Critical Education Studies

Education Studies as an academic discipline within HE in the UK is a contested area. One thing most Education Studies programmes might agree on is that they are 'critical'. But what is a genuinely critical Education Studies degree? And, how could such a programme survive within the hostile neoliberal environment of the contemporary UK? This chapter argues from a materialist perspective that Education Studies which are critical entail the responsibility on the part of students and staff to put theory to work in their lives, and to provide the conditions for students to work on the production of their own capacity to labour. This represents a setting on its feet of the Hegelian model of Education Studies proposed by Tubbs and Grimes (2001). In order for Education Studies to remain critical, it is argued that something of its learning and teaching must remain covert, to operate within the interstices of bourgeois social structures.