ABSTRACT
‘Post-education Society’ is a useful slogan, no more and no less than ‘post-industrial Society’. The second draws attention to dramatic changes taking place inside the world of work for payment, concerning the production and distribution of goods and the employment of people. A cashless society is its metaphor. Goods and services are ordered by telephone, linked with computer printers and television screens and paid by credit card. Similarly, the slogan ‘Post-education Society’ draws attention to equally dramatic changes taking place in the world of formal education, in school, higher education and further training. Things are not what they were. The production and distribution of education has changed already and continues to change fast. The employment of teachers has changed. What we now need from our formal education system is the means of making reality out of what ought to be the appropriate metaphor for it – a learning society. To a considerable extent, as we have seen, a learning society has developed outside the formal education system, and is only casually related to it. To talk of post education therefore no more means talking of a society without education than a post-industrial society means doing without industry. ‘Post’ is a metaphor for ‘different from now’.
