Carpentier, V; (2014) State education, crisis and austerity : an historical analysis through the lens of the Kondratiev cycles. In: Education and the state : international perspectives on a changing relationship. (pp. 78-102). Routledge: Abingdon, United Kingdom.

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Abstract

During hard times, the public educational system is often blamed for not reinforcing social cohesion, for not supporting productivity, and for being a financial burden for growth. However, the analysis at the interface of political economy and history of education developed in this paper suggests that, from a historical point of view, the relationship between austerity and crisis is not as straightforward as it might seem today. The lens of the long economic cycles shows that, before the Second World War, the growth of state education used to take place during economic crises as a key part of a broader historical expansion of a social infrastructure of human development, which played a key role in reducing the tensions between inequality and economic performance. Thus, the successive hases of historical expansion of public educational systems were responses (and indeed solutions) to socioeconomic crises, rather than their cause. Such mechanisms contrast with the austerity policies which have been implement to address the various economic crises which have unfolded since the mid 1970s. Therefore, there could be a historical case we can refer to when attempting to develop countercyclical public policy today.

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