Preface

Summary

The slogan ‘Equality of Opportunity’ offers a starting point for a discussion of the asymmetrical relationship between education and social equality that has divided society and endangered democracy. It evokes a policy paradox that has created a ‘left-behind’ class; the members of which, to paraphrase Robert Putnam (2000), have been consigned to ‘bowl alone’ in the social wilderness of disadvantaged communities. The ‘left-behind’ live precarious lives located on the periphery of post-industrial society. These largely forgotten people are a universal social phenomenon across the cities of Europe and North America, as deindustrialisation hollows-out the traditional working-class in Western society. The ‘left-behind’ are problematised in the media as a marginalised group that has failed to engage constructively with economic change in a globalised world. They are in social reality victims of poverty, discrimination and social exclusion.

That is the sociological approach adopted in this book to an important and complex equality issue. It goes to the core of the cultural and economic context of social life in Western civilisation. The French public intellectual and internationally renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) observed: ‘Sociologists are in a very rare position. They are unlike other intellectuals, since most of them know in general how to listen and to interpret what is said to them, to transcribe and transmit it’ (Bourdieu and Grass, 2002: 68).

The connection between democracy and education is a cornerstone of Western civilisation, as the philosopher and education reformer John Dewey (1859–1952) has pointed out, calling education ‘a necessity of life’. Dewey, in his 1916 book Democracy and Education, equated education with life itself, which is diminished by its absence. Each generation is challenged to build education anew, as if reinventing the world. It is, as Dewey (1916: 1) put it, ‘the renewal of life by transmission’. In the era of the ‘knowledge economy’, which seeks to instrumentalise higher education, Dewey's humanistic vision is challenged by neoliberalism representing a return to market values, social discredit and individual responsibility in a globalised world.

This book sets out to explore the relationship between the global and the local through the prism of educational disadvantage in territorially stigmatised communities.