Social Change and Education in Greece

Aims to inform students, scholars, and educators about the complex processes and factors that promote or impede education's potential to enhance individual advancement within the socioeconomic structure of a late-industrialized country within the context of modern capitalism. 

'Social Change and Education in Greece is a probing and trenchant analysis of the class dynamics of Greek society and the social, cultural, and educational fallout from the war on Greek democracy by the transnational capitalist class. This is necessary reading for any comprehensive understanding of capitalism today.'

- Peter McLaren, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

"Spyros Themelis's research on social inequalities and their relationship to education is an insightful analysis of social reality in postwar and post-civil war Greece. Discussing a time when education still functioned as a vehicle for social mobility, this book illuminates how a cultural minority, a semi-agrarian Gypsy community, fought its way into mainstream society. Seen from the perspective of the growing gap between a diminishing middle class and the real holders of material and symbolic capital in post-crisis Greece, Themelis's book could explain also why the integrative pattern he describes for the past is no longer valid for large segments of the population undergoing a painful experience of downward social mobility in contemporary Greece."

- Athan Gotovos, Professor of Education, University of Ioannina, Greece

Spyros Themelis is Lecturer in Education at Middlesex University, UK. His publications adopt a critical perspective on issues of education and meritocracy, social mobility, Roma/Gypsy/Travellers and minorities, and social and educational policy. He has published in various journals, including the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Journal of Youth Studies, Research in Comparative and International Education, and Romani Studies.