ABSTRACT
During the last two decades, educational planning has been unable to regain the level of relative confidence that it enjoyed in the past. Several factors have contributed to the erosion of the effectiveness of planning as a tool for the development of education. These include a technocratic outlook on development processes, a naive view of the power of education, recurrent economic crises, and a growing emphasis on a neo-classical economic approach to finding solutions to social problems. This has been aggravated by the theoretical and practical exhaustion of current development paradigms which exacerbate the contradictions, in the role of key social institutions such as the state and the school, and in their relationships with the society at large.
