Chapter One recalled how education in the 1950s and 1960s enabled a minority of individuals to ‘move up’ the old social class pyramid. It enabled them to cross the great divide in knowledge and labour that used to exist in the employed population between manual and non-manual work. This possibility was related to increased opportunities for entering expanding white-collar, managerial and professional employment. These career opportunities encouraged moves towards comprehensive schools and away from selection at 11+ since more than a limited ‘pool of ability’ came to be regarded as ‘educable’. They were recommended by the Robbins Report (1963) to progress to higher education.

It is important to retain this history because, contrary to Conservative mythology, comprehensive schools did not bring this period of limited absolute upward social mobility to an end. Therefore returning to selective grammar schooling will not restore it. Rather, for a time, comprehensive schooling ensured supply continued to meet demand – at least until the demand dried up. This is clearly seen by comparing the US during the same period, where all-through comprehensive high schools had existed since the Second World War, but where similarly limited absolute upward social mobility also ended in the late 1970s (Aronowitz, 2008). High school graduates, but also more and more university graduates, were then left ‘all dressed up with nowhere to go’.

In this chapter it is argued that, with the increasingly restricted opportunities for young people summarised in Chapters Two and Three, education has once again become primarily an agent of social control that nowadays substitutes for wage discipline in the absence of work. Or rather, substitutes for the youth wage with hopes of an adult one. Extended education and training can then be seen to have played a large part, alongside housing, policing and regional policy, in shaping and reinforcing the new class divisions of knowledge and labour outlined in Chapter Three, as well as in seeking a new correspondence of education with remaining employment.

The new student experience

Despite all the claims made for it as a doctrine of individual salvation, education at all levels teaches people to know their place, and only in exceptional cases enables them to leave it. The exception is then made the rule, at least in popular misrepresentation.