At the end of 2015, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published a report, Is Britain fairer? Its answer was that in many respects it is not, and that it is young people in particular who are especially disadvantaged compared with previous generations. The report was greeted as ‘The betrayal of a generation’ by one national daily newspaper’s front-page headline, which summarised the report as showing:

The extraordinary fact that this book documents and explains is that this has happened despite the most extravagant promises of success and achievement offered to young people by extended education and training, boosted by access to an internet supposedly opening knowledge and information to all. ‘Learn to succeed’, ‘Realise your goals’, ‘Achieve your ambitions’, ‘Be what you want to be’, ‘Make your dreams come true’, ‘Fly!’ – these are the promises still made by educational advertising, amplified by mass media, and endorsed by every government. Starting earlier and going on for longer, education and training of all sorts continues to be promoted as the only road for individual aspiration in a world where all else is increasingly uncertain.

Unlike similar creeds, however, what Grubb and Lazerson in 2005 called the ‘education gospel’ is not a deliberate deception. Nor are many teachers conscious deceivers of those they teach. In fact, teachers are more deceived than deceiving. We feel uneasy about the too great expectations of education that we are asked to sustain. Many of our students are also increasingly sceptical, feeling that they are ‘running up a down-escalator’ (see Allen and Ainley, 2012), studying harder, but learning less, to become overqualified but underemployed. They put in more time, effort and money, but get less in return. This engenders a creeping loss of legitimacy that undermines learning at all levels, but which this book seeks to explain.

Much of the inspiration for the book comes from the epilogue that Pierre Bourdieu added to the English translation of his 1964 report with Jean-Claude Passeron on French students, that he called ‘The bamboozling of a generation’ (originally, une génération abusée).