ABSTRACT
Despite its many achievements, the extension of schooling throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained a limited operation characterized by the absence of any widespread appreciation of overall purpose, hampered by the primitive and undeveloped state of educational theory. It was a diffuse movement scattered across Europe, conducted by voluntaristic groups with a variety of unusually limited aims, and it is not surprising that in the second part of the eighteenth century many of the philanthropic efforts became exhausted and declined. Inadequately funded, conceptually shortsighted and often administratively inept, and universally based upon the prevailing class structures, they failed to develop because, among other reasons, the circumstances of the times were making different demands; the West, in all of its aspects - intellectual, economic, social and political - was changing at an accelerating pace.
