Patterns of Control: Reforming West-European Schools

Abstract

In Britain, as in all European countries, educational reform has featured prominently in the development and evolution of social policies. In the immediate post-war period the task of reconstruction, the requirements of the rapidly expanding school population and the pressure to establish free and compulsory secondary education contributed a first phase of renewal. In the 1950s the democratization of schooling and the reform of institutional structures provided a second focus for social enquiry and, frequently, for legislative action. In the following decade interest moved to the content and curriculum of schooling. Numerous highly publicized subject based reform projects, designed to usher in an age of modernization through new and liberalized approaches to pedagogy, received widespread attention. They also attracted extensive funding from governmental and non-governmental sources. The outcomes were often controversial and, in the economic climate of the 1 970s, few projects were implemented in the form originally envisaged. More recently very different approaches to curriculum reform on a national scale have evolved with the implementation of centrally directed highly inter-