Over the past several decades, numerous arguments have been made advancing the notion that the failings of the public education system in the United States have placed the nation's national security or economic prosperity at risk. This article will examine some of these "crises" and explore how arguments claiming that the shortcomings of…

In the era of knowledge capitalism, universities are consistently regarded as potential "engines" of capital accumulation and state prosperity. This article will argue that as regards their teaching and research functions--but with specific attention to the research function--universities can be seen to be enacting a type of neoliberal…

The influence of globalization on institutions of higher education is one of the leading topics in educational policy today. As the nexus of innovation increasingly moves from labor-intensive "smokestack industries" to "mind work," education is becoming critical to policy discussions on economic growth. Tracing current discourse on the…

This article examines the World Bank's discourse of neoliberalism with a view to understanding how this informs and sustains the Bank's policies and practices in particularly gendered ways. "Neoliberalism" is, here, a discursive structure that constitutes a powerful and pervasive contemporary model of economic development, resting on assumptions…

Knowledge economy policies are currently very powerful drivers of change in contemporary university approaches to research. They typically orientate universities to a national innovation system which both positions knowledge as the key factor of economic growth and sees the main purpose of knowledge as contributing to such growth. In this article,…

In a paper presented in July 2003 to Labour's National Policy Forum, the main policy-making body in the United Kingdom, Liam Byrne, a research associate of the Social Market Foundation, forecast the major problems that will face government in Britain in 2020. As reported in the "Guardian" (9 August 2003): "British national…

English schools have always been involved with the economy of their time, but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that schooling for the poor became primarily an adjunct of industry, rather than of the Church. This industrial style of education, preparation for the production line, still informs the school system, though Britain is no…