ABSTRACT
In the industrialized countries schooling has been developed to a level that probably cannot be further extended in a meaningful way. I am referring to ‘schooling’ as a service primarily addressed to the education of children and adolescents in specialized structures which are organized in a rather uniform way from the temporal and spatial point of view – a definition which can be applied to schooling as it has been practised since the sixteenth century in Europe. Nowadays, almost the whole population is involved in sequential schooling for a substantial number of years. Compulsory schooling, which used to be limited to primary education and to some years of secondary, is now being extended to the completion of secondary education for an increasing number of youngsters, and it is possible to note the same trend in higher education too.
