Education during these thirty years exhibited certain similar characteristics all over the world which enables us to view them together across the national boundaries. Accordingly we shall be concerned not with the various nations one by one, but with aspects of education illustrated from time to time by some particular nation.

The study of the development and content of education cannot but be ecological. Systems do not flourish in the air. They affect and are affected by the social, political, intellectual and religious structure as well as by the movements of their time. Of no period was this more true than of the last third of the nineteenth century. This was a period of the aftermath of wars in Europe, in America, in China and the Far East. It was a period of vast industrial expansion and of the rise into importance of the working class. It was a period of the expansion of Europe into Africa and elsewhere. And above all it was a period of secularisation. The Church, even in Catholic countries, was losing its grip on one department of life and thought after another. In education it saw the emergence of education as a civil right and as the concern of the whole community as such, instead of being merely a private or sectional concern.

One of the earliest aims of education, an aim as old as Plato, was the training of a social elite in the art of government. This attitude to education, which assumed that ability went with status, was but slowly replaced. It was not until the nineteenth century that an educational elite was recognised anywhere as an alternative to one that was purely social.