British educational ideas and policies towards working-class and minority youth show continuous preoccupations with social status and preparation for labour. In examining this, we link educational discourses and practices in England from the Charity Schools to the contemporary higher education policy Widening Participation (WP). We argue that WP is heir to successive educational programmes that explicitly fit poor and marginalised youth to labour and, contrary to its asserted aims, legitimates social and economic hierarchies. Using major government reports, promotional narratives and data on university expansion and tuition fees, we argue that the ‘disadvantaged student’ in WP is a currency for higher education institutions and student debt is the price of a ticket to ‘success’ within an imagined neoliberal meritocracy. The novelty is that whereas in the past, the costs of subaltern education were covered by philanthropy, today's ‘disadvantaged students’ indebt themselves to maintain their positions in society.

中文翻译：

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伐木者和汲水者：从慈善学校到扩大参与的新自由主义精英教育的英国底层教育

英国针对工人阶级和少数族裔青年的教育理念和政策显示出对社会地位和劳动准备的持续关注。在研究这一问题时，我们将英国慈善学校的教育话语和实践与当代高等教育政策“扩大参与”（WP）联系起来。我们认为，工人党是一系列教育计划的继承者，这些计划明确地让贫困和边缘化的年轻人适合劳动，并且与它所宣称的目标相反，它使社会和经济等级制度合法化。利用主要的政府报告、宣传叙述以及关于大学扩张和学费的数据，我们认为，WP中的“弱势学生”是高等教育机构的货币，而学生债务是想象中的新自由主义中通往“成功”门票的价格精英统治。新颖之处在于，在过去，底层教育的费用是由慈善事业支付的，而今天的“弱势学生”却要靠自己负债来维持自己的社会地位。