Politicians and captains of industry alike tell us that knowledge is now a key factor of production, a fundamental basis of competitiveness – at the personal, enterprise and national levels. And as knowledge is a product of learning, education is more important than ever. This is why education has become such a prominent topic in the public discourse of social promise.

The expectations of education have been ratcheted up. More than ever before, people are saying that education is pivotal to social and economic progress. This does not necessarily translate immediately into greater public investment in education (a businesslike approach, one would think). But today’s rhetoric about the importance of education does give educators greater leverage in the public discourse than we had until recently.

Stated simply, in a knowledge economy in which more and more jobs require greater depths of knowledge, schools must do what they can to bridge the knowledge gaps. If they can achieve this, they are at least doing something to ameliorate the worst systemic material inequalities. Schools, in other words, have a new opportunity, a new responsibility and a new challenge to build societies that are more inclusive of social classes whose access to material resources was historically limited.

Despite this, educators struggle to find the resources to meet increasing expectations, despite all talk of a ‘knowledge society’ and ‘new economy’. We may have listened to this rhetoric with a great deal of skepticism given the struggles we educators face. Nevertheless, we need to grasp what is rhetorically or genuinely new in our times. We must seize the drift of contemporary public discourse, and position ourselves centrally. Here is our chance: the stuff of knowledge is no more and no less than the stuff of learning. Surely too, this new kind of society requires a new kind of learning and that a new social status is ascribed to education. It is our role as educators to advocate for education, to make a claim for the allocation of the social resources required in order to meet expanding expectations.