A contribution to the critique of worthless education: between critical pedagogy and welfare sociology

ABSTRACT

The article deals with changes in the area of education, especially at the higher level, after the so-called neoliberal turn of the 1980s. In order to explore the transformation of the sphere of education, the Marxian concept of commodification was used, as well as the four-level approach to the mechanisms of social reproduction of inequalities of Göran Theborn. This allows the introduction of the concept of worthless education, which, in turn, takes into account the role of not only the phenomena of education in the contemporary capitalist society, but also – similarly to the proposal of Max Weber – phenomena that are conditioned by and important in terms of education. Thus outlined research area was confronted with the approach of critical pedagogy and welfare sociology, in order to articulate the social consequences of the process of spoiling education. The main aim of the article is, therefore, to critically analyse the changes in the area of education after the neoliberal turn, which through the concept of ‘worthless education’ allows to see the overt and covert consequences of the ongoing transformations on many levels of society (although attention and examples have been focused mainly on the issue of labour).

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• worthless education
• critical pedagogy
• welfare sociology
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments have greatly improved this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).