It may seem a little otiose to raise in these pages the notion of the sovereignty of learning at a time when a decade of Conservative government in Britain has secured decisive measures to bring the conduct of schooling into conformity with its own championship of a market economy approach to social policy. The scope and the effects of this new ascendancy in Britain have been explored in a number of recent articles in this journal (Quicke, 1988; Turner, 1989; Jonathan, 1990). Educational reforms inspired by a similar kind of thinking, however, have been widely implemented in the United States during the decade of the 1980s. Some key features of the market approach have also infused educational discourse in other countries, notably Australia and Ireland.