A conference to honour the memory of Brian Simon (1915-2002) was a privilege and a challenge for its organizing committee. Simon was an educationist and an activist, a chronicler and a critic. His intellectual field encompassed psychology, pedagogy and politics as well as history. His legacy was both to education and to its history. Any 're-visioning' of this legacy, as promised by the conference, would therefore be directed not only at the period of educational change through which he lived and the role he played in it, but also at the historiography to which he contributed so significantly.