The under-recognition of the significance of social class conceptions of education in Piketty’sCapital

Abstract

Piketty's Capital has created enormous interest around the world, not least in educational circles. One reason for this may be his readiness to refer, in a book largely focused on economic history, to the ways that education has, and might, contribute to better and more equal social outcomes. This article welcomes this, but argues that Piketty's suggestions remain somewhat limited due to his adherence to a more or less distributional, rather than relational, approach, and it sets out to address this issue by arguing that the assumption it is the distribution of credentials that accounts for their contribution is mistaken. Instead, it advances arguments which recognize the separate contributions of the content of credentials, and their valorization. The main focus of the paper is thus on the different ways that educational credentials are realized, which, it is argued, is a major basis for the maintenance of educational inequality

Political economy of education - implications for efficiency, equity and social justice

“…However, critics soon pointed out that things might be more complicated. Speci cally, some educational researchers criticized Piketty's reliance on a human capital perspective on education, arguing that human capital thinking had itself informed a large number of educational reforms, which had been instrumental in exacerbating the very inequalities criticized by Piketty himself (Dale, 2016; However, in his recent book, Capital and Ideology (2020), Piketty is more nuanced in his view of education. He shows that, over the last few decades, patterns of access to and nancing of education have been deeply involved in exacerbating the social and economic disparities we witness today.…”

The competition fetish in higher education: Shamans, mind snares and consequences

“…The first consequence is inequality. The different forms of competition interact to reproduce old hierarchies and channel new forms of inequality within and across national HE systems (Dale, 2016; Marginson, 2016; Pusser, 2001). These are competitions that are always rigged in favour of the elite.…”

Transforming education through solidarity and collective representation

“…Piketty (2014) argued that in the current political climate, a new democratic, transformative vision would need to include the forces of educational convergence (knowledge diffusion, which assumes that greater dissemination of knowledge, and increased training and skills produces a more equitable social and economic growth). The reinvisioning requires a new knowledge and set of belief systems, narratives and representations as the first step (Morley and Ablett, 2017;Dale, 2016;Piketty, 2014). From there, the new vision would be translated into activism as part of collective and activist practices.…”