Postmodernism and Education

Last Updated on November 7, 2026 by Karl Thompson

A postmodern education might be individualised, more diverse and offer more choice of subjects and learning pathways to learners. One might also expect it to be more playful, more hyperreal and to express a certain incredulity towards metanarratives.

This would mirror changes associated with the shift from modern to postmodern society (especially since the 1980s). Postmodern society is more diverse, consumerist, fragmented and media-saturated (hyperreal), and allows individuals much more freedom of choice than the modern society that came before it.

This post considers the extent to which our mainstream education system (mainly schools and colleges) might be characterised as postmodern, or as responding to postmodernisation.

You might like to review this article on modern and postmodern society before continuing.

Summary: The Postmodernist View of Education

Postmodernist sociologists argue that education reflects the diversity, choice and uncertainty of a postmodern society. Instead of preparing students for a single, unified culture (as functionalists claim) or reproducing class inequality (as Marxists argue), education now emphasises flexibility, individual learning paths and cultural diversity. Postmodernists highlight:

• schools adapting to a global economy and diverse labour markets
• a curriculum that is more personalised and less focused on one national culture
• greater recognition of different identities, lifestyles and forms of knowledge

Critics, however, argue that postmodernism exaggerates diversity and overlooks persistent inequalities in education based on class, gender and ethnicity.

Postmodern education or education responding to postmodernisation?

OK, so this might sound like a pedantic semantic issue, but I think there is a difference between a postmodern education and an education system (which may remain predominantly modern) responding to society having become more postmodern (a process known as postmodernisation).

A postmodern education

As I understand it, a postmodern education would display a certain incredulity towards metanarratives (maybe shown through scepticism about religion, science, politics and the possibility of progress). It would take a relativistic attitude towards what knowledge is taught as part of a curriculum, and probably even abandon the concept of a curriculum altogether.

A postmodern education might also be more diverse and playful, not take itself too seriously, and allow parents choice and children the freedom to explore their own individual learning paths.

An education system responding to postmodernisation

The postmodernisation of society has resulted in societies becoming more diverse, individualised, consumerist, globalised, uncertain and risky.

An education system could respond to the postmodernisation of society by becoming more consumerist (by creating a market in education, for example). It could also simply become more global in outlook and teach children strategies to cope with new global risks and uncertainties, and it can do all of this through a relatively modernist, centralised curriculum.

Personally, I’d characterise the latter as a late-modern education system rather than a postmodern one.

This type of education system is very different from a ‘postmodern education’, and it might not be effective if there was a radically relativistic and playful approach to knowledge. BUT these can also be part of a late modern as well as a postmodern approach to education.

One further change, which could be either or both the postmodernisation of education or a late modern response to postmodernisation, is the move to more online learning within schools.

Postmodernist sociologists on education

The postmodernist with most to say about education is the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (first published in 1979). Two of his ideas matter for the exam.

The first is incredulity towards metanarratives: people no longer believe in the ‘big stories’, such as science leading to progress, that used to justify what knowledge is worth having. Without them, there is no longer a single agreed answer to what schools should teach, or why.

The second is performativity. Lyotard argued that, once the big stories lose their grip, knowledge is judged by how well it improves the efficiency of the system: its usefulness, rather than its truth. Education is then judged by whether it meets society’s practical needs, and knowledge is broken down into units that can be delivered and measured. Lyotard even suggested that machines and data banks could take over much of the job of instruction.

Performativity is a useful bridge to other perspectives. League tables, targets and constant testing, which Stephen Ball calls ‘governing by numbers’, are exactly the kind of performative measurement Lyotard described. A postmodernist would see them as a symptom of knowledge losing its old justifications. A Marxist or neoliberal analysis would explain the same thing differently. See the neoliberal perspective on education.

Robin Usher and Richard Edwards’s Postmodernism and Education (1994) introduced the ideas of postmodern thinkers such as Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida to educational theory. They argued that postmodern ideas challenge existing concepts, structures and hierarchies in education: who decides what counts as knowledge, who has authority in the classroom, and how education is organised.

Is education in Britain becoming more postmodern?

To decide whether mainstream education is becoming more postmodern, we might expect to see evidence of all or any of the following:

• more diversity of school types and more freedom of choice for parents, including more home education
• less centralised control of schools and more autonomy for individual schools
• a move away from a prescriptive national curriculum
• more personalised and individual learning programmes for students within schools
• schools making use of more online learning platforms
• a greater diversity of educational experience, and more relativism

Do parents have more choice of schools?

There has been a definite trend towards increasing diversity of types of school over the last 40 years.

Back in the early 1980s, most parents had no choice but to send their children to a local education authority school, and in some areas the council decided which school a child went to.

Today, parents can state a preference for a school, AND there are a number of different types of school: local authority maintained schools, academies and free schools, faith schools and grammar schools, to name a few.

Most secondary schools are now academies (83.9% in January 2026), and academies have so far not had to follow the national curriculum, so there is potentially a greater diversity in the range of subjects these schools offer.

However, while there is more choice and diversity today, it’s important not to overstate the increase. The vast majority of academies choose to follow the national curriculum, they still focus mainly on getting students the best grades in their core GCSE subjects, and STEM subjects still have more status than critical thinking subjects, all of which is very modernist. And under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, academies will have to follow the national curriculum from 2028.

Are free schools really innovative?

The case of free schools also suggests how little innovation is actually happening in the state education sector.

The promise of free schools when they launched in 2011 was that parents and local communities would be able to set up their own schools, increasing diversity. But of the free schools open in 2016, 363 had no religious character, and most look much like other state schools. The Education Policy Institute (2019) also found that free schools were the type of school parents were least likely to choose as their first preference, and that free school places had gone disproportionately to areas that already had spare places. So free schools are maybe better characterised as late modern rather than postmodern. See free schools: arguments and evidence.

Homeschooling isn’t that significant

Homeschooling is possibly the most postmodern form of education there is. Taken to its extreme, if every household chose to educate its children at home, we’d have millions of ‘learning centres’, with children studying the most diverse range of subjects possible given the extreme decentralisation involved.

And there has been a rapid increase in the number of parents choosing to home educate. The Department for Education’s figures show 126,000 children in home education in England on autumn census day 2025, up from 92,000 two years earlier, and 175,900 children were home educated at some point during 2024/25.

However, 126,000 is still only about 1.5% of children aged 5 to 16, so these are not sufficient numbers for us to say that there is a significant trend towards the postmodernisation of education in this respect. See my post on homeschooling in England and Wales.

One also might question the extent to which a hypothetical mass movement towards home education would actually involve ‘education’. For some households, ‘home ed’ may just mean children being taken out of school and then receiving no education, so this might be regressive rather than progressive. Not that this distinction would matter to postmodernists, as they don’t believe in the concept of ‘progress’ anyway!

Do schools today have more autonomy?

Academies and free schools are free from local authority control and receive their funding directly from central government, which means in one sense that most secondary schools now have more control over their own budgets.

However, there are still conditions which determine how money can be spent. Most of it has to go on wages; from the 2026 Act, academies must pay teachers at least national minimum rates; buildings have to be maintained to safe standards; and pupil premium funding has to be spent on disadvantaged students.

And on top of this, schools are still monitored by Ofsted, which is, by proxy, inspecting how effectively they are spending their budgets.

So in reality, ‘independent control over budgets’ maybe means the heads of academies get to pay certain teachers a bit extra, or spend a few thousand more on fringe subjects they value, but really 95% of the budget is already determined.

Have we moved away from a centralised curriculum?

As with autonomy more broadly, independent schools, academies and free schools have not had to follow the national curriculum, which means we have had an education system with the potential for radical diversity.

HOWEVER, the vast majority of schools spend most of their time teaching the standard national curriculum subjects: English, maths, the sciences, geography and history. They focus on getting their students through their key stage 4 exams with the best grades possible. And from 2028, academies will be required to follow the national curriculum.

It may be true that, outside the mainstream exam-focused subjects, academies and free schools offer a rich ‘extended curriculum’ with a range of sporting, creative and career-development programmes. But realistically these are fringe offerings: schools are still 90% focused on national curriculum subjects, because that’s what parents want.

Has learning become more personalised?

Personalised learning became a New Labour policy priority in the mid-2000s, but in reality schools remain for the most part exam factories, focused mainly on getting students the best grades possible in mainstream GCSE subjects such as English and maths.

Personalised learning happens, but most schools pay lip service to it: they work with students to produce ‘personalised learning plans’ which in reality are not that unique to each student (lots of cutting and pasting for similar students), and then review them only a few times each year. See has education in the UK become more personalised?

The shift to online learning?

Global companies now offer fully online private schooling. For example, Pearson Online Academy offers online schooling for 14 to 18 year olds, leading to International GCSEs and A-levels.

However, this is a very narrow offering, to older students only, and not available to all students.

In state education, schools in England had to shift to mostly online learning for most students during the school closures of 2020 and 2021 in the Covid-19 pandemic. This gives us a natural experiment in how successful online learning is for school-aged children.

According to research from the Office for National Statistics (September 2021), teachers reported that pupils learning remotely covered substantially less material than pupils in class. The ONS concluded that remote learning was “at best, a partial substitute for in-class teaching”. The gap was widest in primary schools and in schools with more pupils eligible for free school meals.

The government’s own review of research on learning during the pandemic also suggests that both the quantity and quality of education students received fell, and that what students received at home varied with their parents’ circumstances.

In short, the evidence from the ‘natural experiment’ of the lockdowns suggests that online learning was a poor substitute for school, especially for disadvantaged pupils.

So far the available evidence suggests that while schools are becoming ever so slightly postmodern, this is really only on the fringes, and they remain around 95% modernist institutions. But how successfully has our education system adapted to the postmodernisation of society?

Criticisms of Postmodernism and Education

• Exaggerates diversity: schools remain shaped by inequality (class, gender, ethnicity).
• Ignores power structures: Marxists argue schools still reproduce capitalist values.
• Overlooks government control: the curriculum, testing and Ofsted inspections limit flexibility.
• The relativism problem: claiming “all knowledge is valid” risks undermining scientific and evidence-based knowledge.
• Not a full theory of education: more a description of change than a systematic explanation.

Education responding to postmodernisation

The changes below are (to my mind) more likely to be characteristic of a late modern education system than a postmodern one:

• the rise of apprenticeships and more vocational options in post-16 education
• schools having a more global outlook and teaching more about global issues such as climate change
• schools teaching students strategies to cope with the risks of living in post/late modern society

The rise of apprenticeships

The last 40 years have seen a significant increase in the variety of vocational options on offer.

The increasing variety of apprenticeships especially suggests that the system is adapting to an increasingly diverse and competitive global economy. There are many different types of apprenticeship, and in reality the diversity is even greater, because thousands of employers are educating their young employees (apprentices) according to their own specific needs, adapting the apprenticeship ‘framework’ to suit them. For more, see sociological perspectives on vocational education.

Teaching about global issues

How much schools should teach about global issues such as climate change has been debated for years, and campaigners have long argued that it deserves a much bigger place in the curriculum. The new national curriculum, due from 2028, will be the next test of how far schools are preparing young people for what is probably going to be the major challenge of their generation.

Teaching strategies to cope with new risks in society

One example of this is the government’s PREVENT strategy, to deal with radicalisation and the threat of terrorism. HOWEVER, there is nothing at all postmodern about this, because one aspect of PREVENT was to make schools promote British values, which is itself a very modernist response. Critics have also argued that the policy risks alienating Muslim students.

Most schools do offer lessons on staying safe online as part of PSHE, but this is hardly front and centre of schools’ teaching, and many schools deliver this content in a piecemeal and often ineffective way.

When it comes to safety in general, schools do have safeguarding duties, and some of the more vulnerable students are protected. But when it comes to the more subtle, everyday risks which ‘non-vulnerable’ students have to deal with, students are very much left to fend for themselves. They have to figure out their own strategies for negotiating the risks of living in an uncertain world, and more often than not they first have to figure out what those risks actually are!

Postmodernism, Postmodernisation and Education: Conclusions

The education system has become more postmodern in some ways, such as:

• an education market: more consumerist, more choice of schools and subjects, especially post-16
• more personalisation
• the shift to online learning

However, overall I would say this has NOT been a significant trend. There is very little within the education system to point to a shift towards postmodernism.

Rather, the education system as a whole for 5 to 16 year olds remains very modern. Most schools stick to the fairly narrow national curriculum, most try to instil a sense of shared values and solidarity, and the primary focus of mainstream schools is getting children through national exams with the best grades.

And once we drill down into it, there is little real choice for most parents, little real diversity, and little in the way of innovation or experimentation.

Sort of a 10% postmodern fringe, 90% modern.

I think at best we might characterise our education system as ‘late modern’, because it has adapted in some ways to our society becoming more postmodern, in response to globalisation and digital technology. For example, history and English literature now have more options to look at global events and texts, and the pandemic saw a radical increase in the amount of online learning.

However, in terms of equipping students with the skills they will need to cope with the risks of living in our global postmodern world, schools lag way behind. There is little in the way of giving students the skills they will need for the world of work (if that’s even possible to do in school), and very little effective teaching about global issues such as climate change or how to stay safe online.

If education is becoming more post (or late) modern, then this shift is happening outside the mainstream education system (maybe even in spite of it). Possible examples include:

• the rise of online learning platforms such as Udemy
• the increase in independent people offering education and training on YouTube and other channels
• the increase in ordinary people sharing their stories, experiences and life experiments, and the increased interest in people consuming these
• the increase in both children and adults using these sources to educate themselves about what interests them (on top of what they have to learn for work or school)
• students increasingly using online sources to educate themselves rather than resources provided by their school (such as textbooks)

If we were to explore these, we might well find that informal education outside the mainstream system could be characterised as postmodern. But I can’t, hand on heart, characterise the formal educational institutions and practices as postmodern today. For more on learning outside formal education, see online education trends.

Postmodern and late modern views of education: a summary

The postmodernist view. Postmodernists stand against universal, one-size-fits-all education systems: if there is no one truth, it isn’t appropriate to have one kind of education for everyone. For many students, modernist education is oppressive: they give up their freedom for eleven years to learn knowledge that is supposed to improve their life chances, and that doesn’t work for everyone. Forms of education that fit a postmodern agenda include home education, liberal schools such as Summerhill, adult and lifelong learning (where adults make more of their own choices), and learning outside formal education altogether.

The late modern view. Schools become part of the reflexive institutions of late modernity. Anthony Giddens describes late modern societies as trying to ‘colonise the future’: to manage risks before they happen. Education policy can be used to do this, by providing opportunities to retrain in a changing global labour market, and by keeping students seen as ‘at risk’ under surveillance.

Summary Table: Postmodernism and Education

Feature	Postmodernist view	Criticism
Role of education	Reflects diversity, prepares for a flexible economy	Still reproduces inequality (Marxism, feminism)
Curriculum	Diverse, personalised, multicultural	National curriculum and exams limit diversity
Knowledge	Relative, multiple perspectives (Lyotard)	Risks relativism, weakens science
Choice	Parents and students as consumers	Marketisation increases inequality between schools

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the sociology of education.

Further Resources on Postmodernity and Postmodernism

If you’d like to explore further, check out my main hub and core posts on this topic:

• Key Definitions: Modernity, Postmodernity, Modernism and Late Modernity
• From Modernity to Postmodernity
• Postmodernism: An Introduction for A-Level Sociology

Sociology of Education Revision Bundle

Postscript: a note on pedantic postmodern semantics

Sorry, that’s postmodernism for you! Just suck it up and try to understand what you can!

Sources

• Department for Education (2026) Elective home education, Autumn term 2025/26; Schools, pupils and their characteristics: 2025/26.
• Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1994) Postmodernism and Education: Different Voices, Different Worlds, Routledge.
• Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity, Polity.
• Lyotard, J.-F. (1979) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
• Office for National Statistics (2021) Remote schooling through the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, England: April 2020 to June 2021, 22 September.