On the Problem of Foundation Skills and the Futures of Work

This book provides an analysis of how global capitalism, digital disruption, and new worlds of work have reshaped ideas about language, literacy and numeracy (foundation) skills in a neoliberal foundation skills apparatus in Australia since the 1980s.

The book uses Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to producing critical ‘histories of our present’. From this perspective it examines how these disruptions have transformed what was once a voluntary, not-for-profit community ‘movement’ of education for migrants and marginalised people into a sophisticated government, community, and for-profit training and skills sector which imagines foundation skills learners as choice making consumers.

Garry Argent is Lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University. His research focuses on the foundation skills of adults, vocational education and applied learning in schools.
Peter Kelly is Professor of Education in the School of Education at Deakin University. His research focuses on young people’s education, employment and well-being in times of crisis at the convergence of the sixth mass extinction and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.