The development of education and schooling in modern times emerged from the priorities of religion and politics in the sixteenth-century transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation. Subsequently, liberal ideas about the maintenance and advancement of life on earth fostered a new dualism, between educational science and politics. The development of modern schooling was implicated in these changes; and different trajectories of "great" (or systematic) and "small" (or schoolroom) didactics, open and closed curricula, heavenly and temporal salvation became part of the modernist, nation-related project. The advent of transnational, globalised regimes since the end of the nineteenth century, however, has gradually created a new political agenda for schooling. To understand this agenda, it may be useful to return to past circumstances and, in the process, clarify perceptions of the future.