Review Article
By Guy Standing
In this, the shift away from the possibilities of ‘education commons’ has been towards facilitating education to serve the needs of industry and a larger economy in which the learner becomes primarily a worker, an employee, and a subject of the larger capitalist system. Human capital, now accepted uncritically in most international circuits and policies (including India), focuses on enabling ‘money-making, employability, competitiveness and the fetish of the age, economic growth’ (p. 62). In this shift, Standing highlights the loss of the key foundations of what liberal, classical Western education once stood for: Paideia (search for truth); Arete (moral virtue); Schole (learning with public participation in the life of polis); Praxis (practice as an end in itself); Parrhesia (speaking truth to power); Matthesis (moral or ethical thinking skills);