One myth about education is that it is a stable entity that needs to be engineered for change. Another is that it is a common social good with a roughly equal positive value for each individual in society and a third is that it is a general good for society itself, as in human capital theory for instance. However, according to our recent ethnographic research, reported on in the present paper, these things are socially constructed myths. Education is not and never has been a stable, uniformly equal enterprise in any nation or region. It has always been an outcome of a resolution of different economic, social, productive, ideological and other cultural forces, constantly in flux and has also shown itself to reinforce considerable social inequalities.Lenin described the value of education in relation to the distinct social classes that make up capitalist society. And for him an education for the masses was valuable principally in terms of the development of possibilities to unravel and counter the hypocrisy and lies of the bourgeoisie, a notion later taken up by both Gramsci (1988) and Freire (1970) in his concept of conscientisation. The value of education for the bourgeoisie was oppositely indexed, in terms of its use as an instrument of class rule imbued with the bourgeois caste spirit where an ability to supply obedient lackeys and able workers to the capitalist economies of goods and signs in the interest of profit was central.However, even within the bourgeois educational concept, there was never one kind of education (Beach, 2005a,b). There has always been one education for the poor masses of the population, one for the rich inheritors of wealth and yet a third for the middle classes, such as the book-keeping bureaucrats of the capitalist order (lawyers, accountants etc), who were to orchestra affairs in the dominant class interests. The present research looks ethnographically at the ways in which this 'bourgeois caste tendency' within education operates in several present day neo-liberalising educational contexts. It looks particularly at how the 'trinity' of class reproduction in education takes almost an as open and obvious organisational form as it did within the tripartite system of State education operating in England and Wales for much of the middle portion of the previous century, and the parallel school system operating in Sweden during most of the first half of the 20th century.Correspondence theory and social reproduction theory have been important tool in the research. However, perhaps even more important are the two concepts of useful labour (and its concomitant value form of use value) and productive labour (and its value form of accumulated economic value), as discussed for instance in Marxist literature. In Marxist use these concepts differ from uses in bourgeois economic theory, as in Marxism useful labour is an activity which meets a human need other than the accumulation of capital whilst productive labour is labour that is productive principally in the economic sense, by creating a profit (a form of capital) for someone. It is the antithesis of useful labour and is generally regarded as the unpaid part of labour measured in proportion to the capital invested in and acquired from production that is expropriated from workers and distributed by various means among the capitalist class. The research is in this sense an ethnographic study of the cultural production of education value inside local school communities as they concretely exist as part of a material reality within a context of their interconnections and the connectivity between this aspect of cultural production in school and social reproduction.Ethnographic research using participant and direct obeservation methods, artifact analysis, conversation and documentary analysis and participant interviews (Beach, 2005c; Beach & Dovemark, 2005, Dovemark, 2004). The research has suggested how the changing conditions of production in Sweden have (had) consequences for how we might understand the new unifying concepts of education change. National policy texts (like the various school curricula) and supra-national ones (like e.g. OECD 1996, 2000a,b) have emphasised the need for a reduction in central and rules regulation and an increase in delegated responsibilities, goal-rationality, self-determination and freedom of choice in education. And a new politically expressed interest has become extensively voiced for what learners should become (i.e. creative, self-reliant and discerning consumers and producers of knowledge) rather than what they should know for a lifetime of productive work. What they should become is new education consumers eating selectively from mixtures of starters, main courses and desserts that are sufficiently varied as to be massively abundant and totally available at almost all times on the bourgeoning education markets. However, education equips individuals differentially with respect to this future social goal as consumer. The research suggests what this has implied for education subjects in education practices.Beach, D. (2005a: Ed) Work-package 2: Welfare State Restructuring in Education and Health Care: Implications for the Teaching and Nursing Professions and their Professional Knowledge. Second deliverable in the EU sixth framework project Professional Knowledge in Education and Health: Restructuring work and life between the State and the citizens in Europe http://www.profknow.net/fs-results.html.Beach, D. (2005b) Summarizing General Developments in Teaching and Nursing and Teacher and Nurse Education. In D. Beach (Ed) Welfare State Restructuring in Education and Health Care: Implications for the Teaching and Nursing Professions and their Professional Knowledge. Second deliverable in the EU sixth framework project Professional Knowledge in Education and Health: Restructuring work and life between the State and the citizens in Europe http://www.profknow.net/fs-results.html.Beach, D. (2005c) From fieldwork to theory and representation in ethnography. In Geoff Troman, Bob Jeffrey & Geoffrey Walford (Eds) Methodological issues and Practices in Ethnography. Studies in Educational Ethnography Vol 11. Oxford: JAI Press. Beach, D. & Dovemark, M. (2005a) Kreativitet som kulturell handelsvara: en etnografisk studie om kampen om kreativitet, Didaktisk Tidskrift, 15(1-2), pp. 5-17.Beach, D. & Dovemark, M. (2005b) Creativity as a Cultural Commodity: An Ethnographic Investigation of Struggles over Creativity in Three Swedish Schools. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 4(2). www.jceps.com Dovemark, M. (2004b) Ansvar-flexibilitet-valfrihet. En etnografisk studie om en skola i förändring (Gothenburg Studies in Educational Sciences 223). Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgensis. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogia do Oprimido. (Sw. trans. 1972) Pedagogik för de förtrykta. Stockholm: Gummessons. English translation (1994). Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum. Gramsci, A. (1988) Prison Letters. London & Chicago: Pluto Press. Yes. Part of a book presenting examples of the ethnographic work involved in the research project.