Education as a common good: initial concepts for the study of the educational merchandise

Abstract

The studies developed on education as a merchandise have had a strictly economic sense, disconnected from a strong social and political dimension, at list from an emancipatory
perspective. This perspective has a clearer reference considering education as an ideological apparatus of the State and framed in a critical sociology of education. We pretend now, however, to establish some initial concepts for a research, which may start from the concept
of education as a merchandise, but at the same time, considering the pedagogical or didactical aspects. With this purpose in mind Marxist concepts such as: fetishism, use value and exchange value, and process of capital circulation, with the intention of nuance (but not to rectify) the ideas circulating about, on purpose and strategies of the neoliberal educational policies and, as such, state other lines of work for the State and Civil Society.