EDUCATION

At the beginning of the long nineteenth century in Europe, few statesmen, reformers, or local worthies considered mass, universal schooling desirable, useful, or feasible. A third or more of the population was under fifteen years of age; in many regions, life expectancy was forty years or less. Most children were workers rather than pupils; if they attended school, it was before they were of much use anywhere else, or else when weather interrupted work in the fields. Whatever their ambitions, families, communes, churches, and states had only a fraction of the resources needed to build, staff, and supervise schools for all of the poor. In some countries, many villages, townships, or congregations had an elementary school of sorts, but learning how to become a member of one's church and obey parents and masters, or else sew, spin, or make lace, were seen as more important than learning to read and write. Even more frequently than boys did, girls learned all the useful skills considered necessary in the home. When they did attend school, it was for a shorter period than their brothers, often leaving before writing was tackled. Later in life, about twice as many men as women could sign their name. Many of those who did learn to read had not done so at school. Even formal educational arrangements rarely dealt with a specified age group, used standardized tools, or taught children in groups rather than individually. For purposes of state, it did not yet matter much what languages working people spoke; in any case, few of the vernaculars used by Europeans had a fixed written form. Sons of the wealthy were far more likely to receive prolonged and systematic instruction. But even here, childhoods dominated by schools, and schools organized into systems, lay in the future.

By the end of the long nineteenth century, this future became clearly visible. Money remained chronically scarce, but a sizable portion of much larger state budgets was allocated to schools. Not all ten-year-olds in a much more numerous age group were under instruction, but literacy and enrollment statistics became accepted measures of a civilized nation. Disagreements persisted about how to run and organize schools, and perfection was nowhere in sight, but reformers and educators began to agree on what a modern education system should look like. Teachers should be trained, classes graded, school days divided into lessons of equal length and distinct content, schools held in purpose-built buildings fitted with special furniture. All children, regardless of the way they spoke at home, should learn to read and write the national language. They should be sorted into classes by age and individual attainment, follow a standardized sequence of lessons, use specially designed textbooks to prepare for standardized exams, and become expert at obeying school orders, using school tools, and participating in school rituals. State authorities should use regular inspections and examinations to stamp their will on the conduct of teachers and pupils, provide most of school funding, and collect and publish educational statistics. Parents should no longer be allowed to fetch children from school when they were needed at home. Whatever else their duties, boys' and girls' key occupation, each school day over six or more years, should be schoolwork.

Among the explanations for this far-reaching change, concerns with social order appear particularly pressing. As the peoples of Europe multiplied, older forms of authority no longer seemed adequate to render them docile, pious, and industrious. In regions of central and eastern Europe, late-eighteenth-century reformers became convinced that peasants became so lazy, stupid, and stubborn that serfdom was now a fetter on economic progress. In parts of northwestern Europe, literate wage workers were plentiful enough, but were also prone to insolence and strikes. Nuisance, crime, and seditious ideas, it appeared, could at any moment turn to riot and insurrection. Even protoindustrial artisans, in spite of their dependence on the market, showed little capitalist rationality. Finally, nothing seemed able to stop the poor from forming their own households and having children. And yet, wealthy commentators believed, most laboring men made appalling household heads and their wives were unfit to be mothers. Just as new machines and ways of organizing production augmented the productivity of one pair of hands, so mastery could be made less laborious and more effective through molding desirable dispositions at school. Obscurantism—the desire to keep the poor ignorant—increasingly appeared as irresponsible folly. For their part, radicals became convinced that knowledge was power and began struggling for appropriate educational media to bring enlightenment to their brothers and sisters.

As states and rulers developed an interest in shaping the content of humble subjects' minds, they typically instructed communes to tax themselves in order to build a school and pay a teacher. But many localities and households were too poor or had quite other priorities. Even where schools existed, what precisely they produced seemed to be a matter of chance. The way such issues were confronted and strategic choices made depended on a myriad of local and regional factors. Everywhere, the building of education systems became an inseparable part of building states and their capacity to visualize, comprehend, and govern the populations inside of their borders. In this process, periods of close cooperation between church and state could alternate with decades of competition, intransigence, and combative animosity.

regions with many cities

In regions with many cities, established municipal organizations, widespread commercial and market activity, and extensive wage labor (as in England, Scotland, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and parts of Germany and Austria), widespread literacy, and a dense network of complementary, competing, and overlapping educational institutions long predated nineteenth-century campaigns to enforce compulsory schooling. Farmers, petty producers, mechanics, craftsmen, and traders frequently needed literacy to carry on important parts of their day-to-day work. Early industrialization drew on the accumulated wisdom of such communities but, initially at least, depressed levels of literacy and disrupted school attendance. Here, the first tasks included locating establishments where teaching took place, finding effective means of influencing what went on inside those deemed to be schools, and working out how to close down the rest.

England

Around 1750, 60 percent of males and 35 percent of females in England were literate. Over the following 150 years, the population of England and Wales grew from six to thirty-two million. The English navy helped consolidate the increasingly powerful empire's overseas holdings, and English cottons and steam engines began conquering the world of trade and industry. For some decades, English technologies of instruction began transforming the world of the school. Monitorial schools, invented around 1800 for the charitable instruction of poor children, were conducted by a single paid master assisted by unpaid senior pupils. Up to a thousand children were divided into groups of ten pupils of equal attainment in particular skills, each group seated at a separate desk and allocated a monitor who taught them the task at hand, having earlier in the morning received instruction from the master himself. Soon, monitorialism spread to Greece, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Russia, France, Sweden, and Denmark.

Yet while English economic and political power grew, the provisions made for instructing the country's swelling crowds of children were increasingly condemned as inadequate and unsystematic. In ideal conditions, monitorial schools held miraculous promise. In practice, increasing numbers of reformers concluded, they failed to deliver what they set out to do—mass produce meek, biddable, well-instructed children. More importantly, the majority of girls and boys attended no school at all, or else learned to read in disorderly neighborhood dame schools. It was at the height of Chartist agitation in the 1830, in response to the threat posed by an increasingly literate and articulate subaltern public, that the first public grants to assist voluntary charitable school organizations were made, and the first central government educational authority established. Four decades later, the government began to assert a measure of direct local control. The 1870 Elementary Education Act provided for the setting up of elected local school boards, and empowered them to enforce local attendance provisions and build new schools where they were needed. The school leaving age was raised to twelve in 1889, although, as in most other countries, pupils were not required to attend each day that schools were opened. Free elementary education was granted in 1893 but was fully implemented only after 1918. The employers had long ceased to advocate keeping the poor in ignorance, but remained sceptical of the practical benefits of school expenditure. Even advanced technical training, they believed, was better provided on the shop floor rather than from books: the latest equipment could be used and trade secrets less easily stolen. Between 1870 and the early 1880s, the proportion of the group aged five to fifteen enrolled in "inspected schools" rose from a quarter to a half. In many localities, transient, unofficial schools persisted, but since they were not inspected, those who made use of them were not counted as "under instruction."

France

In France, the sinews of state power were far more visible, and periods of revolutionary turmoil more sharply drawn. Dramatic reversals of power between Catholic monarchists and secular republicans, combined with profound ambiguity regarding the civil status of women, at times made laïcité, or secularism, one of the core themes of political and educational discourse. Although their blueprints for instructing children of the people differed, republicans and royalists alike were hampered by scarce resources and limited knowledge of local conditions; both admired the "simultaneous method" of instruction developed by Brothers of the Christian Schools, whose complex system of signs and signals enabled a single teacher, in theory at least, to control classes of up to 150 pupils. When in 1816 Louis XVIII decreed that all school teachers be authorized by the reconstituted Université, royal officials had no idea how many schools there were or where they were located. Many of the provincial notables entrusted with mapping existing educational provisions failed to carry out their new role, and others could not agree what constituted a school. The Guizot law of 1833 required each commune in France to have a primary school. Yet much of the apparent growth in provision, after a permanent, full-time school inspectorate was established in 1835, resulted from counting, for the first time, girls' educational institutions, which were previously not thought to be schools. It was during the Second Empire (1852–1870), which facilitated cooperation between secular and Catholic authorities, that schools were finally built in all communes. Enrollments increased from over three million in 1850 to over five million by the late 1870s; almost the total cohort of school-age children was on the books of officially recognized institutions several years before legislation making attendance compulsory was passed. Catholic schools accounted for all but a fifth of this growth. In 1876 four-fifths of the half million French children in nursery schools, over half of elementary school girls, and nearly a quarter of boys were in the care of religious congregations. In some regions, the proportions were much higher: in the diocese of Lyon in 1863, 72 percent of boys and 86 percent of girls in the department of the Loire attended congregational schools. Since school funding was the responsibility of local councils, the success of many Catholic schools, with their bequests, cheap staff, and church subsidies, was less a reflection of the religiosity of the population than the stinginess of municipal councillors. Conversely, becoming a nun was an attractive option in an age when the state showed little interest in training female teachers, and there were few nonmanual jobs for the many women who needed to work. Two hundred thousand women joined some four hundred religious orders, most dedicated to teaching and some enjoying a considerable degree of semiprofessional autonomy, between 1800 and 1880.

The Third Republic, proclaimed in 1875, inherited what amounted to two systems of elementary schooling: a secular one, staffed mainly by men, that dealt with most boys and less than half of the girls in the population and a Catholic one, staffed mainly by women, that catered predominantly to girls and infants. By now, what used to be a convenient compromise, similar to that achieved in other Catholic countries, began to appear as a source of social discord. Heightened class conflict, falling fertility, and high infant mortality, bourgeois reformers argued,

could all be alleviated if working-class women tamed their husbands' radicalism and brought up healthy and industrious republican children. For their part, labor leaders worried that women, captive to the church, would betray working-class movements. Men from opposite sides of the republican spectrum shared fears that spiritual divorce between themselves and, as Jules Michelet wrote, "wives and daughters brought up and governed by our enemies" would shatter their own domestic tranquillity (quoted in Price, p. 319). The French government increased funding of municipal elementary schools, greatly expanded provisions for the training of lay women teachers, and opened the first state-funded high schools for girls. Within three decades, all parts of an increasingly unified and stratified education system were secularized.

regions with few cities

In regions with few cities, agricultural predominance and relatively uncommercialized economies, the dynamics of school building differed again. Here, direct coercion tended to play a major part in production, and rulers typically created ponderous fiscal machines to extract the means of war out of local populations. In the eighteenth century, in absolutist Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Spain, costly territorial wars, followed by decades of sharpening exploitation, precipitated widespread famines and left whole regions simmering with discontent. Tightening feudal obligations any further, reformers began to argue, had no chance of increasing landlords' returns. At best it would lead to debilitating poverty, more likely it would spark off murderous uprisings. The only way out, it seemed, was to free the serfs, break up the estates, and commute labor services to rents. But first, it was necessary to educate the poor into new forms of thinking and feeling. In some parts of Prussia and Austria such educational projects drew on long traditions of schooling and popular literacy and achieved considerable success. Elsewhere, they faced formidable obstacles. In the Habsburg Empire, Maria Theresa signed the General School Ordinance, mandating school attendance of all children between six and twelve, in 1774—three years before a voluntary patent for the commutation of labor services was issued. In the province of Bohemia, two-thirds of all school-age children were enrolled in school by 1790. An Austrian census taken in 1900 showed that for those born in the 1850s, 96 percent of Czech speakers and 93 percent of Germans could read, compared to 17 and 11 percent respectively of those speaking Serbo-Croatian and Ruthenian (Ukrainian).

Prussia

In Prussia, Frederick the Great's school edict of 1763 reasserted the compulsory attendance provisions of earlier legislation and applied them to the entire monarchy. In theory at least, country schools came under full state jurisdiction, with Protestant and Catholic clergy delegated the task of inspection and supervision. All instruction, hours, curricula, schedules, and texts were regulated by law. The legislation, which for many decades was only unevenly enforced, provided for free education for the poor, specific qualifications for teachers, graded classes, and uniform schoolbooks. In 1808 a ministry of education was established to supervise all public instruction. In 1817 it merged with the department overseeing church matters to become the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs. By 1826 all schoolteachers were required to be certified through a state examination; many were taught, and a number tried to practice, inquiry-based approaches to classroom instruction that are still respected today. Many Volksschule, historians warn, were not nearly as good as enthusiastic visitors, keen to shame their own governments into action, reported. Still, in a period when British industry and political institutions were admired and Prussian regimentation and backwardness condemned, Prussian common schools were held up as a model of enlightened educational practice, and English ones decried as uncivilized and inefficient.

The emperor's own enthusiasm for educational innovation cooled during the revolutionary 1840s. Direct state contribution to schooling remained small: in 1867 it amounted to only 4 percent of the total, growing to 12 percent in 1878. In 1852 there were on average ninety pupils per teacher in Prussian elementary schools, and many country teachers struggled with ungraded classes of a hundred or even a hundred and fifty students. Yet, the fact remains that nine out of ten Prussian army recruits were able to read in 1841; and in 1880 female illiteracy in Prussia was, at 6 percent, a third of that in England. In the early 1870s seven out of ten five- to fourteen-year-olds were enrolled in school in Prussia, twice the number attending "inspected schools" in England and Wales. In reminiscing about their childhood, many German working-class people wrote bitterly about the harsh necessity to complete their share of remunerative labor before and after mandatory attendance at school. British and French autobiographers, in contrast, frequently noted that family necessity compelled them to miss out on going to school. In many rural regions of Spain and Italy, there were simply no classes to go to.

Italy and Spain

In Italy, laws requiring communes to provide two to four years of free, compulsory schooling, passed in the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1851, were extended to all regions of unified Italy in 1877, and expanded over the following decades. Yet only 43 percent of five- to fifteen-year-olds were enrolled in school by 1907. In the rural south in particular, local elites vetoed new taxes and refused to allocate funds for schools or night classes and enforce attendance as required by law. "Money for schooling" they argued, "is often harmful: obligatory education is useless and dangerous, serving only to create socialists and anarchists who are the ruin of Italy" (quoted in Reeder, p. 101). As long as no better life seemed possible, most agricultural laborers themselves saw little point in attending adult education classes or sending children to school. According to the 1901 census, 65 percent of Sicilian males and 77 percent of females over the age of six were illiterate. But this does not mean that all were trapped in a timeless, traditional society. Thousands of southern Italian men helped build the trappings of modernity in the four corners of the globe before they learned to read. They paved city streets in Buenos Aires, constructed tunnels and railroads in Canada, and built skyscrapers in New York. The hope and savings they sent home inspired their wives and neighbors to see literacy as a useful and attainable goal. In Spain too, local authorities charged with implementing the 1857 school legislation frequently chose to ignore it. In the 1890s school spending was less than a quarter of that in France, over two-thirds of children did not attend school, and half of Spanish men and three-quarters of women were illiterate. The powerful socialist and anarchist movements that emerged during this period educated and organized the masses through radical newspapers written so they could be read out aloud to illiterate comrades. For their part, the powerful tended to see popular literacy as a source of sedition and schools for the poor as unwarranted expense rather than a "fountain of prosperity," and preferred to meet the challenge of radical movements with force.

educating the common people

Throughout Europe it was seen as desirable, though often not possible, to prepare boys and girls for their differently subordinate station in life in separate schools. Less clear was the pattern of authority teachers could emulate. Should classrooms resemble a monastery, an army regiment, a factory, or a well-run household? Should teachers embody the virtues of a sergeant, a mother made conscious, a wise patriarch, a nun, or a bureaucrat? Could not such preferences be amended to utilize women keen to teach for half or less of male rates of pay? One indication of the differently gendered answers to such questions is the proportion of men and women trained and employed as elementary schoolteachers in various regions of Europe. In Italy, almost three-quarters of trainees were women in 1870 and 93 percent in 1900. In 1837, two of every three French elementary schoolteachers were men; by 1863, more than half were women. The first Prussian teacher training institution for women opened in 1832, but in 1897 only 6 percent of trainees were women. The city of Berlin hired its first female elementary teachers in 1863; but in 1900 only a quarter of city teachers and 9 percent of those in the countryside were women. When the city of Zurich hired the first women teachers in 1874, the majority of elementary school instructors in England were female. In most of Europe, women teachers were paid around half of what men earned; in Austria they received equal pay from the 1870s.

One of the main reasons for sending all children to school was to teach them the national language. This helped create a sense of national unity and pride. It provided a vehicle for transmitting and inculcating (often recently invented) national traditions. It simplified the issuing of orders and regulations, and made army recruits easier to train and bureaucracies easier to staff and manage. As families who spoke one of the nondominant vernaculars

knew only too well, one needed to be fluent in the official language of state to deal with government bureaucrats, trade with strangers, become a teacher, or secure even the lowliest uniformed job in the post office or the railways. The problem was that the peoples of nineteenth-century Europe spoke many more languages than there could ever be viable states. In the Prussian, Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, German, Polish and Czech; Hungarian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Italian, Slovenian, and Yiddish; Albanian, Greek, Serb, and Turkish; Russian, Polish, Finish, and German villages existed side by side. In newly unified Italy, less than one in twenty inhabitants actually spoke the Italian language for ordinary purposes of life; in France at the end of the eighteenth century, six or more languages and thirty dialects were spoken, and six million people relied on a language other than the French in which "national" works of literature—and school textbooks—were written.

In multiethnic empires, the language question was multifaceted and complicated: Should a plurality of languages be tolerated, if necessary provided with a written form, and taught at school? Would this not give rise to undesirable separatist tendencies? Alternately, would not the determined pursuit of linguistic nationalism inflame counternationalism among those whose mother tongue became a mere dialect, or else a foreign language, in the locality where they lived? Should religious precepts be written down and explained to children in the vernacular they spoke and understood, even if it delayed the teaching of the national language to all inhabitants of an empire? Were some faiths naturally associated with particular ethnolinguistic groups? For example, could the Muslims among Albanian speakers be automatically reckoned Turks, Orthodox Christians, Greeks, or Russians, and Roman Catholics Latins or Slavs? And should all Muslims then learn to read and write the language of the Prophet, whether or not they spoke any Arabic? And if, as eventually happened, they decided against overwhelming odds to read and write Albanian, which alphabet should they use?

Many of the regions where the language question was the hardest to resolve—the Breton, Provençal, Catalan, Basque, Sicilian, and Balkan hinterlands—came to be reckoned educationally backward. Elsewhere, as in parts of central and eastern Europe, opposition to imperial domination turned peasant women and men into clandestine teachers, and schoolchildren into patriots. In Prussian provinces of partitioned Poland, government prohibition on the use of Polish for religious instruction—and children's refusal to say prayers in German at school—sparked off widespread school strikes and helped create an unlikely oppositional alliance between the Roman Catholic Church, peasants, and nationalist gentry and intellectuals.

education of the elite

The elementary schooling of common people was one thing, the education of their betters quite another. Common schools taught basic skills and the duties of everyday life. The wealthy learned to read and write at home; their formal education tended to begin where that of the poor ended, it revolved around genteel attributes and arcane knowledge that ordinary people lacked and that their schools did not furnish. Elementary schools served a third, half, or more of a given age group; advanced schools and universities combined might serve one or two in a hundred. Rather than patronize different levels of one education system, the rich and the poor received quite different instruction in separate institutions. Elementary schoolteachers were trained in higher elementary rather than secondary schools; advanced schools and even universities had their own preparatory classes. Schools for the people were regulated and inspected by central authorities but financed mostly by fees and local taxes; universities and boys' classical schools were often funded by the state. Since only (some) men but no women could become professionals, vote, or hold government office, females (together with people of the wrong faith) were for most of the nineteenth century excluded from public examinations and the universities.

But questions remained about how to articulate a powerful tradition of classical studies with professional forms of apprenticeship and with "modern" areas of learning, and how to instruct young ladies. The education of English and German barristers illustrates the different ways such issues could be tackled. The English common law is based on interpretations and adaptations of ancient custom by legal practitioners. Associations of such practitioners, the Inns of Court, organized informal apprenticeship provisions for aspiring barristers and controlled their admission to practice. Oxford and Cambridge universities provided some lectures on jurisprudence and legal history, but not on current practice. There were no examinations for entry to the civil service before the 1870s; until after World War II, university education was neither a prerequisite nor even the most common preparation for admission to the bar. A disproportionate number of top professionals were educated in the eight most influential English public schools, but these, despite their name, were free of government control.

In much of continental Europe, in contrast, laws were systematized by royal officials; since the late eighteenth century, university training was considered an integral part of preparation for senior ranks of government service. In Prussia, six years of rigorous study in a classical Gymnasium (closely regulated by state authorities since the 1770s), assured boys' grasp of examinable facets of Greek and Roman culture—and secured them exemption from army conscription. Two more years prepared them for the Abitur examination, without which one could not enter university. Successful university study culminated in a state examination and a junior post in the bureaucracy. After several years of such work, candidates could sit a final qualifying state examination. Despite vast differences in legal systems, government structures and professional

training, English and German authorities both insisted that only men could become barristers. Although a handful of women did complete legal studies and apprenticeships, they did not win admission to the bar until after World War I.

Latin and the rarefied mysteries of classical learning constituted the common currency of cultured distinction, formed the subject matter of the most prestigious exams—and gave young men the confidence to despise "practical hacks" who merely learned science. Those without the money—or desire—to become cultivated, gentlemanly amateurs patronized less prestigious but often highly innovative middle-class schools. Teaching "modern" and utilitarian studies such as science, geography, surveying, modern languages, and shipbuilding, many of these schools trained excellent merchants, technicians, and businessmen. Not least because such occupations were considered vulgar by the elite, modern schools and technological institutes struggled to gain parity with those built around classical culture. Eventually, most faced one of two difficult options: accept an intermediate rank on an emerging educational pyramid, or recast the subjects they taught to resemble the unworldly, examinable curriculum of grammar schools, Gymnasien, and lycées.

For decades, young women from privileged backgrounds had no direct access to either world of learning. Ladies' academies and convents, intricately differentiated by the status of their clients, provided individualized, home-like instruction in a universally recognized set of female accomplishments. For middle-class women compelled to earn their own living, teaching these skills provided one of the few avenues of genteel employment. It was concern about expanding employment opportunities for such women that played a key role in opening of the first academic schools for young women, and in turn created a demand for female secondary teachers. Initially, girls' academic schools were of little interest to the state; most were established by local associations and financed by fees. In the 1890s, for example, 272 of 568 Prussian secondary schools for boys, but only 4 of 128 girls' schools, were supported by the state. It took years of struggle before women were allowed to sit the same academic examinations as their brothers, enroll in universities, and practice professions. Women were admitted to university schools of medicine in Zurich from 1864, Paris from 1867, and Italy in the 1870s; separate women's medical colleges were set up in Russia in 1872 and in Britain in 1874. By 1901 women constituted 3.3 percent of all university students in France, 4.8 percent in the Netherlands, 5.1 percent in Switzerland, and 2.9 in Sweden. Prussian universities did not admit women until 1908. The eventual victories, significant as they were, came at a cost. Women played little part in the making of the (masculine) public sphere, and their strengths, preoccupations, and insights were marginalized as they, too, adopted an education built around competitive academic knowledge.

"The sons of noble persons, councillors, and clerks," an Austrian edict of 1776 decreed, "are to be admitted [to the classical Gymnasia] even if they possess only mediocre talent and little proficiency in the necessary subjects. Children from the lower orders, however, are to be admitted only if they possess exceptional talent." Few statesmen were so blunt. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, the education systems they helped establish embodied—more or less perfectly—just such principles. Gentry and aristocracy accounted for up to half of total enrollments in the eight most influential English public schools. In the second half of the nineteenth century, these supplied over four-fifths of Oxford and Cambridge university students. As late as 1881, 47 percent of Russian Gymnasium students came from the nobility. Between 1864 and 1907, around half of the fathers of German Gymnasium students, but between 60 and 80 percent of French academic lycée students came from upper-middle-class backgrounds. At one of the most elite French university schools, the École Polytechnique, the total share of the upper-middle class advanced from 70 percent just after 1815 to almost 90 percent before 1880. Until the 1870s, almost two-thirds of those who reached German universities came from the 5 percent of the work force in government, the professions, and the services. Between 1860 and 1910, only 1 percent of students in Prussian universities were the children of laborers, in Vienna and Prague universities, 6 to 7 percent.

The technologies of instruction, conceptual tools, and institutional frameworks with which we think of education today were taken up, recast, and sometimes invented in the course of the nineteenth century. They helped crystallize gendered social inequality and set the parameters of childhood and adolescence. They helped constitute notions of measurable intelligence and ideas of appropriate family size. They allow us to distinguish between work and education, current and future usefulness, social dependency, and the pursuit of knowledge. For all these reasons, history of education remains relevant today.

See alsoChildhood and Children; Ferry, Jules; Literacy; Professions; Secularization.

bibliography

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Cohen, Gary. Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918. West Lafayette, Ind., 1996. Combines institutional history with material on students' experiences; includes detailed comparative statistics.

Eklof, Ben. Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1864–1914. Berkeley, Calif., 1986. Influential contribution to debates about peasant attitudes to schools.

Flora, Peter. State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe, 1815–1975: A Data Handbook in Two Volumes. Chicago, 1983. An outstanding collection of key dates and statistics.

Gemie, Sharif. "What Is a School?: Defining and Controlling Primary Schooling in Early Nineteenth-Century France." History of Education 21, no. 2 (1992): 129–147.

Gosden, P. H. J. H., ed. How They Were Taught: An Anthology of Contemporary Accounts of Learning and Teaching in England, 1800–1950. Oxford, U.K., 1969. A well-chosen collection of documents.

Grew, Raymond, and Patrick Harrigan. School, State, and Society: The Growth of Elementary Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France: A Quantitative Analysis. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991. A key text, which corrects for reliance on what reformers said by careful statistical analysis.

Hurt, John. Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1918. London, 1979. Insightful and detailed social history.

Lamberti, Marjorie. State, Society, and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany. New York, 1989. Insightful social history.

Maynes, Mary Jo. Schooling in Western Europe: A Social History. Albany, N.Y., 1985. Still an excellent overview of themes and debates.

Melton, James Van Horn. Absolutism and the Eighteenth Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge, U.K., 1988. An influential interpretation of the rise of compulsory schooling.

Miller, Pavla. Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500–1900. Bloomington, Ind., 1998. Links rise of mass schooling to contested changes in patriarchal governance.

Ortiz, David, Jr. "Redefining Public Education: Contestation, the Press, and Education in Regency Spain, 1885–1902." Journal of Social History 35, no. 1 (2001): 73–94. On the way the popular radical press addressed an illiterate audience.

Price, Roger. A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France. New York, 1987.

Purvis, June. A History of Women's Education in England. Milton Keynes, U.K., and Philadelphia, 1991. An accessible overview.

Reeder, Linda. "Women in the Classroom: Mass Migration, Literacy, and the Nationalization of Sicilian Women at the Turn of the Century." Journal of Social History 32, no. 1 (1998): 101–125.

Ringer, Fritz. Education and Society in Modern Europe. Bloomington, Ind., 1979. Influential comparative study of education and social stratification in Germany, France and England.

Stone, Judith. "The Republican Brotherhood: Gender and Ideology." In Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914, edited by Elinor Accampo, Rachel Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart, 28–58. Baltimore, Md., and London, 1995. Important recasting of debates on laïcité and republicanism.

Tomiak, Janusz, in collaboration with Knut Eriksen, Andreas Kazamias, and Robin Okey, eds. Schooling, Educational Policy, and Ethnic Identity. New York and Aldershot, U.K., 1991. First volume of comparative studies on governments and nondominant ethnic groups in Europe between 1850 and 1940.

Pavla Miller