Higher education as self-formation

I found this really helpful for revisiting my PhD, seven years on, in order to finally publish from it. I’m broadly sympathetic with the project expressed in this lecture but the point of departure is his claim that higher education increases the capacity for reflexivity. This just isn’t true as an empirical generalisation and examining the cases where this imperative, in so far as we can meaningfully say it is an institutional priority, fails in its own terms can help us revise some of the problematic assumptions about agency here without abandoning the commitment to recovering it as a salient variable in explaining social life.