A RISING TIDE of professional sentiment in the world is questioning a view of society which equates schooling with education. Inspired by the credo of relevance, this tide is challenging the validity of existing patterns of educational provision and stimulating a search for alternatives. The leading apostles of this contagious iconoclasm view the school itself as the major obstacle to economic and social development and advocate its abolition.2 The revelationary force of their criticism has stimulated widespread and beneficial rethinking about the purposes and process of education. However, despite the trenchant logic which has accompanied it the deschooling prescription is not based on new empirical understanding of the relationships between schools and society. It seems rather to reflect a heightened awareness of such pressing social problems as educated unemployment, economic inequality, and student elitism and the choice of institutional education as a scapegoat for them. The decision to abolish the school seems premature unless it derives from a comparison of both school and nonschool types of educational program and an empirical assessment of their relative contribution to economic growth, employment creation, social equality, or whatever are the principal goals of national policy. In the absence of definitive data which point inexorably to the abolition of the school it seems appropriate to treat educational enterprises outside the formal system not as self-evident substitutes for it but as shadow systems. These shadow systems have meaning firstly in the extent to which they may complement the formal system by meeting needs which it is not covering, and secondly in the extent to which they display principles which may have wider application in the national system. A number of such shadow systems have sprung up recently in various countries. Examples range from the British open university and the American free school to the National Service of Tanzania, Brigades in Botswana, and Escuela al Campo in Cuba. The claim for such practices is often that their flexibility enables them to be more responsive to the needs of individ-