Crises in Education: What's Right or Wrong?

• In Event: 47.035 - Crossing Borders: Ideas and Policies in Comparative Settings

Abstract

In Western countries throughout the history of public schooling there has always been debate on what’s “right or wrong” with schools during reforms of the education system. This paper identifies and analyses influential sources from the 19th and 20th Centuries that shaped public discourse on the state of education when it was said to be in “crisis”. These sources cover hopes and fears of societies longing for a better future, or debate their state (“languages of crisis”). It is not the actual state of schooling that is crucial for crisis diagnosis, but rather the social and political interactions, which create anxiety by insisting that something fundamental must be done about a nation’s school system.

Author

• Bernhard A. Hemetsberger, University of Vienna