What is Education for in neoliberal times? Looking inside the educational policy in Turkey via vocational and technical education”,

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the deepening and intermingling relation between the education policies and labour market policies and suggests that education policy largely becomes an aspect of labour market policy. That is to say the aims of education and the aims of labour market overlap. The content of education is much more associated with work and designed with quality and skills discourse. The increasing tendency of capital groups in the education sector is not surprising for neoliberal times then. When we make a technical, simple content analysis of the educational documents of the governments since the 1980s in Turkey and of the capital groups; it is outstanding that in the name of education policy vocational and technical education has been the main concern. All the governments underline the weakness of the relation between education and employment and put an aim of strengthening this relation. Sociology of education had already been pointing out that the school has a dual role of meeting the demands of labour market and conserving or reproducing the existing power relations and privileges. Education process, which means a selection process, has internally related ideological and economic functions that work for the reproduction of our hierarchical society. Within this critical perspective, restructuring of education will be analysed in this paper with a particular focus on the vocational and technical high schools as a part of inequality management of neoliberal education policy.