Work‐experience as a Contradictory Practice

Abstract

Radical educationalists have analysed work‐experience as an activity which provides poor quality and unreflected experiences for school students and serves to ‘mystify capitalist relations of production’. Using data gathered from a case‐study which examines the experiences of a group of students who had recently returned from a week in a place of work, this paper suggests that such a view may be misleading. Furthermore, the experiences of students in this study suggests that work placements may constitute the site of an activity through which the validity of capitalist social relations of production and the labour process may be challenged.