The book addresses contemporary ideological discourses concerning education in the United Kingdom. It provides a synthetic analysis of the roots of the political changes in education in the UK from the tenth to the first decade of the twenty-first century, with particular emphasis on the last hundred years. It presents British political and education thought during the tenth through the sixteenth centuries, then in the Age of Enlightenment, showing the roles of the positivist current in British education, the Chartist movement, and educational changes related to them. The remainder of the book focuses on the trends and stages of educational development up to World War II, the postwar reform of the education system in England and Wales, the neoliberal trend in the educational policy of Britain, and the genesis of the 1998 educational reforms in England and Wales and their consequences up to 2013.
