ABSTRACT
Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, Western educational thought was dominated by utopian and progressive aspirations for a new era in education, and although European and American conceptions differed there was a high degree of unanimity on the need for concerted action to ensure that education became universally available as a means of both personal development and preparation for responsible social involvement, civic and vocational. Accompanying these hopes was the conception of the school as a transformed institution, no longer built on the model of the grim factory or squalid prison of nineteenth-century industrialism, but a centre of creative, cooperative learning. Much progressive thought was given to structure as well as function, and in some experimental ventures the school was reorganized architecturally. Unfortunately, imagination always soars beyond the reach of practicality and there was no possibility that utopian aspirations could be fulfilled on any wide scale. Experimental schools were limited to a tiny sector of European society in only a few countries, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, northern France and the United States, which were, in the period, the pacesetter nations of the industrial West. Elsewhere, economies were weak 441and there was little realistic basis on which minimal mass education could be built, much less the shining images of the new era. There were a multitude of impediments; not only did the dominant nations control most of the productive power of the West - indeed, of the world - but there were cultural forces, both religious and social, that resisted change. In most of underdeveloped Europe education was closely linked with the conservative established churches - Catholic in central, eastern and southern Europe, Orthodox in Russia and the Balkans - and the populations were predominantly rural peasantry with neither an appreciation of, nor a desire for, urbanization, industrial development and the social turmoil that had inevitably accompanied these processes.
