Human Capital

The Tragedy of the Education Commons

By: Guy Standing

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Paperback | 29 January 2026 | Edition Number 1

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224 Pages

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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.

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