Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons

Guy Standing
Paperback, 512 pages
9780241688182

"A brilliant analysis of how alongside the dangers of fake news and fake politics we risk fake education..." - John McDonnell

"Human Capital provides both the diagnosis and cure to those trying to school us towards competitiveness, individualism, and greed." - Danny Dorling

Does the education system make better people? Why are so many – teachers and students alike – stressed and dissatisfied? Do we need to revive real education?

Ideally, education is about the pursuit of truth, beauty and morality. But in the last few decades, a perilous fixation with human capital – skills, knowledge and aptitudes required for the labour market – has trampled over curricula, schools and universities. Rather than learning how to think critically about the world, from cradle to grave students are trained to be more effective workers, to make more money, and to serve an hegemonic ideology. Teachers and researchers are pressed to serve those goals.

In this concluding book in his series on the commons, Guy Standing shows us how education – intrinsically a common public good – has been enclosed, privatised, financialised and corrupted, turned into an instrument of societal control, not human emancipation, weakening democracy, not strengthening it. Human Capital charts how the education industry largely serves commercial interests, not its teachers and students, and considers how to revive its lost values, to save society for the common good.

Contents
1. Education Unhinged: "The Horror'
2. The Education Commons in History
3. Enclosure of the Education Commons
4. The Privatization of Education
5. The Commodification of Education
6. The Smirk of Finance: The One-Eyed Leading the Blinded?
7. Education and the Precariot
8. The Ultimate Horror: Caligula on the Potomac
9. Reviving the Education Commons
Appendix: Commons, Commoners and Commoning