What should be the relationship between early childhood and compulsory education? While it's widely assumed that the former should prepare children for the latter, there are alternatives. This book contests the 'readying for school' relationship as neither self-evident nor unproblematic, and explores some alternative relationships.

This book documents and critiques the historical origins and historiography of schooling and teacher preparation in New Zealand. The country has a unique educational history, as the overview of the history and development of schools for the nation's children, both Pakeha (European) and Maori, will highlight.

Original blurb: "The volume of writing on educational topics has increased so prodigiously in recent years that the student is likely to lose himself in a sea of print. This may lead him to opt for the first book that comes to hand, or waste time rifling through half a dozen when a thorough grasp of one key text is all that is needed. Reading lists commonly look impressive, not to say daunting. In fact, the multifarious titles conceal an enormous amount of duplication, an endless raking over of other people’s research findings. ‘It is a safe bet’, writes W. Kenneth Richmond, ‘that less than 5 percent of the contents of any new book on education will be in any way original’." This critical bibliography, originally published in 1972, is concerned with the noteworthy books and major official reports that had appeared in the English language during the twenty-five years prior to publication. In his introduction and in the commentaries prefacing each section the author explains the background to the genuinely new departures of the period and describes successive changes in the climate of educational opinion.

New Zealand has been a veritable “laboratory” for a range of social experiments in the last twenty years, including an arranged marriage with neo-liberal economic policies during the late 80s and 90s. These experiments extended to education, where students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers have experienced wide-ranging “reforms” in administration, curriculum and qualifications. The most contentious of these have been a series of untrialled and radical qualifications reforms. This book offers a critical examination of these reforms from the perspective of a group of educators who resisted them by doing the unthinkable: devising their own national qualification and making it work.