What Post‐modernists Forget: cultural capital and official knowledge

Abstract

The conservative alliance has attempted to transform what education is for. It aims at providing the educational conditions believed necessary both for increasing international competitiveness, profit, and discipline and for returning us to a romanticized past of the ‘ideal’ home, family, and school. Through an examination of the rightist agenda(s) and its influence on what knowledge is considered legitimate at universities, I raise questions about the tendencies among many post‐modernists in education to ignore the political economy of high‐status knowledge. While cautioning against reductive analyses, I suggest important connections between the dominance of technical/administrative knowledge and the industrial project.