ABSTRACT
The ubiquitous massive growth and spread of education has transformed the
world into a schooled society – a wholly new type of society where dimensions of
education reach into, and change, nearly every facet of human life (Baker, forth-
coming). As educational expansion, most recently the expansion of mass higher
education, continues unabated into the twenty-first century, formal education
not only transforms individuals, it reconstitutes the very foundations of society
through a pervasive culture of education with a legitimate capacity to reconstruct
work and its central components, such as ideas about human productive abilities,
new organisations and management, widespread professionalism and expertise,
and the emerging educated workplace. The implications of the educational revo-
lution and its resulting schooled society are applied to the narrow version of
human capital theory and education-as-myth sociological theory – two widely
employed theories of education and work over the past 40 years. And a theoreti-
cal synthesis that takes into account the empirical realities of the schooled society
is proposed.
