Audacious Education Purposes – How Governments Transform the Goals of Education Systems

As the demands for civic and economic participation increase, the result of technological, economic and social transformations, and in response to a rapidly changing world and to new challenges, many governments have turned to schools to provide students with opportunities to develop the skills necessary to thrive. This chapter traces the roots of education reforms that seek to develop a breadth of skills, to educate the whole child, reviewing the emergence of the field of comparative education as the first public education systems were created, and examining the role of the international development architecture built after world war II in advancing the global education movement.