Manzer's comparative political study of schools in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States focuses on five fundamental problems in the historical development of Anglo-American educational regimes: the original creation of systems of elementary education in the nineteenth century as publicly provided and publicly governed; the transformation of secondary schools in the early twentieth century to match the emerging structure of occupational classes in capitalist industrial economies; the planning for secondary schools in the development of the welfare state after the Second World War; the accommodation of social diversity in public schools from the 1960s to the 1990s in response to increasingly strong assertions of ethnicity, language, race, and religion, not only as criteria for equal treatment, but also as foundations of communal identity; and more.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.