ABSTRACT
As the first two chapters of this book argue, we know that there is something extraordinarily uniform about schools and schooling all around the world. Children and young people are taken from their families, they are disciplined in specially designed institutions in age-defined groupings; curriculum and assessment, although variable, structure the day and the year and stratify occupational futures; and similarly constrained, pedagogy oscillates between the transmissive and the progressive (Baker 2014). The modern 19th-century school was an integral part of the way that the emerging state worked to govern its subjects (Hunter 1994) but of course pre-modern schooling was similarly structured and organised through, for example, the monasteries of Europe and the temples of China.
