Individual Autonomy and Comprehensive Education

Abstract

AbstractThe welfare states in developed societies have led to significant individuali‐sation of social experience. The relative success of the welfare state programme has mitigated the determining effects of social structure on life chances (even though not by any means eradicating these effects). In reaction to this, citizens of these states have sought to exercise greater agency in determining their social lives. The specifically educational aspects of the changing role of social structure are illustrated in detail for the instance of comprehensive education in Britain, a collective reform which has had as one of its main effects a strengthening of individual agency. The process of individualisation cannot, therefore, be interpreted as straightforwardly associated with either a conservative or a progressive politics: strengthening individual choice was an original aim of social democracy. A comparison of England and Scotland provides a particularly revealing instance of the complexity of the political debate, in that the New Right has been dominant in the one but almost entirely absent at a popular level in the other, and yet in both a similar new culture of education has developed, involving both individual autonomy and a continuing attachment to public provision to insure that autonomy.