ABSTRACT
We begin this chapter with an historical perspective on the development of schooling as a publicly organized practice. In the twentieth century, many nation-states attempted to embody their members’ daily needs in terms of a set of programmatic provisions. People came to invest their domestic and public aspirations in institutionalized programmes: health became heard as medical service, justice as legal service, community support as welfare, even tending the dying as palliative care, and so on. And acculturation and education came to be heard as schooling. The extent to which nation-states transformed themselves into service states by providing programmes for living became a hallmark of their modernity. The adequacy with which they sustained these provisions became a predictor of their political credibility and stability
Taking on increased educational responsibilities brought with it organizational imperatives. Governments centralized the public administration of schooling and regulated it with legislation for managing and funding schools, training teachers and providing materials and procedures for accounting for the institutions’ performance. The fact that governments legally compel children to spend ten to twelve years in schooling does not astonish us now only because so much of the duty of acculturating the young has been thoroughly transferred to public administration. Among other things, this process entailed installing and regulating a standard, administrable model of the clientele, of the Child. This, in turn, involved attending to the question of who and what were ‘the young’, what were their needs and what did societies need from them? What was this object of professional, governmental education? How did governmental systems describe it in ways that made it both amenable to bureaucratic administration and compatible with public understandings?
