Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationalization of the Modern World

Abstract

The catchword “educationalization,” which enjoyed some popularity around 1920, has been used increasingly since the 1980s, first in the German and then in the Belgian and English discussions. Although the uses of and intentions behind the term are far from identical, they all express a perceived intersection between distinct social practices, one of which is education. As a rule, this intersection is interpreted as assigning education the task of coping with perceived social problems. Accordingly, the most popular expression of this mode of thought has been labeled, in an abstracting way, the educationalization of social problems.