Education, Individualization and Neoliberalism

Youth in Southern Europe

Valerie Visanich

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350082472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Education, Individualization and Neoliberalism questions the individualization process in education in the Anglo-American context and analyses how this process is applied in the everyday life of millennials with tertiary education in Southern Europe. Valerie Visanich explores the close affinity of this concept to neoliberalism in contemporary societies, specifically by focusing on changes in education and employment. Using Beck & Beck-Gernsheim's concept of individualization to refer to increased freedom in one's life choices yet at the same time increased risks, Visanich unpacks the trajectories of life experiences of tertiary educated millennials in the contemporary neoliberal Anglo-American setting in relation to recent cultural and socio-economic changes. She examines how this individualized mode is adopted and adapted in countries across Southern Europe including Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta and Greece – in locations where cultural conditions habitually cushion-out, often by family networks and patronage, some of the burdens of being young today.

1

The extension and expansion of education

For the last six decades, the expansion of the educational systems was directed towards a form of social levelling to equalize opportunities and enable children from deprived backgrounds to prosper. Policy changes in education were in place to provide assurance for pupils from low-income backgrounds to be given opportunities for intergenerational social mobility. But some studies point to the opposite direction – children coming from deprived backgrounds are still ill-equipped to climb the social ladder (Bourdieu 1973, Bowles and Gintis, 1976, Willis, 1977). In view of this, scholars wrote about the opportunity gaps between those who have opportunities for higher education compared to those who don’t, predominantly based on their ethnic background, gender and/or the annual household income.

Instead of building on this body of study, my focus in this chapter is to sketch out the shifts in the educational system and explore their implications on those who have had opportunities for tertiary education. This is worth considering in view of the overall aim of this book to provide an understanding of youth with tertiary education; these amount to 34.2 per cent of those aged twenty-five to fifty-four years in the EU28, with some southern European countries score at the lowest scale: Italy (20.6 per cent), Malta (24.4 per cent) and Portugal (27.6 per cent) (Eurostat, 2017).

This chapter starts off by setting the framework for exploring the recent shifts in the educational system in the last sixty years or so, within the Anglo-American context by referring to the British educational reforms as an exemplary case. It also examines such shifts within the southern European context by looking at policy changes and the implementation of legislation that facilitated the opening up of the educational system and resulted in greater opportunities for social mobility. Prior to elaborating on the educational system, it is essential to mention the recent changes in the actual conceptualization of youth itself, in part as a result of these shifts in education. It is no doubt that the expansion and extension of the educational system were one decisive element in the longevity of youth as a stage of dependence.

Conceptualizing youth

The timings of different life stages and the conceptualization of youth are very much shaped by the time spent in education – the longer one is a full-time student, the more she/he usually delays transitioning into adulthood. As a life course adulthood is often measured in terms of financial independence and leaving parental home. Yet, life courses have become fuzzy today with changes in individuals’ biographical timetables. Youth are less likely to follow the traditional socially expected and culturally transmitted age-norms.

Irrespective of this, there are still transversal traits in youths’ transitions. Puberty marks the start of the consciousness of sex and its expression: the beginning of intimate relationships and the training phase preparing for adulthood. The anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep (1960) identified the ritual ceremonies manifesting life-course transitions in his account on the rites of passage. He explored the age-related social transitions of individuals, celebrated by ritual practices that promote stability in society:

The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another. (Van Gennep, 1960:2–3)

Especially in ‘primitive’ societies – by which I am referring to tribal societies based on stages of early settlement and the degree of technological and social organizational complexity – rites of passage display how the individual becomes detached from the previous stage and passes through an intermediary state until incorporating the new set of rules, roles and obligations of the successive social position. An individual in transition is considered to move from one life stage to another in three phases: the rituals that mark the separation from one life stage to another, the liminality of being moved to another stage and finally the incorporation into the new life stage (Van Gennep, 1960).

In recent years, youth transitions are comparable, according to Zygmunt Bauman (1996) in ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist’, to the experiences of a ‘tourist’. Just like the journey of a pilgrim, the formation of identity in the past had an ultimate plan to reach the goal. Yet in postmodern society, the route towards adulthood resembles more that of tourists, having a clear awareness of the goal, but individuals may simply decide to go places for new experiences before reaching such goals. This shift crystallizes the changes in youth’s biographical patterns.

The trends summarized by the terms extensions, destandardization, fragmentation and individualization of the life course vary in their intensity between societies and social groups. Speaking on the delay in life-course transitions, there are numerous studies on the increased fluidity of social boundaries separating life-course stages and delays in the life-course transition into adulthood (Arnett, 2000, 2004, 2006, Chisholm, 1995, Clark, 2007). Chisholm (1995) empirically proved from his numerous studies carried out in western and southern Europe that the contemporary youth phase has extended further compared to the past:

The social boundaries between life course phases are more fluid than they used to be. Quite simply, the trends summarised by the terms extensions, destandardisation, fragmentation and individualisation of the life course are not in dispute, although their intensity varies between societies and social groups. (Chisholm, 1995:127)

Primarily, it is worth understanding who is considered as youth. Youth as a definitive autonomous stage of life gained its prominence in the mid-twentieth century particularly with the emergence of the social category ‘teenager’ (Savage, 2008). There is no doubt that opportunities for higher education and full employment were distinguishing factors for the creation of ‘teenager’ as a distinctive age in most of western Europe during the 1960s. It is said that young people in the West experienced the expansion and extension of education, which had a direct bearing on their advantageous life chances (Hobsbawn, 1996).

Warren Clark (2007) maintained that the timing of transitions has been delayed since the 1970s. He identified five main factors for such delay in youth’s transition into adulthood. These are shifts in leaving school, moving out of the parental home, having a full-year full-time work, entering conjugal relationships and having children. When comparing data from the census, he found that typical 25-year-olds in 2001 have made the same number of transitions as 22-year-olds in 1971.

Observations on such delays have led Jeffrey Jensen Arnett (2000, 2006) to come up with a new separate phase of ‘emerging adulthood’. Arnett (2006) disputed the conceptualization of youth as the intermediate phase between childhood and adulthood by saying that

youth is too vague and elastic a term to be useful in describing the new and unprecedented period that now lies after adolescence but before full adulthood … Any word that is intended to be applied to people in the entire age range from 10 to 12 until at least 25 cannot possibly work, because the typical 10 or 12 or 15 or 17 year-old is simply too different from the typical 25-year-old. (Arnett, 2006:119)

Arnett (2006) maintained that the term ‘young adulthood’ is no longer suitable to describe youth who are in their twenties. Instead, the term ‘emerging adulthood’ should be used. Many people in their twenties do not subjectively define themselves as adults, and therefore for Arnett, the term ‘young adulthood’ is misleading as it implies that youth define themselves as such. Because of the extension between the stages of youth and adulthood, individuals are extending the time of enjoying, not having full adult responsibility yet at the same time being semi-autonomous.

Arnett’s (2006) proposal of this new concept of youth is characterized by identity exploration, trying out new possibilities in love and work, instability, self-focus and the feeling in between adolescence and adulthood. In this liminal stage of ‘emerging adulthood’, young people free themselves from the normative expectations of childhood dependency and move into exploring the variety of possible life directions. In their early twenties, young people tend to be more committed to move out of the family home, establish stable relationships and choose their adult identity. However, typically they do not regard themselves as adults but more as individuals making long-term commitments and decisions (Arnett, 2006). Because of the postponement of full independence because of extending the years in full-time education, adulthood is assumed to be reached around the age of thirty.

Yet, Arnett’s (2000, 2006) new conceptualization is viewed with scepticism. Bynner and Côté (2008) found little reason to view ‘emerging adulthood’ as a new developmental period. Instead, they argued that support of this new concept comes from those who simply want a useful metaphor to make sense of changes in the transitions of youth to adulthood. They stated that they were not convinced that

the developmental necessities for the transition to adulthood have changed fundamentally and thus that a new developmental phase of the life-course has been established that potentially applied to all young people. (Bynner and Côté, 2008:252)

Various studies referred to the shifts in youth by assuming that Anglo-American youths in the 1960s were brought up with a more organized life plan cemented in traditional social structures (Ashton and Field, 1976, Coles, 1995, Kohli, 1996, Mills and Blossfeld, 2001, Furlong and Cartmel, 2007[1997]), whereas individuals experiencing their youth in recent years have more autonomy when devising their own biography (Giddens, 1991, Beck, 1994, Bauman, 1996, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2008[2002]).

It warrants to mention that the concept of ‘emerging adulthood’ ‘exists only in cultures which allow young people a prolonged period of independent role exploration during the late teens and twenties’ (Arnett, 2000:469). Yet still, Arnett did not explain what causes the variations of those who experience such developmental stage and those who do not (Bynner and Côté, 2008). Based on their observations, Bynner and Côté (2008) concluded that the conceptualization of the life stage described as ‘emerging adulthood’ fails to recognize the population heterogeneity including marginalized youth as well as structural components influencing one’s life-course transition. In this regard, the study on youth cannot be understood divorced from one’s social positioning.

An understanding of youths’ actions is perceived as being the product of both dispositions and reflexive decisions. Despite the noteworthy difference in the approaches of both the concept of habitus and studies on human agency, Elder-Vass (2007) accentuated that the two can be reconciled into a single theory. In particular, he maintained that the work of Bourdieu (1990) on the social conditioning determining behaviour and Margaret Archer’s (2000, 2003) stress on reflexive choices can be reconciled with some modification. Human action is essentially the outcome of continuous interaction between dispositions and reflexivity (Elder-Vass, 2007).

It is an undeniable fact that youths’ biographies are very much embedded in its context. It is not only a question of individual agency, but structural factors play an equally important part. Norbert Elias (2000[1939]) emphasized the importance of one’s habitus as a constituent part of what makes the individual’s life chances and dispositions. For Elias, childhood is the main ‘transmission belt’ for the development of the habitus.

It is the web of social relations in which individuals live during their most impressionable phase, that is childhood and youth, which imprints itself upon their unfolding personality in the form of the relationship between their controlling agencies, super-ego and ego and their libidinal impulses. The resulting balance … determines how an individual person steers him or herself in his or her social relations with others … However, there is no end to the intertwining. (Elias, 2000[1939]:377)

Biographies are considered the product of ‘the particular family living in a house situated in a certain area’ (Pollock, 2002:69). Youths’ identities are formed and reformed by structures and experiences. This makes sense when focusing on millennials with tertiary education as a social group of youth who were born in a family that is culturally and economically supportive of their post-compulsory education.

Changes in the educational system in the last sixty years

‘Education, not nationalisation, was to be the main engine in the creation of a more just society’ (Crosland, 1982:69). Education, as a fundamental human right, recognized as one of the pillars of the economic system was attributed meticulous attention during the second half of the twentieth century. The scholar Eric Hobsbawn, who shaped the global Marxist imagination in the twentieth century, wrote methodically on how the opening up of the educational system and the provision of full employment had significant implications on youths’ life-course transitions within the socio-economic context of the post-Second World War. In his book The Age of Extremes, he wrote about how socio-economic, political and cultural changes between 1950s and the early 1970s made this period ‘golden’. The affluence of this period manifested itself in better standards of living ‘for all’. Equipped with historical analysis, Hobsbawn (1996) explained the accumulated advantages of youth during these years. People’s life chances are said to have improved substantially with the expansion of the educational system and measures in place to minimize poverty. In assessing the ‘goldenness’ of this period, Hobsbawn gave credit to the Keynesian combination of economic growth in a capitalist economy based on mass consumption of a fully employed, well-paid and well-protected labour force.

The period following the Second World War brought institutional stability at a time when welfare was considered a fundamental feature of western statehood (Hobsbawn, 1996, Kus, 2006). The Bretton Woods agreement that controlled the international economy and considered to be ‘the backbone of post-war embedded liberalism’ (Kus, 2006:492) accentuated the common realities amongst western European countries during the post-war period.

State intervention and the increase in the social wage guaranteed full-time stable employment especially for young people. Up until the 1980s, having no academic qualifications did not hinder you from finding work in places such as Britain; the labour market virtually absorbed everyone, and opportunities for the unqualified and unskilled were easily available (Bynner and Côté, 2008). Notwithstanding the various divergences in policy implementation of educational reforms in countries in the West, Britain is referred to here as an example of how the development in the educational system, geared towards a meritocratic system, was arguably promoting social mobility for all.

This so-called post-war consensus, fuelled by the application of John Maynard Keynes, whose work as an economist was based on post-war settlement, resulted in full employment and the development of public services working as safety nets ‘from cradle to grave’. Keynes had advocated strong government intervention in order to manage markets. Such measures also brought institutional stability, mainly reflected in the advantageous life chances experienced by youth at a time when the welfare provisions were a fundamental feature of western statehood.

The Keynesian economics aimed at the well-being of all classes by providing a welfare system for the inclusion of everyone as a way forward out of the severe downturn in economic activity during the interwar period. Similar to other western European countries, Britain’s social legislation in the immediate post-war years was focused on combating the ‘Five Giants’ – want, disease, squalor, ignorance and idleness (Jones, 2005[2000]). The ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ report by the economist William Beveridge was the blueprint for the state to take responsibility for the well-being of its citizens (Yergin and Stanislaw, 1998):

The Plan for Social Security is designed to secure, by a comprehensive scheme of social insurance, that every individual, on conditions of working while he can and contributing from his earnings, shall have an income sufficient for the healthy subsistence of himself and his family. (Beveridge, 1944:17)

It is certainly clear that young people benefitted directly from changes in measures aimed at combating ‘ignorance’ and inducing mass participation in higher education in the British education system. Students coming from different social backgrounds benefitted directly from policies implemented to open the doors to higher education (Heath, 2003). Moreover, policies based on the principle of equality of opportunity offered student support grants. The real concern of the 1944 ‘Education Act’ in Britain was the promotion of educational opportunity for all pupils under a unified system of free compulsory schooling between the ages of five and fifteen.

The eleven-plus exam, introduced in this Education Act, intended to channel pupils into state secondary schools geared to their abilities. However, when Anthony Crosland became Secretary of State for Education between 1964 and 1970, he worked for the abolition of this exam in an attempt to facilitate greater equality of opportunity and promote social mobility (Fenwick, 1976).

The commitment to free education intended to maximize the number of students with higher education. For instance, in 1956 the Anderson Committee offered student support grants to reach those with financial difficulties, based on the principle of equality of opportunity. This was followed by the so-called ‘Robbins Report’, aimed at enhancing the educational opportunities for many young people in 1963 by committing the government to increase students in higher education by 50 per cent in four years and by 250 per cent in 1980 (Dunford and Sharp, 1990). These actions led to a large expansion in the number of university students and university institutions. Actions were also carried out with the intention to develop an all-inclusive educational system. The increase in polytechnics ensured that those students who did not qualify for universities had the opportunity to follow courses up to a degree level (Lawton, 2004). The White paper in Britain ‘A Plan for Polytechnics and Other Colleges’ published by Crosland in 1966 was desig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The extension and expansion of education
• 2 The currency of academic credentials, consumerism and financial burdens
• 3 Unemployment in the graduate economy
• 4 Neoliberal intersubjectivity: A way of doing things
• 5 Shock-Absorbers for youth in the South
• 6 Slow motion changes in the South: The case of a small Southern European state
• 7 The meanings and feelings of tertiary-educated millennials in the South
• Summary and conclusions
• References
• Index
• Imprint