In 1864 the Regents of the University of the State of New York announced their intention to develop a system of competitive examinations for students at academies and high schools across the state. Aimed both at strengthening those institutions and at stimulating the ambitions of students, the exams would provide “positive evidence of actual merit” in learning and instruction. On the basis of the exams the Regents would then distribute state funds to institutions and award “promotions and honors” to students. Thus New York launched the first state-wide system of standardized examinations and performance-based credentials in the country.

Contrary to philosopher A.N. Whitehead's assertion that “the antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious,” a distinction between intellectual studies and the learning of manual and vocational skills has marked curricular discussions and structures at least since the ancient Greeks. Both Plato and Isocrates, although at odds in many ways, attacked the sophists' marketing of persuasive technique while venerating studies that cultivate the intellect, virtue, and contemplation of higher truth as the only learning befitting the free citizen with leisure. Similarly, Aristotle contrasted manual labor and related technical arts that “tend to deform the body… and degrade the mind” with liberal studies that prepare one for decision making and other civic duties. By the fifth century C.E., the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy) had emerged as the normative curricular expression of the classical liberal ideal—a course of study that would dominate the schooling of clerics and non-religious scholars for the next thousand years. Meanwhile, technical learning remained separate from the liberal arts and schools, yet the core of commercial and craft apprenticeships as well as a central component of chivalric education for medieval secular elites.

The provision of universal primary education in nineteenth-century Europe is generally associated with processes of state building. In the wake of the French and Industrial Revolutions, compulsory school systems became important tools by which national governments could ensure political loyalty and encourage skills that would lead to economic growth and productivity. Nowhere is this more true than in France, where successive regimes from the Revolution to the Third Republic attempted to centralize educational resources and set national norms. By the early 1880s, when anticlerical Republicans achieved power, they made universal primary schooling central to their political objectives and identity, envisioning a well-regulated Republic in which schoolchildren learned patriotic and practical lessons from nationally trained, secular, schoolmasters and mistresses in newly built schoolhouses, preferably located next door to the Republican town hall.