Improvement

The term "improvement" in general means "gradual, piecemeal, but cumulative betterment", which can refer to both individuals and societies as a whole.

[3] It emerged in late medieval England and later shaped the colonies of the British Empire, through what Richard Drayton describes as "enlightened imperialism".

[4] This limited agricultural use of the term changed in the 17th century, when "its metaphoric range was extended to include a host of social and political reforms aimed at growth, development, or perfection".

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche criticized this concept of "improvement" in his notes published in The Will to Power, asserting that it created a false and self-serving sense of human superiority over nature, and that the "civilizing" of man was actually a "softening".

It is therefore difficult to fully understand the history of “improvement” as a concept and to appreciate that it was a genuinely new way of thinking in the early modern period.

The poor family who were denied a crucial means of subsistence did not regard the newly enclosed fields as “better”.

Recently, we have seen a push for evaluation systems to be used to sort and fire teachers—a supposed quick fix, but one that ignores the vast majority of dedicated educators.