Comprehensive Education Consolidated

Abstract

This chapter investigates the continuing impact of social democracy on the development of comprehensive education in the period after the Second World War. As will be seen, forms of social democracy continued to develop in all the countries under investigation here, either in the classic mode of social democratic parties, as in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, or in the particular laborist and liberal mutations found in Britain. Here Labor remained the only major party on the center-left of politics, despite a short-lived breakaway to forge an alternative Social Democratic Party between 1981 and 1988 (the Social Democratic Party merged in 1988 with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democratic Party). Historians and state theorists (Judt, 2005; Jessop, 2002) have identified the period from 1945 to 1970, at least in the northern part of Western Europe, as the age, par excellence, of Keynesian welfare capitalism, characterized by mixed economies, full-employment policies, and expanding welfare states. To a significant degree this represented a near consensus across mainstream parties around some of the key principles of social democracy. However, political systems, economic models, and welfare regimes still differed in crucial respects. When, in the early 1970s, the Keynesian postwar “consensus” began to break down, under the growing pressure of rising oil prices, industrial unrest, and declining capital profitability, countries began to chart different courses to reach new, more durable political settlements.