Education and Society: Welfare State Challenges
Module 4. Society and Education: Present and Future
1. Education and Social Welfare: The Welfare State
Education has become a consumer product of the welfare state. The welfare state is required to meet the demand for education, whether through private or public institutions. However, not all layers of the population benefit equally, and education remains a source of inequality and political conflict.
We are in an era where consumer products, including education, are created according to consumption possibilities. Children and youth are part of this supply and demand, treated as commercial objects. We are, therefore, subject to capitalism, speculation within the world system, globalization, and the loss of social and cultural identities. There’s a push to standardize products to increase consumption, both economically and culturally.
Links with nature, environmental implications, participation in communication, critical humanism, interculturalism, cultural identity, and solidarity are alternative elements that contrast with the contradictions of modern society. The power system and social structure recycle and overcome conflicts in a less violent way. However, from a critical perspective, the future poses many questions.
The current societal crisis arises at all levels, both globally (macrosociologically) and specifically (microsociologically). Culture, society, economy, institutions (church, family, school, state), values, customs, lifestyles, and traditions all point to a need for a path forward where cultural resurgence comes from overcoming individual and collective identity, not solely through state intervention.
2. Society and Education with a Future
The crisis of the school, in relation to macrosociological developments, runs parallel to the crisis of the welfare state. James Carbonell highlights future scenarios in the European Community:
- Difficulties in managing the rising costs of mass schooling.
- The fallacy of equality of opportunity policies.
- Declining population growth.
- The crisis of confidence in mass schooling.
- The impact of new technologies, leading to changes in teaching and learning.
- The transition to working life and employment, necessitating basic multipurpose and versatile training.
- Increased educational internationalism.
- Growth of non-formal education and leisure culture.
- Teacher distress due to the degradation of their status.
- Increasing control, centralization, and bureaucratization of education systems.
Despite seemingly egalitarian policies in education, it does not fully realize its potential and can channel social inequalities. Authorities aim to create more realistic budgets to address the expenses of the school system. They attempt to solve problems through parallel education systems, using grants for private initiatives or diverting funds that should go to more economically, socially, and educationally unbalanced areas, such as the Third World, but often without requiring accountability or addressing the issues of cultural colonization. Alternatively, they seek to rationalize costs in other ways.