Blackboards and Bootstraps: Revisioning education and schooling contributes to an international conversation about public education that, in recent decades, has been attenuated if not silenced by advocates of neoliberalism, marketisation and neocorporatism. Written for a wide audience, this book is not a manifesto for the twenty-first century. It is more of an invitation than a blueprint. In drawing a distinction between education and schooling, it identifies, recovers and explores many ideas about education and schooling that are no less important to the practice of the present than they were to the pedagogues of the past. The introduction questions the role of schooling in the future trajectory of spaceship earth. The remainder of the book considers these questions by revisiting a range of ideas that underpin current practice. It launches itself by returning to the sixteenth century, a time when the organisation and conduct of modern schooling took shape around a new set of terms –...