Conclusion: Reflections on the historicality of education systems

Abstract

What are the conditions under which education systems change? In seeking answers, social historians often look along trajectories, explaining the meaning of events by their relation to the unfolding of social experience. Whether the researcher takes a narrative view and constructs a story of a community or a state, or takes an analytic and quantitative approach, the focus is always the same: the sequential development of social outcomes. However, as the sociologist Andrew Abbot notes, "The social process doesn’t have outcomes. It just keeps on going."1