The educational transformation of work: towards a new synthesis

Formal education not only educates individuals, it reconstitutes the very foundations of society through a pervasive culture of education with a legitimate capacity to reconstruct work and its central components such as ideas about human productive abilities, new organisations and management, widespread professionalism and expertise, and the emerging educated workplace. The ubiquitous massive growth and spread of education has transformed the world into a schooled society, and in turn the schooled society has transformed work. The implications of the educational revolution and empirical findings from a range of recent research studies are applied to - the narrow version of human capital theory and education-as-myth sociological theory - two widely employed theories of education and work over the past 40 years. And a new theoretical synthesis that takes into account the empirical realities of the schooled society is proposed.