ABSTRACT
The optimistic breakthrough in the western world of the 1960s and 1970s towards social modernization in the field of education can be seen as an example of an innovative new beginning. The humanistic and the critical move rapidly into the policy background due to the policy imperative for numerical criteria and the change in teaching efforts leading to a mandate for immediate and visible output of data from prescribed lesson contents. As a general consequence, the three aspects of bigger, tighter and harder in policy reforms are deeply restrictive, neglecting local cultural needs and specific conditions of schools, controlling effects on the sole basis of rigorous data and unspecific scientific theories and rejecting a more open systemic view in a broader political context. According to John Murray, teachers engaged in teacher education as second-order practitioners are of special importance for policy impulses for curricular innovation. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
