As contemporary education becomes increasingly tied to global economic power, national school systems attempting to influence one another inevitably confront significant tensions caused by differences in heritage, politics, and formal structures. Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the reform movements that seek to homogenize schooling around the world. Informed by historical and sociological insight into a variety of nations and eras, these in-depth case studies reveal how and why sweeping, convergent reform agendas clash with specific institutional policies, practices, and curricula. Countering current theoretical models which fail to address the potential pressures born from these challenging isomorphic developments, this book illuminates the cultural idiosyncrasies that both produce and problematize global reform efforts and offers a new way of understanding curriculum as a manifestation of national identity.

"This book really comes together.What it shows—time and time again, in a variety of national contexts and time periods—is that efforts to import school policies and curricula and practices from elsewhere always experience an intense interaction with national policies and curricula and practices. It’s not that globalization efforts have no impact; it’s that this impact is nonlinear and not at all necessarily in the intended direction. National systems of schooling use international initiatives for their own purposes, just as globalizers try to use national vulnerabilities to advance their own agendas."

--David F. Labaree, Stanford University, USA

Daniel Tröhler is Professor of Education and Director of the Doctoral School in Educational Sciences at the University of Luxembourg and visiting Professor of Comparative Education at the University of Granada, Spain.Thomas Lenz is a post-doctoral research associate at the Research Unit for Education, Culture, Cognition and Society (ECCS) at the University of Luxembourg. He was a scientific collaborator at the University of Trier, Germany, and has taught courses at Hamline University, USA and at the Babes-Bolyai University, Romania