ABSTRACT
The examination of patterns of change brings the analysis up to the present time. It involves a discussion of current educational practices and problems, but it consistently links these back to prior processes of interaction and to even earlier processes of structural conditioning. In other words, the contemporary characteristics of educational systems and the activities that take place within them are grounded in history and cannot be explained without reference to their genesis and subsequent development. The task of this Chapter is not to describe these historical changes or to assess the performance of modern educational systems – these are the preserves of the educational historian and the comparative educationalist. The sociological contribution consists in providing a theoretical account of macroscopic patterns of change in terms of the structural and cultural factors which produce and sustain them.
