This thesis is situated in the history of British debates over the relationship of technical and vocational schooling to capitalism. It analyses the impact of 'new vocational' policy initiatives on English education from the 1970s, using an approach termed 'historical ethnography.' Using this methodology, it draws on ethnographic studies of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) between 1985 and 1992. / My argument is that TVEI represents the most recent manifestation of a long history of educational policies that have systematically produced and ordered the social relations of class in an educational form. In this vein, I argue that the technical and vocational curriculum can be seen as an integral site within the English educational State for the production and formation of class relations within schooling. TVEI, I assert, was central to such a process through its capacity to concert and co-ordinate the social relations and practices of secondary schooling around the concept of enterprise, which acted as an organising device for management/administration, teaching, learning, and most crucially, the formation of individual subjectivities. Understood this way, we can see how TVEI effected reforms that contributed to the formation of clusters of social relations that produced class in new ways. / I show how this process emerged under TVEI through my ethnographic studies of enterprise, school-based management, business studies, and assessment. What each study reveals is how TVEI worked to effect a generalised shift in the culture of schooling away from the post-war social democratic politics of education, to that of a 'managed market' and enterprise culture. In this respect, I argue, TVEI prefigured many of the reforms that were to flow from the Education Reform Act (1988).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.40371 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Jordan, Steven Shane |
| Contributors | Jackson, Nancy S. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Faculty of Education.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001528714, proquestno: NN19735, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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