To Create a World without War, Violence and Deep Injustices, We Cannot Just Educate Young People to Compete and to Win

Kathleen Lynch

Questions and considerations

Given that one of the principal objectives of education globally is to develop people who are credentialised in cultural capital and dispositional terms to service the economy,¹ it is timely to ask if the servicing of capital has unforeseen cultural, social, ethical, and political consequences. Does the manner in which education rewards people for being highly competitive, especially for winning, ‘being top of the class’, contribute in some way to individual and collective indifference to others and the earth? Does treating educational credentials as private cultural capital, to be deployed in one’s own self-interest, generate non-solidaristic dispositions? Does the practice of ordering and ranking people in a hierarchically organised manner throughout school and college life (a period of fourteen + formative years at the very least) contribute to the hubris of the educated elite and to ressentiment (envy, resentment, and powerlessness) among those who are ‘failed’? In other words, does the culture of human capitalised thinking play a role in creating human subjectivities that are self-focused rather than other-centred, thinking and living in non-relational and care-less ways, indifferent to local and global injustices and suffering? Based on research for Beyond Human Capitalist Education,² this short paper briefly explores questions about the kinds of educational subjectivities and dispositions being produced culturally and socially through the habitus³ of school and college life. It focuses on these because values and beliefs are not just learned abstractly in curricula; they are embodied emotionally and cognitively through the practices and norms embedded in the culture of schooling.

By focusing on the culture and norms underpinning school life, the paper addresses the Convention on Education’s agenda in a number of ways. It explores the limitations of the current human-capital approach to Irish education and briefly outlines an alternative and sustainable care and social justice perspective on ‘What a shared vision for education for all [should] be for the remainder of the twenty-first century’. It also speaks directly to the Convention’s agenda: ‘supporting children and young people of different abilities’ by investigating the limitations of incessantly classifying and hierarchically ordering children in school, in a manner that alienates so many, and normalises inequality through the myth of meritocracy. It proposes moving to more co-operative and non-hierarchical ways of learning and assessing capabilities, while recognising that children’s abilities are never constant and always variable.

Schools are places of incessant competitiveness, where ordering, classification, standardisation, and measurement ‘constitute the water in which children swim every day’⁴. The culture of corporatisation, intense academic rivalry, and precarious employment, which is now endemic to higher education, does not encourage caring and concern for others.⁵ In both schools and colleges, students are socialised to become privatised autonomous citizens who manage their own ‘risks’.⁶ There is a strong focus on individual responsibility for failure and claiming ‘ownership’ of personal success, with all the arrogance that the latter endorses.⁷

While educating people to be competent and skilled matters greatly, the paper argues that focusing on certifying competence in a narrowly defined range of market-relevant skills (an individual’s bundle of ‘human capital’) in a hierarchical manner is not a holistic form of education, not least because it glorifies dispositions wedded to hierarchy and the normalisation of inequality. People can be educated to be competent and capable without the ranking and ordering that creates a toxic culture of competitiveness, envy and fear.⁸ Responding to the Convention’s ‘Question 2’ regarding ‘the most supportive and inclusive balance between recognising thresholds in students’ growth and development on the one hand and recognising and celebrating the many ways in which they all achieve on the other’, the paper also provides a brief overview of the opportunities education offers for creating care and social and ecologically-just ways of seeing and being in the world. It makes the case for an ontological and epistemological understanding of education that is not only based on producing people as economic units of labour (homo economicus) and/or as rational economic actors. It recognises that human beings are as much caring and moral persons (homo curans and homomoralis)⁹ as they are reasoning and economic persons (homo cogitans and homo economicus).

The child as an economic investment

The so-called ‘normal’ child in the twenty-first century is assumed to be a rational economic contractual citizen-in-the-making. The Convention on Education admirably envisions children and young people as ‘citizens today and as active participants in society into the future’. However, it then adds ‘including in the workforce’ perhaps privileging but certainly singling out the child as an economic investment.¹⁰ Even in early childhood, education is regarded as an investment for the future, something that will ultimately bring economic returns.¹¹ The child’s relational life as an interdependent, caring, ethical, and potentially other-centred human being is largely peripheralised, as is their relational life with much of humanity, the earth and other species.¹² The recent ‘biological turn’ in educational thinking¹³ is exacerbating the narrow homo economicus view of an educated person; it purports to measure and map the education of a child/young person based on their brain functioning and ‘genetic’ architecture.¹⁴ The ideal educated person is an atomistic one, abstracted from social life; they are defined as ‘a post-political, resilient, empathic, bio-perfected, transhuman subject’¹⁵ made market-ready through education.

The human capital model and hierarchical ordering in Irish education

The framing of education as a mechanism for advancing human capital is widely accepted in Ireland at policy levels, particularly within higher education.¹⁶ It is regarded as a vital resource for businesses not only in knowledge terms but also in terms of personal skills and capabilities.¹⁷ Given that a human-capital model of education has been actively promoted within the OECD and the World Bank for many decades,¹⁸ and endorsed most recently by UNESCO in 2024¹⁹ and the European Union in March 2026,²⁰ the impact of human capital thinking on education in Ireland is not surprising, nor is it confined to higher or further education. The human capital focus is not a twenty-first century phenomenon; its foundations were laid, in Ireland and elsewhere, in the latter half of the twentieth century.²¹

The human capitalisation of Irish education has followed a similar pattern to that of other countries. Multilateral bodies, most notably the OECD, but also the World Bank and the European Commission, exercise considerable ‘soft’ power over national educational policy-making, through cognitive (data-led)²² and normative (recommendation-led) modes of governance at different educational levels.²³ The normative power the OECD exercises in Ireland is evident not only in the ‘rankings’ that occurs in PISA assessments but also in the manner in which it has exercised authority in framing the concept of school leadership²⁴ and in how it helped precipitate the use of data-led indicators for measuring educational attainment; standardised testing is mandatory in Irish primary schools since 2012.²⁵

The impact of country ranking and rating through PISA (TIMMS and PIRLS) does not only operate at the policy level, it feeds the culture of ranking, classifying, and ordering people individually. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the everyday aim of students, and their parents/guardians, is to acquire the best bundle of marketable human capitalised education credentials for themselves. Educational qualifications are seen as private assets, like deposits in a bank²⁶ that can be cashed in, ideally for high-paying jobs. The goal is to maintain or advance class-based privileges by outcompeting others; winning is what matters.²⁷

The hierarchical system of ordering and classifying nation states, schools, and colleges has cultural consequences not only for young people themselves but also for society generally. Because schools are public places, the student/child’s status, ranking, and classification are public events. They are measured and graded as lesser or greater compared with their peers, often on a daily basis, whether they wish it or not. Such classifications are experienced not only as educational judgements but as public appraisals, producing considerable stress for most primary-school children;²⁸ they are also experienced as harms, both at primary- and second-level, by those who are defined as unsuccessful.²⁹

High performativity expectations, built around the prioritisation of personal autonomy and achievement, have significant mental health consequences for children.³⁰ The Republic of Ireland does not operate the divisive system of selecting children for second-level schools on the basis of academic attainment alone, unlike a number of other European countries and Northern Ireland, with all its deeply exclusionary consequences.³¹ Nonetheless, hierarchies and divisions operate, be it through banding, setting, or streaming at second-level or through so-called ‘ability grouping’ in primary schools.³² These systems of hierarchical ordering are not inevitable even if presented as such; they are policy choices be it at national, school, or classroom levels.

Education’s ordinal ranking systems not only glorify the success of the few at the cost of the many,³³ they also endorse strongly atomistic and narrowly transactional approaches to life, both ontologically and epistemologically.³⁴ The daily habits of competing to win socialise young people to focus on their own private possessive goals. It fails to provide them with opportunities to co-operate collectively or to appreciate the deep dependencies and interdependencies of the human condition.³⁵ An understanding of human relationality and vulnerability and the benefits of solidarity and co-operation is disallowed, as grading, testing, and examining only reward individual success.

While the enhancement of human capabilities through education is foundational for the enrichment and enablement of individual life, and while education in its human capital form enables countries to earn an economic return on their educational investment, equating education with its economic utility, especially in narrow neoliberal market-led terms, has many unforeseen cultural and political consequences. It reinforces a competitively-driven capitalist-informed morality that currently exercises ideological hegemony,³⁶ especially among young people.³⁷ Education is seen and sold as a game where bundles of cultural capital (credentials) can be acquired and used exclusively for private benefit.³⁸ Out-competing others becomes the mantra of formal education; this inevitably encourages an opportunistic and transactional approach to human relations. Both peers and teachers become utilities like any other.

So-called meritocratic and human-capital-led education is neither morally nor politically neutral

Human capital-led education does not simply produce skilled people in economic terms. In a neoliberalised economy, where privatisation and competitiveness are highly prized,³⁹ the latter dispositions are embedded in the culture of school and college life. The daily habits of grading, ranking and ordering, habituate both students and teachers to hierarchical thinking and to winning. One imbibes hierarchy and inequality in the daily grind of the school day. It is not on the curriculum, rather it is learned through the habitus of school life.

The minds that accept inequality are legitimated, in turn, through the meritocratic myth that intelligence + effort = merit.⁴⁰ The widely promulgated ideology that talent is limited and that school tests are a fair and equitable system for finding the ‘talented’ people society needs is simply not true empirically (as talent is not limited and it is generally the already privileged who are defined as the most meritorious).⁴¹ Furthermore, it generates a myth that the so-called ‘losers’ are responsible for their own ‘failure’ even though it is outside their control. The world becomes divided between winners and losers,⁴² producing the hubris of the educated elite on the one hand and the shame and alienation of those who are ‘failed’ on the other.⁴³

Self-interest as virtue

Because human-capital-led education is also embedded in a deeply liberal mode of political thinking, it is grounded in a individualistic and atomistic ontological framing of the human condition, which is, in turn, allied historically with a narrow non-relational cognitivist epistemology.⁴⁴ When high individualism is allied to incessant metricisation, the cultural adulation of competitiveness and winning, and the celebration of homo economicus as the epitome of human self-realisation, it endorses and promotes self-interest as virtue, no matter how unintentionally. What is produced, in turn, is an acquisitive and self-preoccupied way of knowing and relating to the world and to others. The net outcome is the generating of political coldness and carelessness in the making of the educational subject.

The relative ‘failing’ of many people in education, in comparative and relative terms, also has political implications, even if this is not analysed much in the educational literature. Those who are defined as ‘failures’ in school are the most likely to experience insecure and low-paid employment, poor housing, and financial hardship, especially in times of financial and other crises. They are among the most excluded; and it is those who feel excluded, for whatever reason, who have become the most numerous political supporters of the far-right in Europe and elsewhere.⁴⁵ While the reasons for the rise of the far-right are complex,⁴⁶ the relationship between educational alienation and far-right politics needs to be investigated.

A care-led ontological and epistemological framework that is socially and ecologically just

To have a more socially, economically, politically, and ecologically just world for everyone and all species, education needs to be informed by a relational understanding of the human condition and a care- and social- and ecological-justice-led epistemology. This means moving away from its current atomistic and isolationist view of an educated person, built on the myth of autonomy,⁴⁷ and from an instrumentalist understanding of knowledge as a private asset to be deployed in one’s own market interests.

Creating a socially and ecologically just society⁴⁸ and global order means developing a new vision of an educated person as a relational, moral, ethical, and active subject. This involves making education a care-led process, one that involves learning to care for oneself, others, the community, and the environment.⁴⁹ It means proactively educating people to be socially and ecologically just. Rather than teaching young people to see life (and education) as a competition between their own well-being and that of others, an ethics of co-operation, mutual care and respect must be enabled and facilitated.⁵⁰

At the psychological level, this requires developing a very different way of thinking and especially of desiring. To enable people to think differently, and to act on co-operative, trusting, and relational thinking, they need to desire differently. The new analectics that Dussel⁵¹ calls for means going beyond deconstruction ‘towards the noncoercive rearrangement of desires’⁵². This involves a new way of thinking about what it is to be human that enables and disables the folding and unfolding of existing and new possibilities.⁵³ For such changes to occur within education, scholars, policy-makers, and educators need to recognise the limitations of Western modernist thought.

The limits of Western modernity

European and Western modernity operates in an epistemically powerful position culturally and epistemologically.⁵⁴ Leading Western scholars are rarely challenged to know the limits of their perspective: the ‘knowing I’ ‘is imagined to be both universal arbiter and neutral or perspective-less observer’. The ‘universal I’ ‘judges the other under a cloak of neutral anonymity with no need for hermeneutic humility’.⁵⁵ The lack of engagement with ontological and epistemological traditions that recognise the relationality, vulnerability, and inter/dependence of all life forms is one example of the lack of hermeneutical humility and cultural ignorance of the West.⁵⁶ Although its epistemically privileged framing of the world is culturally, historically, and linguistically bound, unfortunately, hegemonic epistemic power precludes a full appreciation of its own ignorance.⁵⁷

Going Beyond Human-Capital-Led Education

Conclusions

Because humans are embodied, relational, and affectively driven as ethical subjects, this requires a rethinking of education ontologically (how we define the human condition) and epistemologically (what is defined as valued knowledge and learning).

To learn to think with care is to abandon the ‘naïve’ detachment that Descartes assumed necessary for knowing. It involves making the relationality of humanity, other species and the earth recognisable epistemologically.⁵⁸ Appreciating how the knowing subject is ‘a relational embodied … affective and accountable entity’, not some kind of abstracted ‘transcendental consciousness’,⁵⁹ would enable care-led thinking to help redefine reason and rationality and thereby contribute to reshaping educational responsibility and morality.

Care-led thinking and acting means moving to a relational understanding of all life forms and a care-centred epistemological understanding of knowledge itself.⁶⁰ Contrary to the instrumentalism that underpins transactional and consumerist human capitalistic approaches to education, where knowledge is a ‘thing’, a private property acquired for personal gain, generally used to dominate others and the earth itself, a care-related epistemology recognises one cannot pursue knowledge without considering the relationality of knowledge and of the knowing subject.

A relational ontological understanding of education involves a move away from atomistic thinking and the idealisation of the detached individual subject. It is a responsible way of being in the world: it involves learning to think and act relationally and carefully, always with principles of social and ecological justice in mind, to live and work co-operatively in other-centred rather than self-centred ways.

Humans have, in equal measure, the capacity to be altruistic and self-interested, to love and to hate. Consequently, emotional dispositions – be they those of hate, competitiveness, and self-aggrandisement, and/or solidarity, care, love, and co-operation – are socially acquired: they are learned.⁶¹ Which politico-emotional dispositions are developed and prioritised is contingent not only on individual or family circumstances but on the culture of schools and colleges where young people spend most of their formative years. Therefore, in addressing the question of values, the relationships between participants and the development of ‘citizens of the future’, the Convention on Education should meaningfully consider the capacity for education to enable humanity to move beyond fear and despair to become more caring, responsive, and responsible with other peoples, other species, and the whole earth.

Kathleen Lynch is Emeritus Full Professor of Equality Studies in the School of Education at UCD. She was a Commissioner on the Human Rights and Equality Commission (2020–2025) and is one of President Catherine Connolly’s nominees to the Council of State.

Notes

1. Sorensen, Ydesen, and Robertson (2021), ‘Re-reading the OECD and Education: The Emergence of a Global Governing Complex – an Introduction’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 19:2, (2021), pp. 99–107.
2. K. Lynch, Beyond Human Capitalist Education: From Capitalocentrism to Carecentrism (Routledge, 2026).
3. In general terms habitus refers to the dispositions and values that are learned habitually, and generally unreflexively, through doing and acting out in particular ways, even if these are ways of being people do not believe in. Bourdieu defines habitus sociologically as ‘the system of internalised dispositions mediating between social structures and practical activities, being shaped by the former and regulating the latter’, P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. by R. Nice (Polity, 1990), p. 53.
4. W. Luttrell, Children Framing Childhoods: Working-Class Kids’ Visions of Care (Policy Press, 2020).
5. J. Littler, ‘The University: Caring Community or Carewashing Central? Autosociobiographical Reflections’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 57:3 (2024), pp. 235–247.
6. N. Marquis and E. Lenel, ‘Introduction: Puzzling Autonomy’, in Education, Parenting, and Mental Health Care in Europe: The Contradictions of Building Autonomous Individuals, ed by N. Marquis (Routledge, 2024), pp. 1–27.
7. M. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (Penguin, 2020).
8. Lynch, Beyond Human Capitalist Education, chapter 7, ‘Learning to Think with Care’.
9. J. C. Tronto, ‘There Is an Alternative: Homines Curans and the Limits of Neoliberalism’, International Journal of Care and Caring, 1:1 (2017), pp. 27–43.
10. Convention on Education, agenda, ‘Question 1’ www.gov.ie/en/department-of-education/press-releases/agenda-for-convention-on-education-agreed-by-government/
11. L. Palla, ‘The Need for Speed: Identification of “the Deviant” as the Ultimate Goal for High Returns in Early Childhood Education and Care’, Critical Studies in Education, 65:4 (2024),pp. 366–385.
12. W. Luttrell, Children Framing Childhoods; A. E. Wals, ‘Transgressing the Hidden Curriculum of Unsustainability: Towards a Relational Pedagogy of Hope, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52:8 (2020), pp. 825–826.
13. Kyraizi, Mattei, Stieger, and Ydesen, The Biological Turn in Education Policy: Navigating Minds (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026).
14. ‘The paradigm is being built on two key pillars: educational neuroscience and educational genomics. Neuroscience positions brain structure and function as the foundation of learning and behaviour, while genomics examines how genetic variation contributes to individual differences in learning and behaviour in interaction with environmental influences.’ Mattei, Stieger, Kyriazi, and Ydesen, ‘The Emergence of a Paradigm: The Biological Turn in Education, in The Biological Turn in Education Policy, p. 2.
15. Yliniva, Bryan, and Brunila, ‘The Future We Want’? – The Ideal Twenty-First Century Learner and Education’s Neuro-Affective Turn, Comparative Education, 60:3 (2024), pp. 498–518.
16. Department of Education and Skills, National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030 (Government Publications Office, 2011).
17. Lenihan, McGuirk, and Murphy, ‘Driving Innovation: Public Policy and Human Capital, Research Policy, 48:9 (2019). Going Beyond Human-Capital-Led Education
18. Sellar and Lingard, ‘The OECD and Global Governance in Education’, Journal of Education Policy, 28:5 (2013), pp. 710–725; P. Teixeira, ‘Economic Beliefs and Institutional Politics: Human Capital Theory and the Changing Views of the World Bank about Education (1950–1985)’, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 24:3 (2017), pp. 465–492; Sorensen et al., ‘Re-reading the OECD’; Égert, de la Maisonneuve, and Turner, ‘A New Macroeconomic Measure of Human Capital Exploiting PISA and PIAAC: Linking Education Policies to Productivity’, OECD Economics Department Working Papers, no. 1709 (2022).
19. UNESCO, Inclusive Wealth Report: A Special Focus on Social Emotional Capital Accounts (SECA) (UNESCO, 2024).
20. In March 2026, the council recommendation on human capital in the European Union was formally adopted for the first time, https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6081-2026-REV-1/en/pdf
21. D. O’Sullivan, Cultural Politics and Irish Education since the 1950s: Policy Paradigms and Power (Institute of Public Administration, 2005).
22. Data from PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) provide comparative analysis of performances across nation states putting political pressure on policy-makers to ensure their country ranks highly on the tests. As the OECD’s evaluation of educational worth is primarily focused on the needs of the market economy, it guides educational systems in this direction (Sellar and Lingard, ‘The OECD and Global Governance’).
23. Sellar and Lingard, ‘The OECD and Global Governance’; Sorenson et al., ‘Re-reading the OECD’.
24. G. Mac Ruairc, ‘This Way Please!: Improving School Leadership the OECD Way, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 42:3 (2010), pp. 223–246.
25. McNamara and McCauley, ‘Standardised Assessment in Irish Primary Schools: Teachers’ Views on Purpose, Pressure and Practice, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 32:3 (2025), pp. 355–381.
26. P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin, 1970).
27. Banks and Smyth, ‘“Your Whole Life Depends On It”: Academic Stress and High-Stakes Testing in Ireland’, Journal of Youth Studies, 18:5 (2015), pp. 598–616; S. McCoy and D. Byrne, ‘Shadow Education Uptake in Ireland: Inequalities and Well-Being in a High-Stakes Context’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 72:6 (2024), pp. 693–719.
28. G. Martinez Sainz, D. Devine, S. Sloan, J. Symonds et al., Curriculum and Assessment in Children’s School Lives: Experiences from Primary Schools in Ireland 2019–2023 (UCD, 2023). While one third of primary school children typically did not feel anxious about testing, one third felt anxious sometimes, while the remaining one third were anxious usually/always (pp. 38–39).. While parents welcomed school reports and feedback on their own children’s progress, they also noted that their children were more stressed by testing as they got older (pp. 40–41).
29. D. McGillicuddy and D. Devine, D. 2020. ‘“You Feel Ashamed That You Are Not in the Higher Group”: Children’s Psychosocial Response to Ability Grouping in Primary School’, British Educational Research Journal, 46:3, pp. 553–573; K. Lynch and A. Lodge, ‘Metricisation in School: An Affective and Epistemic Injustice’, Emotions and Society, 7:1 (2025), pp. 29–46.
30. N. Marquis (ed.), Education, Parenting, and Mental Health Care in Europe: The Contradictions of Building Autonomous Individuals (Routledge, 2024).
31. J. Jerrim and S. Sims, S. 2019. ‘Why Do So Few Low- and Middle-Income Children Attend a Grammar School? New Evidence from the Millennium Cohort Study, British Educational Research Journal, 45:3 (2019), pp. 425–457; J. Hughes and R. Loader, ‘Is Academic Selection in Northern Ireland a Barrier to Social Cohesion?’, Research Papers in Education, 39:3 (2024), pp. 420–438.
32. D. McGillicuddy and D. Devine, 2018. ‘“Turned Off” or “Ready to Fly” – Ability Grouping as an Act of Symbolic Violence in Primary School’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 70 (2018), pp. 88–99.
33. S. Mau, The Meric Society (Polity Press, 2019); M. Fourcade and K. Healy, The Ordinal Society (Harvard University Press, 2024).
34. V. Dalmiya, ‘Care-Based Epistemology and the Comparative Feminist Context’, in Caring to Know: Comparative Care Ethics, Feminist Epistemology, and the Mahābhārata (Oxford Academic, 2016), pp. 1–39.
35. Wals, ‘Transgressing the Hidden Curriculum’.
36. K. Lynch and M. Kalaitzake, ‘Affective and Calculative Solidarity: The Impact of Individualism and Neoliberal Capitalism, European Journal of Social Theory, 17:3 (2018), pp. 343–58.
37. R. Leyva, ‘Towards a Cognitive Sociological Theory of Subjectivity and Habitus Formation in Neoliberal Societies’, European Journal of Social Theory, 22:2 (2019), pp. 250–71.
38. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit.
39. D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 64–70. As Michael Young observed in The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033 (Thames and Hudson, 1958), the concept of meritocracy, on which the social mobility myth was founded, is a cruel liberal fantasy.
40. The perpetuation of economic inequality and meritocracy go hand in hand, not least because the elite ensure that what is defined as merit is closely aligned with their own class interests. See J. J. B. Mijs, ‘The Unfulfillable Promise of Meritocracy: Three Lessons and Their Implications for Justice in Education’, Social Justice Research, 29:1 (2016), pp. 14–34; J.
41. J. B. Mijs and M. Savage, ‘Meritocracy, Elitism, and Inequality, The Political Quarterly, 91:2 (2020), pp. 397–404. Moreover, the economically powerful can literally buy their way in to getting the most valuable educational qualifications. See S. F. Reardon, ‘The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations’, in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, ed by G. J. Duncan and R. J. Murnane (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), pp. 91–117; S. Friedman and D. Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged (Policy Press, 2019).
42. Mau, The Metric Society, pp. 160–161.
43. Mijs, ‘The Unfulfillable Promise’; Mijs and Savage, ‘Meritocracy, Elitism, and Inequality’.
44. E. Dussel, ‘From Critical Theory to the Philosophy of Liberation: Some Themes for Dialogue’, TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, (2011), pp. 15–43; Dalmiya, ‘Care-Based Epistemology’; R. Braidotti, ‘A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities’, Theory, Culture & Society, 36:6 (2019), pp. 31–61.
45. M. Golder, ‘Explaining Variation in the Success of Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, Comparative Political Studies, 36:4 (2003), pp. 432–66; Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit; M. Aktas, ‘The Rise of Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe’, International Sociology, 39:6 (2024), pp. 591–605.
46. C. Mudde, The Far-Right Today (Polity Press, 2019).
47. Marquis and Lenel, ‘Introduction: Puzzling Autonomy’
48. While re/distributive justice matters in education, as many are excluded from quality education at all ages, resisting inequality in education does not simply mean enabling a small number of less privileged people to join the established elite of society through selective social mobility. The logic of a hierarchically organised society means the select few cannot become the pattern of the many. See Lynch, Beyond Human Capitalist Education, chapter 8.
49. J. Collet-Sabé and S. J. Ball, ‘Beyond School: The Challenge of Co-Producing and Commoning a Different Episteme for Education’, Journal of Education Policy, 38:6 (2023), pp. 895–910.
50. J. Collet-Sabé and S. J. Ball, Against School: Thinking Education Differently (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), p. 7.
51. Dussel, ‘From Critical Theory to the Philosophy of Liberation’.
52. G. Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:2/3 (2004), pp. 523–581.
53. V. Andreotti, ‘The Task of Education as We Confront the Potential for Social and Ecological Collapse’, Ethics and Education, 16:2 (2021), p. 148 (pp. 143–158).
54. W. Mignolo, ‘Parce que la colonialité est partout, la décolonialité est inevitable’, Multitudes, 3:84 (2021), pp. 57– 67.
55. E. Dussel cited in L. M. Alcoff, ‘An Epistemology for the Next Revolution’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1:2 (2011), p. 68 (pp. 66–78).
56. J. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2013); Mignolo, ‘Parce que la colonialité’. Going Beyond Human-Capital-Led Education
57. M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007); M. C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Harvard University Press, 2013).
58. Dalmiya, ‘Care-Based Epistemology’.
59. Braidotti, ‘A Theoretical Framework’.
60. M. Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
61. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, pp. 115–136.