When production management takes over education: the rise and fall of organised education

Abstract

Policy makers, providers and consumers of education have collaborated in the evolution of a self‐regulating, artificial market in education which is losing its purpose. All the players have tricked themselves into believing that the route to a new land of opportunity, is via factory‐based, organised education. This form of education has left society en masse considerably short‐changed. It cannot be sustained indefinitely due to its artificisality and lack of real purpose. This paper attempts to rediscover real education by exposing the risks and limitations of education factories. It suggests that the prevailing factory paradigm is favoured by policy‐makers and administrators as providing the outward appearance of modernity, control and efficiency. Education is literally too vital an issue to assume the structures and processes of an alien, borrowed production management paradigm.