If the term ‘New Education’ (éducation nouvelle, Reformpädagogik) were to mean simply that certain actors or organizations have striven for changes in education, education would have always been ‘New Education’. ‘New Education’ would have existed since antiquity – as a continuous reflexion engagée that constantly challenged the ‘old’ through the ‘new education’ without any clearly discernible demarcation of ‘before’ and ‘after’. But that ignores transformation, without transformation being explainable alone in terms of the self-understanding of the actors. There was indeed an éducation nouvelle as theory and as practice, but it did not begin at a particular point in time, and there was no simple event at its founding. Instead, we have to imagine that there was closely linked reflection that increasingly crystallized around certain themes and motives. As a historiographical category, ‘New Education’, or éducation nouvelle, can be conceived of in various ways: as the history of its founding and charismatic persons, as the configuration of a language, as continuous systemic innovation or as a form of reflection on an alternative. I will focus on the last mentioned variant, because it made ‘New Education’ original and radical. There were educational reforms in the school of the nineteenth century, and its development was different from the authors describing the ‘New Education’ at the end of the century wished to admit, but it was not connected with any great fanfare or publicity. The development of the school in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not go through any great break with the past and has to be seen as a series of successful problem solutions that contradict the polemical semantics of the ‘New Education’. The media, methods and formats of the state institution of the school were adapted and developed continuously, without ever being able to dispense with reform concerns. These concerns presume conformity with the system, which was not questioned, but rather was supposed to be developed. If we are interested to learn how the ‘New Education’ could become a fundamental alternative and challenge to the system, we must take a different start point. New education in this sense emerged in the nineteenth century and was not produced only with the turn of the century, and it had less to do with child psychology and a great deal to do with political movements. It emerged mainly on the grounds of freedom of the child; this issue was new and provided the intellectual appeal that is necessary in order to reach a public outside the education profession. Because the profession of education developed in parallel in time terms, many variants of the new education have been ascribed to it. The author will not follow this line in his presentation, but instead will construct ‘New Education’ independently of the literature of the profession. His example will not stand for the entire ‘New Education’ but certainly for a movement that serves to point up clearly the unique and reflective shape of the ‘New Education’ so far as it sought to be radically different. In a first step, the author discusses the conflict between freedom and order, whereby the focus will be on the controversy between Leo Tolstoy and Jean-Marie Guyau. In a second step, he describes the usual strategy up to today of viewing new schools as providing evidence of ‘New Education’. This theory convinces the audience only if practical success can be implied. He then outlines the opposites of ‘conservative’ versus ‘progressive’ as the political dualism within educational movements. In closing the author shows that progressive schools arose from the principle of freedom, whereas the écoles nouvelles of Cecil Reddie to Hermann Lietz show an underlying Herbartian order and, at least in that regard, could hardly have been the alternatives that they themselves proposed to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]