Introduction

As we noted in Chapter 1, the Learning Society is a contested concept. The dominant version of the Learning Society tends to give most weight to human capital principles, underpinned by a utilitarian notion of social justice. The subtitle of the ESRC programme of which this research was part was ‘Knowledge and skills for employment’ and at the first meeting of the programme the obligatory industrialist commented that he could not understand why research on people with learning difficulties had been commissioned within a programme devoted to economic competitiveness (see Baron et al, 1998, for a discussion of this).

However, rival versions of the Learning Society may be glimpsed both within official policy documents and within radical texts and practices. Counter-hegemonic versions of the Learning Society, rather than seeing education and training as a means of achieving individual and national economic advantage, instead emphasise education as a means of developing social capital. Although the notion of social capital is itself a contentious concept (see Chapter 7 for further discussion), it is generally taken to refer to the networks connecting individuals and groups into a collectivity which provides a sense of identity and purpose for their activities (Baron et al, 2000). The social justice implicit in the idea of a Learning Society based on social capital rather than human capital is very different, giving far more weight to recognising the needs and identities of minority groups.

Education is, by definition, at the heart of the any formulation of a Learning Society, but in addition, various notions of a just society will view education from differing perspectives. Societies based on utilitarian notions of justice are likely to regard education as a good to be transmitted in accordance with the ability of an individual or group to produce a satisfactory financial rate of return on the sum invested. Those based on social capital ideas might, alternatively, regard it as necessary to target additional education and training on those most at risk of social exclusion, on the grounds that this is a good in itself and that the excluded pose a risk to wider social cohesion.

In this chapter, we begin by discussing salient ideas of social justice and their implications for the inclusion of people with learning difficulties.