ABSTRACT
Education departments influence the economy through the values and dispositions concerning children, society, curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation with which they imbue their pre-service and advanced students. Many of the institutions into which the former colleges of education were reorganized validated their awards through the Council for National Academic Awards. In the early 1970s, with an expansion of higher education numbers in prospect, the colleges of education were encouraged to diversify their work beyond the initial preparation of teachers and to become more fully integrated into the higher education system. During the 1950s and '60s what has come to be called the 'four disciplines' (history, psychology, philosophy, and sociology) approach to the study of education became almost universal, to a considerable extent replacing courses hitherto based on 'great educator' sequences and child study. Both as profession and as field of study education is culture-and system-bound in a way that, for example, biotechnology or particle physics is not.
