Description: New Education is a term which refers to a multitude of educational changes from the end of nineteenth century up as far as today. The different movements in different regions and countries of the world, where New Education has arisen and evolved shows this multi-polarity of New Education. It is based on different "national", ideological and religious traditions of institutionalisation in the educational field, in different state-building processes and different religious and confessional embeddings - and therefore also on different concepts of knowledge. Thus, basing learning on knowledge or changing that grounding by redefining education according to concepts of New Education means different things in relation to specific forms of the institutionalisation of knowledge as a social and ideological reference system. In that regard the differences between language-area or culture-historical specific forms of New Education, Éducation Nouvelle, Reformpädagogik, Attivismo, etc. could be described as emerging historical figurations of social and cultural factors changing different things in a different way throughout the twentieth century. New Education movements in the first decades oft the twentieth century emerge in a small number of countries of the European occident as roughly similar but differently accentuated. Its core elements spread to an ever growing number of countries in all of the other world regions, as part of evolving and changing figurations, yet maintaining a set of similar or even identical principals and orientations. So what could bring out such a difference-oriented approach of New Education to elaborate and propose a comprehensive representation of educational movements which could be understood and interpreted all over the world as a change of the forms of education in changing societies? In that perspective I shall discuss the following questions: 1. Educational reform movements from the end of nineteenth up to the first decades of twentieth century are very different with regard to their scientific and ideological references and their socio-political embeddings and outcomes. Is there a common grounding mainstream which could be identified as a unique cause of these movements in the industrialised countries of the old occident? 2. In this case: what are the specific ways these tendencies took to come out in institutional, political and ideological (scientific) changes. Which social and historical conditions of representing changes in a society would interfere in this processes and what is the relation between these specificity of interfering processes and their specific outcomes? What is the role of knowledge in such processes and under such conditions? Different types of New Education suggest different answers on the role knowledge-concepts in the history of these societies. These differences of knowledge concepts imply - on a secondary level of conceptions - different interpretations of New Education and their institutionalisation. Trying to understand these different relationship implies the danger of misunderstandings and debatable attributions concerning historical educational developments.