Abstract

The question posed in this paper is why education reform movements don’t seem to bring the expected improvements and lead only to calls for new reforms. The paper seeks answers to this question by interpreting (a) teacher-students classroom interactions, and (b) interactions between ideologues of school reform movements and the public, in terms of certain concepts from Transactional Analysis theory, particularly the notion of Rescue Game. The focus is on reform movements in North America since early nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the writings of the main ideologue of the Common School Movement, Horace Mann, and to the phenomenon of survival until today of the bureaucratic public school system whose foundations were laid during this movement.