining a stagnant social and economic order. © 2017 D. Hayes.
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