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This chapter is about the modern (Western) educational regime, educational industry paradigm and schooling process, while focussing on statutorily imposed and legally enforced schooling as the main aspect of the hidden curriculum within a globalizing world.

It is about children's productive labour through schooling, whereby children's labour power is consumed, produced and reproduced on behalf of social formations under the capitalist mode of production (CMP).

The claim that a well-educated population is essential for development so that all societies share an interest in having children participate in schooling as much as possible is the central element of the Western education industry paradigm, the global appeal of which is reflected in how compulsory schooling has been embraced almost everywhere in conjunction with being heavily promoted within the ‘international community’ and widely endorsed by researchers, scholars and similar observers.

Contrary to Bowles and Gintis's correspondence principle, the structure of schooling is not an identical to the structure of the workplace in that it entails compulsion, whereby schooling is as efficient and effective as possible in meeting the needs of the CMP.

The CMP benefits from the state having shifted confinement as a mechanism to force people to work onto schooling; or, from compulsory social enclosure, whereby schools increasingly resemble military and prison systems.

Compulsory social enclosure helps to ensure that children's productive capacity – or labour power – is enhanced to the benefit of the CMP, this being the major factor in accounting for its appeal and advance on the world stage, globally.

This study provides new evidence on the effect of compulsory schooling laws on educational attainment and earnings. First, we re-examine the effect of compulsory schooling laws for cohorts born between 1900 and 1964 (“older cohorts”) using newly available data that match administrative earnings records with the survey data. Second, we provide among the first evidence on cohorts born between 1977 and 1996 (“younger cohorts”). Our findings suggest that compulsory schooling laws increased the educational attainment of older cohorts, but had no economically significant effect on the educational attainment of younger cohorts. We are unable to find consistent evidence that compulsory schooling laws increased the earnings of older cohorts – a finding which adds to growing evidence that compulsory schooling laws are less beneficial than earlier studies suggest.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of local labour market conditions and pupil educational attainment as primary determinants of the post-compulsory schooling decision.

Through the specification of a nested logit model, the restrictive independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption inherent in the multinomial logit (MNL) model is relaxed across multiple unordered outcomes.

The analysis shows that the factors influencing schooling decisions differ for males and females. For females, on average, the key drivers of the schooling decision are expected wage returns based on youth educational attainment, attitudes to school and parental aspirations, rather than local labour market conditions. For males, higher local unemployment rates encourage greater investment in education.

The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is threefold. First, a nested logit model is proposed as an alternative to a MNL. The former can formally incorporate the structured and sequential decision-making process that youths may engage with in relation to the post-compulsory schooling decision, as well as relaxing the restrictive IIA assumption inherent in the MNL across multiple unordered outcomes, an issue the authors discuss in more detail in the Methodology section below. Second, the analysis is based on extremely rich socio-economic data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, matched to local labour market data and administrative data from the National Pupil Database and Pupil Level Annual School Census, which provide a broad set of unusually high-quality measures of prior attainment. The authors argue that such high-quality data and an appropriate model specification allows identification of the determinants of the post-compulsory decision in a more detailed manner than many previous analyses. Third, the data have the scale necessary to consider whether the determinants of post-compulsory schooling decisions vary by gender, a particularly important issue given the differential education participation rates of males and females (e.g. in this cohort, females are about 10 percentage points more likely to go on to higher education in the UK than males), and the gendered choices of occupation (see, e.g. Bertrand, 2011). The work will, therefore, provide recent empirical evidence from England on gender differences in the determinants of education choices.

Understanding health determinants and exactly how they affect health is an important social policy question. Empirical tests in the health literature typically find that the number of years of formal schooling completed is the most important correlate of good health. However, there is less consensus as to whether this correlation reflects a causal relationship between more schooling and better health. This chapter capitalizes on a unique social experiment: the 1950 Swedish comprehensive school reform, which was implemented in stages and by municipal areas, through which people born between 1945 and 1955 went through two different school systems (one of which required at least one more year of schooling). It uses an instrumental variables technique to estimate formal schooling's causal effect on adult health in Sweden. The instrumental variable for degree of education (schooling) generated from compulsory school reform yields a consistent estimate of education's causal impact on health, as measured by an bad health index and of body mass index in the healthy range. The additional schooling generated by Sweden's compulsory school reform produces improved adult health (controlling for cohort and county effects, family background characteristics, and individual income).

This study explores the impact of parents’ and children’s early expectations on children’s later school persistence and completion of compulsory and secondary education, paying special attention to the parent-child agreement in early educational expectations. Results from analyzing longitudinal data from the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF) show that children often carry educational expectations quite different from their parents’. Consistent with previous research, children’s and their parents’ early expectations are strong predictors of children’s later educational attainment. More importantly, the analysis reveals that children benefit greatly when they share with their parents’ high expectations. Those children whose high expectations aligned with their parents fair best in later educational outcomes: They are more likely to complete compulsory education and secondary education. The combined determination of parents and children can help moderate the negative impact of poverty and facilitate children’s continued efforts in fulfilling their expectations. This positive impact holds even for children from the most impoverished families. This study points to the importance to recognize that there are non-material resources that family could provide to advance children’s education.

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

Although China has instituted compulsory education through Grade 9, it is still unclear whether students are, in fact, staying in school. In this paper, the authors use a multi-year (2003–2011) longitudinal survey data set on rural households in 102–130 villages across 30 provinces in China to examine the extent to which students still drop out of school prior to finishing compulsory education.

To examine the correlates of dropping out, the study uses ordinary least squares and multivariate probit models.

Dropout rate from junior high school was still high (14%) in 2011, even though it fell across the study period. There was heterogeneity in the measured dropout rate. There was great variation among different regions, and especially among different villages. In all, 10% of the sample villages showed extremely high rates during the study period and actually rose over time. Household characteristics associated with poverty and the opportunity cost of staying in school were significantly and negatively correlated with the completion of nine years of schooling.

The findings of this study suggest that China needs to take additional steps to overcome the barriers keeping children from completing nine years of schooling if they hope to either achieve their goal of having all children complete nine years of school or extend compulsory schooling to the end of twelfth grade.

The authors seek to measure the prevalence of both compulsory education rates of dropouts and rates of completion in China. The study examines the correlates of dropping out at the lower secondary schooling level as a way of understanding what types of students (from what types of villages) are not complying with national schooling regulations. To overcome the methodological shortcomings of previous research on dropout in China, the study uses a nationally representative, longitudinal data set based on household surveys collected between 2003 and 2011.

Until recently in Sweden there were seven years of compulsory schooling, commencing at the age of six, with opportunities for a voluntary additional year. There was also a somewhat complicated system of voluntary secondary education in general, technical or commercial gymnasia. As long ago as 1948 a special committee made recommendations for reform and 1949 saw the introduction of experimental nine‐year schools in various parts of the country. By 1962 these had been so widely established that half the children of Sweden were attending them. In the latter year a new education act made nine years of education compulsory for all children from the age of six and, on the basis of what had been learned in 14 years from the experimental schools, established a new school structure. The compulsory school is sometimes referred to in English writings as the comprehensive school, but since it is both primary and lower secondary it is better called by its Swedish name, the ground school (grundskolan). Extension of compulsory schooling is being introduced gradually and will not be completely established until the academic year 1972–73. A simplified system of gymnasium (higher secondary school) education is also being introduced. The extension and reorganization of compulsory education is partly an attempt to provide a firmer foundation for further education and to make possible a reorganization of the latter. The ground school, therefore, is divided into three departments, each covering three years of school life. In the lower department the foundations of learning are laid, with basic studies in Swedish, arithmetic, religion, local history, music and gymnastics, with handicraft introduced in the third year. In the middle department English is commenced, as being an accepted lingua franca, essential to a small nation if commerce and industry are to be developed. Boys and girls alike receive tuition in textiles, woodwork, and metalwork, with domestic science in the sixth year.

The aim of this chapter is to present a brief review of the main trends in the reforms of school structures in Europe that have happened over the past 25 years. The review comprises school systems in 38 European countries: the European Union member states, the European Free Trade Association countries, and some countries in South-Eastern Europe. The chapter starts with an introduction to the reasons for focusing on the school structures, and then outlines the following six main reform trends: (1) decreasing the school entrance age; (2) expanding compulsory preschool education; (3) increasing the duration of compulsory school education; (4) increasing the duration of primary education; (5) eliminating primary education as a separate level by providing single basic education; and (6) continuing the diversity of school structures. The chapter concludes with short prognoses on the six trends.