Global education policy discourse is based on an unshakable belief that more and improved skills will promote economic prosperity, global competitiveness and social inclusion. In England, the Further Education and Skills sector (FES) has emerged as the vehicle to deliver these skills. However, the portrayal of FES as focusing primarily on…

Travel has become ubiquitous for most social groups as holidaying abroad has become ever cheaper and ecumene. This paper considers how travel can be understood as part of family practices around children's educations and futures. Drawing on Kaufmann's concept of motility, we examine how spatial mobility might become a form of cultural capital to…

Low-fee private schools (LFPS) educate some of India's poorest children. They have grown dramatically over the last decade in India and have changed the country's educational landscape (Srivastava, 2016), yet there is little conclusive evidence that the schools significantly help their students. Our study aims to better understand why and how the…

Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article discusses folk notions of globalization and examines perceptual and attitudinal responses offered by educationally underprivileged working-class female senior citizens, arguably the most neglected and marginalized social group in contemporary Korea. The present study stresses the importance of…

This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and…

Focusing on vocational learning in the English further education (FE) sector and situating it within its social, political and historical context, this paper provides an overview of English attitudes towards the vocational and its subordinate status in relation to "academic" education. It outlines the development of FE in England,…

This article addresses the turbulent relationship that British cultural studies scholars have with the concepts of "class" and "tradition" and the problematic status of these key terms within the cultural studies literature. The authors maintain, in part, that these concepts have been deployed within a center-periphery thesis…

Further education (FE) has traditionally been a rather unspectacular activity. Lacking the visibility of schools or the prestige of universities, for the vast majority of its existence FE has had a relatively low profile on the margins of English education. Over recent years this situation has altered significantly and further education has…

The goal of this paper is to understand, by way of a life history of one low-income working-class youth, how globalization impacts the working class in a developing nation. The concept of globalization and the method of life history seem diametrically opposed. Globalization is an idea about large social forces that impact the economic and material…

In January of 2001, the TimberWest Corporation permanently closed its Youbou sawmill facility near Duncan, British Columbia, Canada laying off 220 workers. On the surface, the Youbou mill closure reinforced a pervasive sense that workers and communities in the province are increasingly vulnerable to an ever more globally integrated and footloose…

The General Election is over. People now know that the policies for lifelong learning will remain as before: to promote competitiveness through skills and access to educational opportunities for groups previously denied them. The list of potential beneficiaries is a long one: (1) working class people in general (especially those with basic skills…

Social class has strongly influenced the development of social policies about adult education. Present policy discourses are a result of weakening working-class interests.

This article focuses on global trends in education policy during the current epoch of imperializing, militaristic, neo-liberal global capital. It is based on an analysis that global capital, in the form of dominant US multinational capital, together with its client governments, uses the repressive and ideological apparatuses of the state to…