Education and schooling: from modernity to postmodernity

Abstract

The development of education and schooling in modern times emerged from the priorities of religion and politics in the sixteenth‐century transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation. Subsequently, liberal ideas about the maintenance and advancement of life on earth fostered a new dualism, between educational science and politics. The development of modern schooling was implicated in these changes; and different trajectories of ‘great’ (or systematic) and ‘small’ (or schoolroom) didactics, open and closed curricula, heavenly and temporal salvation became part of the modernist, nation‐related project. The advent of transnational, globalised regimes since the end of the nineteenth century, however, has gradually created a new political agenda for schooling. To understand this agenda, it may be useful to return to past circumstances and, in the process, clarify perceptions of the future.