ABSTRACT
The historical study of the relationship between education and social change has become a key dimension in the history of education internationally. In the US, Bailyn’s critique of the field (Bailyn 1960) insisted that this relationship was not simply unidirectional, from society to education, but was interactive in nature. According to Bailyn, ‘education not only reflects and adjusts to society; once formed, it turns back upon it and acts upon it’ (ibid., p. 48). Further to this, Bailyn regarded this relationship as essentially positive and liberatory in its effects on American society and the national character (see also McCulloch 2005b, p. 5). Lawrence Stone, also based in the US, chose the history of education as the focus for a regular research seminar held at the Shelby Cullan Davis Centre for Historical Studies at Princeton University from 1969, the contributors to which as Stone explained were ‘all interested in the relationship between formal education and other social processes, rather than with the history of educational institutions as such, or with the history of changes in the curriculum and scholarship as such’ (Stone 1975, p. vi). Stone’s own approach to this relationship differed from that of Bailyn in being more modest and piecemeal, and although he remained centrally concerned with the nature of the interaction involved he concluded that ‘no clear relationship emerges from which a general theory can be constructed’ (Stone 1976, p. xi).
