Education and Society: a Plea for a Historicised Approach

In the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, ways of thinking in the Western world transformed in fundamental ways; even words that remained the same took on new meanings. In the field of the history of ideas, the period 1700–1850 is also called the ‘saddle‐period’. Philosophers of history have argued that the new basic concepts that emerged at this time indicate how social reality has come to be comprehended in the modern era. Various segments of the population relied on them to act, understand, interpret and reform reality. These concepts are crucial to the discursive constitution of the world—in the economy, politics, science, art, education and so on. They play their part in the dissolution of the ‘old’ world and the emergence of a ‘new’ one. They can thus also be studied with regard to their functioning as both factors in and indicators of evolutionary processes. This article deals with a small aspect of the historical co‐evolution of concepts and structures in education. It examines the non‐random character of the variations in the discourses on the social function of education, especially in the eighteenth century.