ABSTRACT
In this essay I intend to ask what happens to the meaning of a theory of education 1 that over a long historical period changes its relations to the broader criticism of society of which it was once an essential part and with which it shared its basic concepts. Concepts basic to the theory of open education include freedom, individualism, process, and self-development. These concepts plus the importance given to the empirical basis for knowledge as well as the relation of activity (experimentation) to the development of knowledge were all central to the critique of society which furnished the ideological base for the rise of capitalism and bourgeois or liberal democracy. I am not claiming that every use of these concepts was offered and intended as a critique of feudal social relations and as a support for the growing capitalist order. Luther and Calvin, for example, do not qualify as democrats, but their concepts of inner freedom contributed to the individualistic concept of freedom so necessary to the justification of our present social order.
