The Rise and Limits of Education Policy. Gendered Education

Abstract

Education policy is a core element of the modern state’s sovereignty and autonomy. Education serves the state as a means of integrating society through culture and ideology, furthermore as a key tool for improving political power and legitimacy, and finally fuelling and stimulating economic growth via human capital investment. Eighteenth century state-building brought the expansion and improvement of educational institutions, and the nineteenth century the development of the fully-fledged education-state. In the twentieth “human capital” century, education policy reached its pinnacle, characterized by unprecedented growth in terms of educational attainment, investments and returns. However, in the last decades, weaknesses of education policy have become visible: the declining growth of human capital returns, problems of reducing social inequality as well as deficient cultural and social integration. Throughout centuries the schooling of girls followed the schooling of boys with delay. Yet, today girl's gross tertiary school enrolment is globally ahead of boys. Indeed, progress of education is a process of longue durée.