ABSTRACT
The classical heritage of Greece and Rome, the role of Christianity, and the influence of Western commercialism are painted with broad strokes of the brush. A question of method that arises is whether the Western European idea in education can and should be described, analysed and evaluated exclusively from within. Mallinson returns on several occasions to the "dignity of man" as the essential aspect of the Western European idea in education. The idea of the comprehensive is nothing new in Western Europe, but it was first applied in practice in the USA and the Soviet Union. At the beginning of this century, when education increasingly came to involve "parallel" schools, with one system for compulsory education and another for so-called "higher" education, the USA was the first country to react to the parallel system and the degree of social stratification involved.
