Human Capital

The Tragedy of the Education Commons

Guy Standing

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Paperback

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English

Pelican
29 January 2026

Educational strategies & policy; Socialism & left-of-centre democratic ideologies

Does the education system make better people? Why are so many – teachers and students alike – 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.

By: Guy Standing
Imprint: Pelican
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 181mm, Width: 111mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 150g
ISBN: 9780241688182
ISBN 10: 0241688183
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 29 January 2026
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Guy Standing has held professorships at Bath, London and Monash universities, was a programme director in the UN's International Labour Organization and has advised many international bodies and governments on social and economic policies. He co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network and is now its co-president. He is author of the bestselling The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (2017) and Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (2019).

Reviews for Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons

One of the clearest and most important studies to be published on education, worldwide, in many decades. Human Capital provides both the diagnosis and cure to those trying to school us towards competitiveness, individualism, and greed -- Danny Dorling