Proefschrift.. !mpulse is part of the comprehensive school Piter Jelles in Leeuwarden striving for new forms of education known as new learning. After a promising start, it faced severe problems. These led to an integration of processes and principles, which conform to conventional schools. In this dissertation the change and preservation of !mpulse is studied with the sociological concepts of utopia and ideology (Mannheim, 1930/1936). Since Thomas More wrote his book Utopia in 1516, the term is understood as the imagination of a perfect world beyond time and space that transcends our social reality. !mpulse cannot be defined as a utopia in this sense—though it did transcend educational reality; it was a realised dream, and it existed in time and space.