Class Struggles : Educational Value, Labour and Play

Parry, Paul and Warin, Jo (2026) Class Struggles : Educational Value, Labour and Play. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Play supports a child’s healthy physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development, whilst research reveals that neoliberal education is antagonistic to play. It has been widely argued that there is an antagonism because neoliberal education normatively values economics over a broader range of educational concerns. But if neoliberal education’s human capital-based foundation has refocused education around raising educational productivity, and if play supports the development of a child’s productive capacities, the argument that economics is normatively valued over play does not fully explain the antagonism. This thesis uses this contradiction as the basis for an original examination into why neoliberal primary education in England is antagonistic to play. It is argued that to understand the contradiction, it is necessary to consider neoliberal education and play as forms of productive activity. Drawing on the latest thinking from Open Marxism, this thesis uses empirical data collected from one primary school in England to develop the original concept of educational value production (EVP). EVP allows both the subject and the object of neoliberal primary education to be located within a specific type of productive activity. It provides a negative critique that can consider the human content, social relationships, and experiences of struggle that a ‘positive’ focus on abstract commensurability variously denies. The work suggests that the productivity that defines neoliberal education in England can be considered a contradictory process of class reproduction that aims to reproduce pupils as potential personifications of the category of labour, a potential working class, by leveraging the teachers’ class need to personify the category of labour. It is argued that such productivity can be understood as a process of fetishisation as it denies the antagonistic practice and social relations that constitute it. Here, teacher and pupil engagement in EVP is understood to constitute class within and through an antagonistic, contradictory and practical experience of struggle, in-against-and-beyond the category of labour. Neoliberal primary education’s antagonism to play in England can be considered in the context of the struggle to reproduce and personify the category of labour, by raising standards and progress within and through a high-stakes engagement in EVP, that relegates the pupils’ subjective desire to engage in play to a secondary concern. The central argument developed is that neoliberal primary education’s antagonism to play can be understood in terms of the economic and social need to objectively classify a potential labour force, to reproduce class relations in a fetishised form, that variously and contradictorily struggles in-against-and-beyond, the needs of the subjects who engage in it. The thesis provides an original empirical contribution to Marxian educational research that has traditionally been heavily theory-based. It develops Rikowski’s ‘web of capital’s forms in education’ argument, Ozga and Lawn’s notion of ‘proletarianization’, it expands on Das’s ‘classroom as a site of class struggle’ and critiques the idea that ‘productivity is almost everything’. The work raises questions about quality and freedom regarding education’s relationship to both economic and child development which aim to facilitate a reflexive consideration of educational practice, beyond the limitations that neoliberal education imposes.