He spent the time in which individual and collective purposes of education, from the perspective of the student or teacher, were clear or could be taken for granted. The plurality of objectives of the sectors involved, the rapid succession of institutional reforms, uncertainties regarding the professional task - not to speak of individual and collective diversity - increasing demands of freedom and experimentation, supervening multiculturalism or rampant globalization draw a new stage both attractive and menacing, full of opportunities but stuffed full of risks. Social change exceeds the rate of school change; the value of work wobbles in the knowledge society; the right to citizenship is doomed to an inevitable struggle with the limits of the nation state; family and school fail to find the path of dialogue; social criteria of equality and justice are difficult to accommodate in school; school organizations squeak to the turmoil of their environment; the teaching profession is debated in search of a satisfactory identity. This work seeks to take away, but with depth, the processes of change that the school and the teaching profession to thereby return the active role both before had in social development are immersed