Life course and education – a theoretical framework

This chapter will clarify and conceptualise the meaning and the research implications of the concept of educational trajectories from the two underlying basic concepts: education and life course. The concept of life course allows to evaluate the adequacy of education for social integration, as it describes how in modern societies individual lives have been standardised by institutionalising distinct life phases and the transitions between them. Historically, (public) education was introduced to prepare children for the demands of adulthood related to employment, family and citizenship; education thereby contributed to the emergence of youth as a life phase (Zinnecker 2013/1997). Ongoing differentiation and de-standardisation of life courses have extended the perspective of schooling towards lifelong learning (Field and Leicester 2002). Accordingly, life courses are addressed as lifelong educational trajectories. In order to design a common theoretical framework for the chapters of the report (Life course and Education), in the first section we introduce the concept and perspective of the life course as an institutionalised order of life ages and its most recent developments and the transformation of the traditional concept of education into (lifelong) learning. This implies relating institutionally foreseen trajectories to individual reconstructions in terms of subjective biographies (structure vs. agency). According to the dual focus of the GOETE project on educational tra-jectories and disadvantage, in the following sections the meaning of school transitions is highlighted, particularly the passage from lower secondary to upper secondary education and vocational training. Special consideration is given to those analyses and theories that regard education more as a powerful factor of social reproduction than of equal opportunities. From a comparative perspective, we are especially interested in which ways transitions are institutionalised in different countries on the one hand, and the decision-making processes in transitions on the other; processes which we do not see as merely individual but as interactive. Consequently, we focus on the actors involved and consider the contribution of both institutional gatekeepers and significant others to the decision making of students. The final section is dedicated to research questions which derive from the theoretical perspectives applied throughout this report as well as other reports of the GOETE project.