• the school taken to market ‘Education’ is the mantra of the ‘knowledge society’ we currently live in. Better education is seen as the key to solving the big problems we face at the moment. School is meant to resolve all the upheavals, inequalities and conflicts in society which result from the growing heterogeneity around us. This is the central agenda behind replacing the welfare state with the competitive state. Richard Münch casts a critical eye over this reform agenda, focusing on the USA’s pioneering role. The central focus of this is to replace the educational establishment in the control centres of the culture bureaucracy with an education-industrial complex in which international organisations, think tanks, consulting companies, billionaire missionary foundations, education reformers and educational researchers collaborate with the education industry and test industry to subject the educational process in schools to meticulous external control. The widespread replacement of social policy by education policy leads to merciless competition for educational certificates and, in the final analysis, to a brutal Social Darwinist survival of the fittest. Target group Education policy-makers, educators, lecturers at universities, journalists, teachers of all type of schools, teachers in training, social scientists, sociologists