In The State and education policy (1989) I argued that (1) education systems and education policy, as parts of the state, are shaped by their contribution to the solution of three fundamental "core" conditions of existence of capitalism ("infrastructural" support for the accumulation process, the construction of social order, and the legitimation of the system), and (2) the "solutions" to these problems were likely to be mutually contradictory, with these contradictions major drivers of the politics of education. Since then, the forms of the core problems, and of the "state", have changed fundamentally in terms of the "constitutionalisation of the neoliberal", the fusing of regulation and emancipation, shifts from government to governance, and the reconstruction and recontextualisation of "the national". This calls for a major rethinking of the ways sociology of education approaches concepts such as "national", "education", "systems".
State; Core problems of capitalism; Education policy; Education governance; Methodological nationalism
