EDUCATION AND STATE FORMATION

Also by Andy Green

EDUCATION LIMITED. SCHOOLING AND TRAINING SINCE 1979 with others

Education and State Formation The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA

Andy Green Senior Lecturer in Education History and Policy Thames Polytechnic, London

Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN 978-1-349-20711-4 ISBN 978-1-349-20709-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20709-1

©Andy Green 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-51897-7

All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1990

ISBN 978-0-312-04934-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, Andy, 1954-Education and state formation : the rise of education systems in England, France, and the USA / Andy Green. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-04934-8 1. Education and state history-History--Case studies. 2. Education­History--Case studies. 3. Education-Great Britain-History. 4. Education-France--History. 5. Education-United States­History. 6. Comparative education. I. Title. LC71.G75 1990 379.42~c20 90-36602

CIP

Contents

Introduction vii

1 The Uneven Development of National Education Systems 1

Elementary Enrolments 12 Post-Elementary Enrolments 15 Teachers 21 Literacy 24

2 The Social Origins of National Education Systems 26 Liberal Theory 27 Education and the Industrial Revolution 36 Urbanization, Proletarianization and Family Life 48 Margaret Archer: A Weberian Account 67

3 Education and State Formation 76 Marx and Engels on the State 81 Gramsci on State and Hegemony 90 State Formation and Uneven Educational Development 99

4 Education and Statism in Continental Europe 111 Education and Absolutism in Prussia 116 The Construction of National Education in Prussia 120 Education and Absolutism in France 130 Blueprints for National Education 137 Education and the French Revolution 140 Napoleon and National Education 146 Education and State after the Bourbon Restoration 153 Education and Bourgeois Hegemony 160

5 The US Experience: Education, Nationhood and the Decentralized State 171

Education in the Colonial Period 175 Education and the American Revolution 177 Education in the Early Republic 181 The Reform Era 187

v

vi Contents

6 English Education and the Liberal State The Peculiarities of the English Education and Liberalism, 1780-1839 Bureaucracy by Stealth, 1839-1869 The Compromise System, 1870-1902

Conclusion: The Liberal Legacy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

208 213 238 268 300

308

317

338

348

Introduction

This book is the product of historical and contemporary concerns in edu­cation. Its principal subject is the formation of national education systems in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. This is a topic worth revisiting, despite the wealth of existing national histories of education, since there are few comparative studies of this phenomenon and none which adequately explain the very uneven development of schooling in nineteenth-century Europe. Exactly why modem systems of education arose, and why they arose at different times and in distinctly different forms is a challenging problem and one which has been surprisingly neglected within historical sociology. To answer these questions has been my main objective. However, there are also two more contemporary questions which have prompted the writing of this book. The first concerns the critical state of education and training in the United Kingdom and the reasons for its relative underdevelopment in comparison with its counterparts in continental Europe. The second concerns what to do about it, and, in particular, what the role of the state should be in reforming and maintaining public education.

Although we have been slow to recognize it, education in Britain, or more particularly in England and Wales, is distinctly backward by comparison with other leading western states. Vocational training has traditionally been considered the weakest area of our national provision, blighted as it is by under-investment and low status, and producing far fewer qualified people than our international competitors. l However, it is becoming increasingly clear that our secondary schooling is also in certain respects deficient by comparison with that of other major states. Whilst in countries like Japan, Sweden and the USA well over 70 per cent of 16-18 year olds stay on in full-time education and training, in Britain scarcely over 30 per cent do SO.2 Furthermore, the proportion of young people achieving competence in a range of core subjects, say five good results at '0' level or GCSE and three at 'A' level, is only around half the proportion in France, Japan and Germany reaching an equivalent standard at these levels. A recent international survey showed that average standards of English 14-year-olds in science were amongst the worst in Europe.3

Early school-leaving is perhaps the most damaging structural character­istic of our education, but it is by no means our only peculiarity. We also have a uniquely independent and elitist system of private secondary schools

vii

viii Introduction

which has no real foreign equivalent; an institutional division between education and training which is sharper than in most other countries; and an enduring resistance to standardization or rationalization which accounts for the rather unintegrated and unsystematic nature of the system as a whole. It was an interest in these and other educational 'peculiarities' that led me to a comparative examination of the historical patterns of public education in different countries, and so to what I believe to be the origins of English 'exceptionalism' in the voluntary forms of education in the nineteenth century.

The other contemporary factor which has influenced the writing of this book has been the rise of the New Right and the neo-liberal philosophy of education which it has promoted. Not since the war, and perhaps not even since the last century, has there been such a fierce debate about the best form of public education and the proper role of the state within it. For a decade and more, Conservative governments have sought to reverse the social-democratic policies of the post-war welfare state and construct a new social order based on the free market principles of nineteenth-century Liberalism. Education has been one of the principal targets for radical reconstruction and, although it is not without its contradictions, the passing of the 1988 Education Act represents, in some of its parts at least, a first stage in the construction of a market education system. Since so much of this is reminiscent of the nineteenth century, it is instructive to see what the fruits of educationallaissez{aire were in England then. To understand the Victorian educational child which fathered our modem system, with all its many problems, has thus provided a powerful personal motive for this historical study.

The intellectual influences which shaped my choice of subject are prob­ably too many to list. However, it should be obvious that central amongst them are my interest in Gramsci and the process of state formation, about which he wrote so well, and the now long-running debate in sociology about the social 'determinants' of schooling. The latter has often taken the form of a rather deterministic argument that schools are completely bound by the economic requirements and the structural inequalities of the societies around them. The influence of such arguments on educational thought has been distinctly double-edged. On the one hand, they have alerted those involved to the persistent inequalities that characterize schooling. On the other, they have engendered a pervasive pessimism about the prospects of changing education. This study, whilst setting out to examine social determinants on education, departs somewhat from such overly determinist positions. It begins from the premise that schooling can vary in significant respects from society to society, even where these share similar economic

Introduction ix

structures. It further holds that, whilst the functions of schools are shaped by social determinants outside of them, they can also themselves be an agent of social change.

I have chosen to study national education systems rather than education in general since these were really the forerunners of modem state schooling and it was the different structures inscribed in these early systems that have done most to determine the different national characteristics of education in our own time. My object in studying these systems has been, firstly, to use a comparative analysis to determine what social factors generally underlay the development of these distinctive new forms of schooling and, secondly, to analyse specific national differences in the chronology and forms of the development of public schooling. It is hoped that the former contributes towards the debate about the social determinants and functions of schooling, and that the latter can help to explain the historical causes of the different patterns of education that have emerged in different countries in the present century and, in particular, to explain some of the peculiarities of English education.

The choice of cases is always important in comparative analyses and the rationale behind my choice of England, France, Prussia and the USA deserves some explanation. The argument in the early chapters suggests that two primary sets of educational parameters for comparison should be levels of quantitative educational development and the existence of 'state' forms in education systems. The choices of cases here is one which includes a maximum variety of educational forms within countries with fundamentally similar economic systems. Prussia developed an early state education system and is widely regarded to have been educationall.y 'advanced' in terms of enrolments etc. France had a 'centralized' state system but with a rather patchier record in educational provision. England was late to develop a state system and was widely regarded to have been 'backward' in terms of most educational indices. I have included the USA as a kind of 'control' case since, although it provided public forms of education with notably high levels of enrolment and literacy, it was quite different from continental systems in being highly 'decentralized'. The choice of these countries has the added advantage that although in the nineteenth century they were all emerging 'bourgeois' capitalist states, their social structures varied considerably in terms of levels of industrialization and urbanization. This allows some comparative analysis of the adequacy of theories that attempt to explain educational change in terms of these factors.

The chapters are arranged in such a way that the order of presentation proceeds from the concrete to the general and back again to the concrete.

x Introduction

This method departs from Marx's prescription for 'rising' from the abstract to the concrete and is clearly unusual for works of this sort. I have done it this way because it seemed desirable to demonstrate at the outset the existence of 'uneven development' since the problem is not centrally placed in modem comparative analysis. This procedure unfortunately encourages a repetition of empirical material which I have not been entirely successful in avoiding. However, I hope that when the argument returns to the concrete histories in the final parts it does so at a more theoretically informed level.

The structure of this study is as follows. Chapter 1 analyses the evidence for the uneven development of national education systems by exam­ining the opinions of contemporary educational 'experts' and comparative quantitative data on levels of enrolment, social access and literacy. This gives some provisional measure of comparative educational 'advance' in different countries and this in turn is related to the chronologies for the development of 'state' forms of public education in different systems. The aim of the chapter is to establish whether there were systematic differences in levels of educational development in different countries and whether this in tum related to the existence or absence of a public or state system.

Chapter 2 involves an examination and critique of different theories and interpretations that have been put forward to explain educational change in general and differential change in particular. These include: traditional Whig or liberal perspectives; Durkheimian 'integration' theory and modem Structural Functionalism; theories relating to urbanization, prolecirianization and the changing structures of family life; and Margaret Archer's Weberian system theory.

Chapter 3 examines Marx and Gramsci's writings on the state and hegemony and suggests that an analysis of the different modes of state formation in different countries offers a more coherent theoretical basis for understanding the origins of national education systems and their different national patterns of development.

The remaining substantive chapters use the theory of hegemony and state formation, as developed in Chapter 3, to develop an interpretation of the social origins of specific forms of educational development in the four countries. To do this I have focused on the differentia specijzca of educational development in each country and the concomitant forms of state and hegemony by which this may be explained. The order of analysis in each chapter begins with a general theoretical discussion about the nature of the national state in question and proceeds to analyse the development of education through broad periods whose boundaries are defined by major changes in state forms.

Introduction xi

The three historical chapters on education in continental Europe, Amer­ica and England are subject to obvious limitations. They are not intended to provide narratives of educational development which already exist in abundance. Nor have they been able to provide adequate interpretations of many specific areas of educational development. Higher education is largely absent from the account as is adult education in general. A number of social factors have not been considered in great depth where the uneven state of historical research has made it impractical to do this at a comparative level and over such a large field. There is considerable work on black schooling in the USA, for instance, but very little which is specific for national minorities in other countries. A certain amount of work is now appearing on girls' secondary schooling but there is still little that is gender specific for the elementary level and probably not enough from which to draw comparative conclusions. The analysis here reflects these limitations and inevitably suffers from them, especially since questions of race and gender are central to the construction of nationhood which is an important theme in this interpretation. It should also be stressed that this is an analysis of the development of public systems of formal schooling and not education in general in all its myriad forms.

Although the substance of this work is historical, it is hoped it will shed some light on the problems that English education has faced in recent years. In the final chapter I suggest how the history of nineteenth-century voluntaryism has effected English education in this century and argue that in some respects our recent educational history represents a continuing pat­tern of relative underdevelopment. The prospects of the recent educational reforms are considered in the light of lessons that can be learnt from our educational history. This argument will be developed in a future work.

lowe thanks to many people who have helped me with my research, both wittingly and unwittingly, including many students and colleagues with whom I have discussed these ideas. I am grateful to David Tyack for his advice on matters concerning US educational history, to Gary Hamilton for allowing me to attend his seminar on comparative historical methodology at UC Davis and for reading some of my early drafts, and to all my colleagues and friends at Yuba College who made my exchange teaching job there both an enjoyable and very informative experience. I would also like to thank Molly Richardson, who helped with the typing in my early 'dinosaur' days, before I discovered the wonders of the word processor; Mike Hutchins, without whose help I would never have managed the transition to computer literacy; and Christelle Green for looking over the final drafts. Special thanks are also due to Stuart Hall, without whose encouragement I would probably never have undertaken this project, and

xii Introduction

to Richard Johnson and Clyde Chitty who were both so generous with their ideas, advice and support. Brian Simon also deserves special thanks not only for the inspiration of his own work but also for his advice on my sections on England. Lastly, my deepest thanks to Cindy Barlow who has read and discussed many parts of this book with me and whose love and support and belief in this project have sustained me through many difficult periods. Needless to say, none of the above is responsible for the errors in this book, although collectively they are responsible for the fact that it exists at all.