Education for All?

The Political Quarterly, 1994

London Review of Education, 2009

London Review of Education, 2022

Histoire de l'éducation, 2020

London Review of Education

I have had a close and long-standing relationship with the IOE (Institute of Education), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK). In order to understand why and how for many years the IOE became my ‘second home’, I infuse this article with a combination of critical academic and political points and a detailed sense of personal history. In the process, I trace out the development of a number of my arguments about the relationship between knowledge, power and education. I connect this to the role of the IOE in this development, both as an institution and with regard to people with whom I had close contacts over the years. Among the people I particularly focus on is Geoff Whitty, who was a key figure in all of this.

British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2008

Irish Primary Education in the Early Nineteenth Century, 2013

Educação & Formação

This article explores how in the postwar years education was constructed as the main way in which a meritocratic society could be created in Britain (but also elsewhere). The concept of meritocracy, that is to say of a just society in which equality of opportunities and education for all, would ostensibly provide the basis with which labor market allocation would be realized. As this article argues, nothing in education operates outside the wider political economy, which in capitalism is inherently unequal as it is underpinned by the existence of antagonistically opposed social classes, separated from each other by unequal access to the means of production. As such, the circulation in the British social system that occurred in the early postwar years was not the result of decreasing inequalities within the class structure but rather the product of the occupational restructuring that fostered high rates of structural mobility. Consequently, “ascription” rather than “ability” continue...

Intimate Accounts of Education Policy Research, 2021