ABSTRACT
The questions dealt with here are macroscopic ones: how do educational systems develop and how do they change? The nature of these problems means that our approach to them must be both historical and comparative. If sociology is to add to the work of the educational historian and the comparative educationalist it must be by developing theories which over-arch their findings. This is what the present study attempts to do – to account for the characteristics and contours of national educational systems and their processes of change. However, it goes about this in a particular way because of the conviction that macroscopic educational problems can best be approached through macro-sociological theory.
