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Human Capital
  • Published: 29 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241688199
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
Categories:

Human Capital

The Tragedy of the Education Commons




A searing indictment of our broken education system today, and how we revive it

Does the education system make better people?
Why are so many – teachers and students alike – so stressed and dissatisfied?
Do we need to revive real education?

Ideally, education is about the pursuit of truth, beauty and morality. But in the last few decades, a perilous fixation with human capital – skills, knowledge and aptitudes required for the labour market – has trampled over curricula, schools and universities. Rather than learning how to think critically about the world, from cradle to grave students are trained to be more effective workers, to make more money, and to serve an hegemonic ideology. Teachers and researchers are pressed to serve those goals.

In this concluding book in his series on the commons, Guy Standing shows us how education – intrinsically a common public good – has been enclosed, privatised, financialised and corrupted, turned into an instrument of societal control, not human emancipation, weakening democracy, not strengthening it. Human Capital charts how the education industry largely serves commercial interests, not its teachers and students, and considers how to revive its lost values, to save society for the common good.

  • Published: 29 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241688199
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
Categories:

About the author

Guy Standing

Guy Standing has a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge. He has held professorships at the University of Bath and SOAS, University of London, following a long career at the International Labour organisation in Geneva, and has advised the UN, World Bank and governments around the world on labour and social policy. He is currently a professorial research associate at SOAS. In 1986 he co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) and now serves as its honorary co-President. He has been invited to speak on the precariat and basic income in over 350 locations since his bestselling book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class was first published in 2011. He lives in Switzerland and is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.

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