The educational transformation of work: A synthesis

The ubiquitous massive growth and spread of education has transformed the world into a schooled society – a wholly new type of society where dimensions of education reach into, and change, nearly every facet of human life (Baker, forth- coming). As educational expansion, most recently the expansion of mass higher education, continues unabated into the twenty-first century, formal education not only transforms 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 implications of the educational revolution and its resulting schooled society 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 theoretical synthesis that takes into account the empirical realities of the schooled society is proposed.