This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and progressive politics in the contemporary period. Limiting the curriculum to experiential knowledge limits access to a powerful class resource; that of conceptual knowledge required for critical reasoning and political agency. Knowledge that comes from experience limits the knower to that experience. The shift to localised knowledge fixes groups in the working class to a never ending present as schools that use a social constructivist approach to knowledge in the curriculum fail to provide the intellectual tools of conceptual thinking and its medium in advanced literacy that lead to an imagined, yet unknown, future. (Contains 2 notes.)