ABSTRACT
Coherent agendas of social purpose stem from commitments to belief systems that have some degree of internal consistency, at least in the minds of adherents and advocates. Such belief systems are, in effect, the ideologies behind the major policy platforms of interest groups and, although often in a much less pure sense, behind the platforms of major political parties. An important thread of political thought and commitment today one that is clearly much more recent than the other two major threads of laissez-faire capitalism and equalitarianism, is an orientation toward the preservation of fundamental cultural, and even language-use, differences in a pluralistic society. Frequently this view of what we ought to become as peoples and nations is accompanied by a commitment to structural pluralism: different institutions for different groups in society. In recent years, the imagination of social critics and policy-makers has been particularly fecund in devising, and often testing, alternative arrangements for schooling.
