6 Kostas Dimopoulos
Taking into account all three dimensions, one can identify two ideal type educational
programs, broadly reflecting the socio-cultural shifts in knowledge and cultural reproduction
in the period from the aftermath of the second world war to nowadays. In effect we use a
Foucauldian approach according to which history is not a continuous, smooth, progressive
and developmental process. Instead history is divided in phases that specific forms of
rationality and regimes of truth prevail (Foucault, 1981). Therefore we seek for the ̳effective
history‘ of schooling, a view of the past that emphasizes discontinuity, rupture and
displacement of not ̳institutions‘, ̳theories‘ or ̳ideologies‘, but ̳practices‘, with the aim of
grasping the socio-cultural conditions which make these acceptable at a given historical
period.
Of course, discursive shifts are necessarily difficult to fix, therefore the terminology and
the periodization introduced need to be interpreted in a flexible way. Specifically, the
characteristic features of each ideal type should not be treated as the only ones occurring in
the corresponding historical period but as mainly policy trends. In the next section each one
of the two ideal types will be described in more detail.
2.1. The First Ideal Type: Modern Schooling (Aftermath of the Second
World War Until the Mid Seventies)
The first ideal type of schooling corresponds to the prevailing socio-cultural climate of
the period from the aftermaths of the second world war until approximately the mid-seventies.
It seems to resonate well with the notion of modernity and more specifically with its tenets
about the existence of universal and absolute truths, the faith in grand narratives such as the
continual progress of the sciences and of techniques as well as the rational division of
industrial work (Habermas, 1981; Giddens, 1991). At the political level modernity is
superimposed over postwar welfarism and equality of opportunities initiatives. This ideal type
of schooling is mainly characterized by:
a) selection of the content to be taught on the basis of epistemic criteria i.e. on the basis
of prevailing conceptual and methodological frameworks in each separate discipline,
b) knowledge based objectives and competence models of assessment, and
c) explicitly hierarchical social relationships between persons, subjects or whole
programs, i.e. emphasis on transmission, lower social positioning of learners with
respect to teachers who represent highly specialized and high status knowledge
domains (Koulaidis and Dimopoulos, 2006).a. Content Selection
The content to be taught in the education programs falling closer to this ideal type is
selected on the basis of internal criteria of each epistemic community of what constitutes
valid knowledge and valid methodologies for producing new such knowledge. Therefore
particular emphasis is given on the presentation of the conceptual network of each specialized
discipline, as well as on the grasp of the essential procedures employed in it for making
knowledge claims. In other words what is attempted to be transmitted in this case is the