ABSTRACT
The comprehensive school must continually review and refashion itself if it is to further the ideals, which inspired it, of creating a more equal and fairer society of opportunity for all to develop their powers and capacities. The author arguments will be that at the centre of the new learning is the making and remaking of civil society. The social and economic changes which have been accelerating since the mid-1970s imply structural transformations for the people society. The experience of cultural difference can also be one of otherness and exclusion. Cultures codify the essential boundaries of social classification. The trends towards fragmentation implied in the post-modern society threaten to undermine the cooperation and trust that define a community and thus the possibility of cooperative action upon which any society depends. The post-war social democratic polity emphasized a passive public, taking its lead from professional experts and distant elected representatives.
