School acts are fundamental to the historiography of schooling. Traditionally, they have been interpreted as milestones or veritable hallmarks in the process aimed at providing education for all. Thus, it is not surprising that, in pertinent studies on the rise of national school systems during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, school acts such as the Prussian Generallandschulreglement of 1763, the French Guizot law of 1833, the Swiss so-called liberal school acts of the 1830s, the Spanish Moyano law of 1857, and the Italian Casati law of 1859 are considered pivotal to the development of educational system in their respective countries. 1
Studies on the origin, content, and effects of school acts have, however, generally been limited by national orientation, addressing an exclusively national readership. 2 Consequently, research results on national school acts are often published in the national language, which makes them inaccessible to the broader international audience. 3 This strictly national perspective might also explain why an international overview of the school acts that were passed during the nineteenth century is still lacking.
Yet, while school acts are unquestionably integral parts of traditional school policy studies, scholars of education have largely lost interest in this kind of legislative history. Following general trends in history, historians of education—inspired by social, economic, and cultural history—have instead focused on instruction practices, gender discourses, economic determinants, or the transfer and transformation of knowledge in educational institutions. Replaced by new research agendas, the history of school acts has almost fallen into oblivion, being perceived as a topic of an outdated historiography.
However, guided by their interest in social, cultural, and economic history, some researchers have begun to rethink the actual value, the impact, and the ostensible purpose of school acts and have started to analyze them against the backdrop of their social, cultural, and economic contexts. 4 As Michel Foucault has noted, there are many ways one can relate to a prescriptive system. Thus, besides being parts of an absolute body of law, the varying nineteenth-century school regulations were also general guidelines, declarations of intent, and sometimes even utopian dreams. 5
By presenting new research on school acts passed in the West during the nineteenth century, we are continuing this line of research while also addressing the desideratum described above. In the chapters comprising this book, several fundamental questions will be examined, including: Why were the school acts passed, and under what social and political circumstances? What was their content? What was their impact and significance? To achieve a comprehensive comparative and multidisciplinary analysis of school acts and the role they played in the rise of mass schooling, which is a novel contribution to the field under study, this book includes chapters dedicated to 13 national case studies focusing on the manner in which school acts were embedded in their respective cultural, social, political, and economic contexts. In addition to providing analyses of the content, organization and funding of nineteenth-century schooling through the histories of school acts, this volume thus provides an international overview of school acts unique in scope and detail.
A Multidisciplinary Conceptual Framework
Returning to the issue of school acts is not an easy task. There is always the risk of repeating, mirroring, or merely negating existing narratives. This book has therefore been written and edited with a number of considerations in mind.
First, and most importantly, this book is not an attempt to establish a new grand narrative on school acts and nineteenth-century schooling. Although we acknowledge the value of theoretical models linking schooling to state formation processes, world systems, or the global model of the nation-state, we believe that the international history of school acts is best served by adding more facts, further nuances, broader historical context, and new questions to the established historiography of education. 6 In this respect, this edited book presents the first international analysis of school acts that provides rich insights into both their similarities and their differences. Consequently, this book is an attempt to address the classic issue of school acts by using the insights yielded by human, social, and cultural sciences research carried out in the last decades. In this respect, the analyses presented herein are truly multidisciplinary, since they are informed by recent studies in economic history, education, social history, cultural history, and sociology.
As a consequence, all authors that have contributed to this volume concur that social, economic, political, and religious factors have played varying roles in the history of schooling, and that this has to shape the analysis at hand. In some instances, the narrative of social struggles or the formation of a nation-state will be more important, while in other cases the narrative of economic development or religious conflicts will be stressed. As will be shown in this book, nineteenth-century schooling was shaped by a wide range of historical processes. Schooling is therefore not a phenomenon that can be reduced to industrialization, social control, the dominant religion, or the process of state formation.
Second, with this book, we intend to develop an analytical framework that may place future comparative research on nineteenth-century school policy on a firm footing. A central element to such a framework is a well-conceived set of analytical concepts. Many of the concepts commonly used in historiography of education such as “school acts,” “school system,” “compulsory education,” “nation,” or “citizen” are not as well delineated as they may seem at first glance, as their meaning and implications differed from country to country and changed over time. 7 The concepts that we use to examine the history of school acts and schooling must therefore be carefully chosen and well elaborated.
To begin with, we stress the importance of defining the above-mentioned notions of school acts and school systems, and how they are applicable to the historical cases analyzed in this book. In order to compare national school systems, the features of each historical phenomenon under investigation have to be scrutinized and described very carefully. For instance, some of the school acts discussed in the chapters that follow were not laws in the common usage of the word (i.e., laws passed by parliament), but rather law-like regulations or ordinances issued by the King or a ministry. We therefore use the term “school act” in a generic sense, to refer to all kinds of constitutions, laws, regulations, ordinances, statutes, and even draft laws that either had sustainable impact on the development of a national school system or that have been recognized to have had such an impact.
The wider international perspective enabled by this book similarly calls for a considerate use of the notion of “school system.” Generally, nineteenth-century school systems were less systematized than their present-day counterparts, as they varied greatly in form. Some of those systems could be called “organizations,” whereas others were “institutions,” to use a distinction introduced by Reiner Lersch. Lersch defines “organization” as a planned and rational process to perceive certain aims like selections or qualifications, whereas “institutions” emanate from the social life of a community. 8 Owing to its ambiguity, it has been our ambition to adopt a clear usage of the term “school system.”
Likewise, the comparative history of school acts indicates that we have to be considerate when using expressions such as “compulsory education” and “compulsory schooling.” As evident from the following chapters, nineteenth-century school systems were marked by several definitions of school age, as well as the number of years that children were supposed to attend school. The Italian Casati Law (1859) stipulated, for example, only two years of compulsory schooling, while the second Ferry Law (1882) mandated compulsory education for all French children between the ages of six and thirteen.
There was also no common understanding of the term “compulsory.” School acts could require all school-aged children to attend school, or could mandate compulsory education but not compulsory schooling (as the Ferry Law of 1882 did). They could also merely allow school boards to implement compulsory school attendance (as was the case with the English Education Act of 1870) or make schools compulsory for school districts to establish, but not for children to attend (which was indeed the demands of the Swedish school act of 1842). The compulsory nature of schooling also varied according to social class. In the Netherlands after the school act of 1878, for example, compulsory schooling was only a reality for the poor who had to send their children to school in return for poor relief. In addition to the wording of the legislation, the compulsory nature of schooling was also conveyed by its implementation. Attendance and absenteeism ratios reveal to what extent compulsory education was enforced, to what extent it had already been instituted, or to what extent it remained a hope or an unfulfilled expectation. The introduction of such differences into the history of school acts—which from a distanced international perspective has been perceived as the continuous enactment of (almost) identical compulsory education acts—is one of the main contributions of this book.
The history of the rise of mass schooling in the “Western” wo...