Thirty Years of Secondary Education

Abstract

In his editorial to the European Journal of Education issue on Reform in Secondary Education in 1980, Gabriel Fragniere wrote: 'A few years ago ... several conferences were organised by the Council of Europe or by the OECD on the problems of education of the 16-19 age group and a lot of discussion has been generated, yet without very much success or very many ideas considered progressive enough to induce noticeable reforms.' Fragniere quotes the European Cultural Foundation's Education Without Frontiers (of which he was co-editor): 'Secondary education is being stretched between basic education, which is coming to include the whole of compulsory schooling, and higher education, which is beginning to encompass all post-compulsory education. It seems therefore that this intermediate form of education will by the end of the century no longer have much purpose.' Very provocative thinking indeed. As the end of the century approaches, it seems appropriate to raise the question of whether the above judgment and prophecy have been justified by developments since. In the following I will argue that, perhaps fortunately, Fragniere's views were too pessimistic, that 'secondary education' is more than ever a useful concept and that much reform has been initiated, most of it not spectacular in itself, but upon aggregation and with time leading to significant change. The greatest event that has occurred on the European educational scene is related to the collapse of the former communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. It has led to the virtual disappearance of a political ideology that was translated into educational paradigms, policies and programmes. It would be tempting to examine whether this demise of one of the world's most significant educational theories has had repercussions on educational thinking in the western world, e.g. about the relationship between education and the economy, about the role of common basic schooling, or about the relationship between teaching and research. The scope of this article does not allow me to go into these questions in any depth, but in the following text comparisons between the educational developments in Western and in Central and Eastern Europe will inevitably be drawn.