ABSTRACT
This attempt at historical analysis will also, necessarily, draw on my own perceptions during the half century that I have been involved in education, first as a schoolchild who entered an all-age elementary school in 1944, progressing through a rural grammar school and a new university to pursue my own career in education. I began that career as a teacher in comprehensive and grammar schools and went on to spend many years in teacher education. Inevitably, I have developed views on the nature of the changes that have taken place in the profession during that time. But this is not intended as some kind of autobiography, nor as the nostalgic reflections of someone looking back to a lost golden age. Whilst this book necessarily draws on and is to some degree reflective of my own experience, it is rather an attempt to unravel what seems to me to be one of the historical puzzles which still hangs over these years, and that puzzle concerns the complex links between the aspirations of educators, the politics of education and what actually goes on in the classrooms.
