This symposium is focused on the incorporation of manual and practical work into the curriculum and pedagogical practice of public schools and education.  Drawing from both theoretical and empirically based research, the four papers in the symposium will cover three aspects related to the theme of work and schooling. First, the papers will critically discuss ways that public schools and education often prepares students for integration into a work force more and more shaped by globalization and accelerated technological change. Secondly, the papers will discuss how educational policies in selected European countries confront the relationship between schooling and work, trying to devise programmes that combine general and vocational elements while still trying to accommodate demands from the labour market. And thirdly, the papers will discuss how school-based forms of manual, practical, and collaborative work can be integrated into public school curriculum in a way that serve as a buttress against the immateriality of contemporary pedagogical trends and the existential desperation endemic to students' vocational future.

The participants in the symposium neither share the same perspective in terms of how they envision work being effectively integrated into school curriculum, nor do they necessarily agree on the relationship that automation and technology should have to the kinds of work that may be practiced in formal educational settings. In spite of their differing positions however, the participants agree that new aspects of global capitalism along with associated changes in our relationship to technology, necessitate a reconsideration of how work is being conceived of within the context of public school curriculum.

In different ways, the papers of the symposium offer up a critique of the future of labour, while considering the ways that a new pedagogy of work focused on the incorporation of manual and practical work into public schools can be utilized in order to open students up to new collaborative processes.  It will be argued that the integration of work into public school curriculum holds a potential to reinforce and defend the corporeal dimensions of learning in the increasingly immaterial conditions found in formal educational and work environments today.  

The symposium will draw on empirical studies of work-related programmes in public schooling and education (especially secondary schooling), as well as on the work of philosophers and critical theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Ernst Junger, Gilles Deleuze, John Dewey, Karl Marx, Oscar Negt and Baruch Spinoza, and along with educational theorists such as Celestin Freinet and Ivan Illich. The symposium seeks to analyse and discuss current developments and dilemmas concerning manual and practical work in public schooling, but it also seems to develop a curricular exit strategy from the resigned and docile ways that schools typically acquiesce to the vocational demands of the market place. An important objective during this symposium is to instigate a discussion about how public schools can utilize particular forms of manual and practical work in their curriculum in order to open students up to alternative relationships with the world and each other.

References are given for the individual papers