Chapter 1 is the first of three chapters that introduce the book. It presents the main concepts used and makes the case for a political economy approach to studying education – one that combines economics of education with political theory. The chapter argues that typical economics of education analyses provide powerful tools to study education, but have analytical shortcomings – they generally assume that markets are competitve, that all economic actors are politically equal, and that, given similar information, they would make similar economic choices, no matter their position in the social structure. The chapter suggests that a political economy approach provides a deeper discussion of market imperfections and economic/political power – including how power relations influence individual choice and condition the identification and treatment of market imperfections – to more fully understand education as an institution and its role in society. The chapter ends by providing three examples of important policy issues in education that such an approach would be likely to address: the relationship between education and economic growth; gender discrimination in labor markets; and teacher shortages.

This chapter examines how certain attitudes toward science and technology during the Cold War contributed to the shaping of transformative educational policies in Iran, from the 1950s to the eve of the revolution. Different agents of social change – from the royal court at the top down to high school administrators – embraced modern learning in mathematics and the natural sciences not only as a corpus of essential knowledge but also as a vehicle to advance their respective political plans and ideological preferences. The impact on the transformation of Iranian society can hardly be exaggerated. Among other social indicators, the impact of such policies is reflected in the high number of former students and graduates of engineering and technical schools among the revolutionaries who imagined modernity and progress primarily in terms of construction and control.

Grit, growth mindset, creativity, emotion regulation, lifelong learning, and the whole child, which can be grouped under the label noncognitive skills, are increasingly present in education policy and research discussions. There is broad support to formalize instruction to support the development of these so-called skills, which are associated with humanistic, democratic, and economic visions of persons and purposes of schooling. Notwithstanding this appeal, noncognitive skills are entangled in neoliberally ideology and endorse a specific vision for personhood. The danger is that through these skills, eolibleral ideology can operate with unchecked influence.

This chapter discusses the policy and educational context of provision for newcomer migrant children in Europe and the United Kingdom (including a review of relevant EU documentation relating to the social and academic integration of newcomer children in schools) before focusing on the specific context of the East of England which is the setting for our empirical study. We review statistical data relating to regional provision of support for EAL in schools and discuss the findings of a regional school survey conducted for the project.

In Mary Shelley’s gothic creation Frankenstein, the Creature’s learning of language is described as something sublime: “[he]… perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science” (Shelley, 1818/2000, p. 103). In terms of linguistic development, the Creature’s learning that occurs from simply watching and listening to the day-to-day lives of a family of French exiles through a hole in the wall is quite naïve; there is no interaction between the Creature and the family, Shelley presumably conceiving him as a blank slate. Over time, the Creature realises an association between the signs in the books read by the exiles and speech, a tacit acknowledgement of the arbitrary link between word symbols and the nature of the sounds when spoken. The Creature does not explain exactly how he was able to learn what he calls the ‘science of letters’; his focus is on describing how learning to read “opened before me a wide field of wonder and delight” (p. 108). The affective impact of understanding language underlines the tragedy of the Creature: now that his mind has been ‘opened’ by language, he begins to wonder about the world and himself. In a Cartesian sense, the Creature thinks himself into existence as he grapples with his own identity through language: “the words induced me to turn towards myself … And what was I?” (p. 108). Language has provided thought, identity, and therefore existence.

This chapter will consider the particular manifestation of English as a ‘school subject’, principally in the country called England and using some small space for significant international comparisons, and it will mainly focus on the secondary school version. We will call this phenomenon School Subject English (SSE). The chapter will argue that historically SSE has gone through phases of development and adaptation, some aspects of these changes inspired by new theories and concepts and by societal change, some others, especially more recently, entirely reactive to external impositions (for an analysis of the current position of SSE, see Roberts, this volume). This chapter considers SSE to have been ontologically ‘expanded’ between 1870 and (about) 1990, increasing the ambition and scope of the ‘subject’ and the emancipatory ideology of its teachers. This ontological expansion was principally a result of adding ‘models’ of SSE, models that each emphasise different epistemologies of what counts as significant knowledge, and can only exist in a dynamic tension. In relation to this volume, SSE has always incorporated close attention to language but only very briefly (1988–1992) has something akin to Applied Linguistics had any real influence in the secondary classroom. However, with varying emphasis historically, there has been attention (the Adult Needs/Skills model, see later) to the conventions of language, especially ‘secretarial’ issues of spelling and punctuation, some understanding of grammar, and a focus on notions of Standard English, in writing and in speech; but these have never been the driving ideology of SSE. Of the two conceptual giants ‘Language’ and ‘Literature’, it is the latter that has mattered most over those 120 years.