All humans that grow up attending or adjacent to schools are likely to develop intuitive everyday “theories” about the nature, purpose, function, and potential optimization of schooling within society.
Some humans will go on to advance and refine these everyday ethnotheories through scientific investigation, knowledge synthesis, and/or other disciplinary ways of knowledge building. Thus, there exists across humanity a vast and diverse landscape of such Theories of Schooling, which can, locally and collectively, form a foundation for community-based school improvement processes everywhere.