ABSTRACT
In the educational system of an industrial society, the influences of two crucial forces of modernization, the economic and the political, blend in and conflict with the respective cultural system of a nation which was formed in the course of a long history. An extensive educational system, in which every adolescent is bound to take part for many years, provides the institutional framework. The school of the Middle Ages therefore lacked a substructure; it was meant to be higher education from the very beginning. Elementary education was carried out only within the domain of the family or of craft apprenticeship. The principle of organizing education in Germany on the basis of territorial independence gained in importance when, as a result of the Reformation, the vernacular elementary education was established as a kind of religious education. The development was radically different from the emerging reorganization of the school system in the United States, another swiftly developing industrial country.
