The problems of education change: Working from the ruins of progressive education

This paper is based on the disclosures from several investigations of education change in situations where institutional arrangements combine within communication processes, laws, norms and traditions which can be oppositional to intentions. It concerns the power relays of present institutional arrangements which help form protected environments for certain kinds of practices in education but not others. A central argument of the paper is thus that progressive, transformational change is at present essentially a ruined but also restorable possibility. Regulation theory has played an important part in the re-analysis of the data behind the paper.