Introduction

Why do some countries form school systems that serve all the people, while others develop systems intended primarily for elites? In some countries, virtually all young students – rich and poor, academic powerhouses and those with nonacademic gifts, folks of different genders and races – can find a program that facilitates appropriate skill formation and pride in their own educational achievements. Other countries create education systems that work only for winners, such as single-track high schools, in which success is contingent on writing the best essay on “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Do not get me wrong, Harper Lee wrote a wonderful book; but its reading in eighth grade does not necessarily produce the right skills for the future car mechanic, and this requirement may diminish the spark of curiosity that excites autodidacts.

Examining a country’s cultural understanding of education can shed light on this question. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, various countries gravitated toward different cultural perceptions of schooling, and the dichotomy between education for academically minded and/or elite students versus education for all continues to reverberate in education policy today. Policymakers developed schools to support various political and economic projects, such as nation-building, industrialization, and democratization; in addition, conflicts among interest groups and the political institutions defining the rules of the game mattered significantly to how nations achieved their educational goals. Yet beliefs about the purpose of education – should the primary goal of schools be to develop individuals or to build a strong society – also informed choices about the provision of schooling for citizens across social classes. These beliefs, in turn, were influenced by fundamental, cultural assumptions about the role of the individual in society, the contributions of farmers and workers, expectations of cooperation versus competition in political exchange, and the role of the state in policymaking.

Britain and Denmark offer a compelling illustration of these different cultural assumptions. In Britain, policymakers, intellectuals, and authors from various political persuasions viewed education as an essential tool for the cognitive development of the child and believed that a well-educated individual should master a prescribed curriculum to attain full selfhood. Granted, elites on the left and right disagreed about whether educational opportunities should be extended to agricultural and industrial workers. By the end of the nineteenth century, those on the left argued for equality of educational opportunity, while those on the right remained more skeptical about a state project for uplifting and enlightening the poor. Yet even many politicians and writers on the left worried that educating the working class could “contaminate” the nation’s culture. In Denmark, elites also recognized the value of education for individual self-development, but unlike the British, both left and right viewed schools for farmers and workers as essential for a strong society. While Danish reformers also thought more about equality by the end of the nineteenth century, early educationalists were motivated by the older, deeper commitment to a strong society, and this distinguished Denmark from Britain (Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard2004; Sundberg Reference Sundberg, Sundberg, Germundsson and Hansen2004, 142).

Writers of fiction were political agents in the presentation and perpetuation of these cultural assumptions about education. Authors joined networks of avant garde political activists who put distressing social conditions on the political agenda and they fulfilled vital services in political movements to advance education reforms. Fiction writers were spin doctors who provided cognitive frames that influenced the construction of social problems and solutions. Writers popularized social issues with vivid, emotional language. In both countries, politicians, bureaucrats, and other activists associated education with the grand projects of nation-building, industrialization, and democratization; yet fiction writers helped to frame these great movements in nationally specific ways. A chorus of literary voices provided the soundtrack, inspiration, and subliminal messaging for campaigns supporting school development.

To understand the role of these authors as political activists, this chapter will explore three critical junctures of education development in Britain and Denmark: the emergence of public primary schools in Denmark and private, church schools for the middle and working classes in Britain in the early nineteenth century, the expansion of Danish schools and enactment of the British public elementary system in mid-century, and the creation of secondary education systems in both countries in the early twentieth century.

Choices about schooling by nineteenth-century policymakers had powerful implications for the expansion of access to industrial and agricultural working-class children. Early creators of mass, compulsory public schools (e.g., Denmark) brought non-elite students into school more quickly than laggards in education system development (e.g., Britain). Countries with strong secondary vocational education imparted stronger skills to blue-collar workers than did nations with one-size-fits-all high schools. Experiential teaching methods held greater appeal for nonacademic children than did the rote memorization of facts and figures. Regulatory regimes that accorded control to communities, schools, teachers, and parents provided greater flexibility for instruction geared to the needs of specific populations than regimes with strong quality controls and uniform standards. The following pages tell the story of how British and Danish policymakers viewed education as a means of addressing various political and economic challenges and the role of authors in debates over schooling.

Varieties of Education System Development

Most European countries developed mass public primary education systems (and subsequently secondary education) during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but these systems varied on five important dimensions. The dimensions include how public the education systems were, the degree of access they offered to all classes, programmatic differentiation, methods of pedagogy, and mechanisms for oversight (administration and regulatory control) (see Table 1.1; for discussions of classification schemes, see Archer Reference Archer1979; Green Reference Green1990; Hopper Reference Hopper1968; Boli et al. Reference Boli, Ramirez and Meyer1985; Soysal and Strang Reference Soysal and Strang1989; Moe and Wiborg Reference Moe and Wiborg2017, 5; Busemeyer et al. Reference Busemeyer, Garritzmann and Neimanns2020).

First, the education systems varied in terms of how public they were. We can look to several characteristics to better understand this variance, including the timing of when countries first instituted public primary schools, the level of resources they were willing to commit to these new projects, and the proportional balance between public and private schools (Archer Reference Archer1979). Prussia, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were all on the forefront of efforts to establish mass schooling, creating public, compulsory primary schools with participation rates of over 50 percent by 1850. A few other European countries – including Greece, Spain, and Portugal – also developed public systems around the same time, but with lower attendance rates under 50 percent. Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Belgium were all laggards in creating public primary education (Soysal and Strang Reference Soysal and Strang1989, 278).

Britain and Denmark embodied these two extremes. Royal ordinances established Denmark’s system of public primary schools in 1814; but these national ordinances followed on nearly twenty-five years of extensive school-building in the provinces, a project undertaken by a school commission set up by the king. Britain enacted a public, primary school system only in 1870; previously, the responsibility for schooling had been largely left to two private, church-affiliated societies (Evans Reference Evans1985, 5).

Countries also varied on the amounts spent for public education and the degree to which private schools easily coexisted with public schools. For example, German primary schools were mostly public, while Britain and Denmark both retained a large share of private schools. Yet the Danish government provided multiple tiers of public schools, including superior schools that charged tuition for the bourgeoisie and free schools for workers; and private schools were also available to a range of classes. In Britain, upper-class youth largely attended elite private schools, while lower-class students were largely relegated to state schools, and the politics of private schooling proved more contentious. British reformers on the left unsuccessfully sought to do away with private voluntary church schools when the primary education system was created in 1870, even as their (mostly Anglican) Tory opponents viewed church schools as a last line of defense against Dissenters, Radicals, and Whigs. In Denmark, National Liberal politicians were initially wary of the private evangelical school movement. But they became convinced that offering a choice between public and private schools was the best way to expand educational access in rural communities and passed legislation in 1855 permitting parents to control their children’s education (Gjerløff and Jacobsen Reference Gjerløff and Faye Jacobsen2014, 66–7).

The second dimension on which Western countries differed concerned the degree of educational access. In 1850, Danish students constituted 21 percent of the overall population, whereas British students constituted only 12 percent (Green Reference Green1990, 4–15). By 1870, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Prussia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States all had primary school enrollment rates of over 50 percent (Soysal and Strang Reference Soysal and Strang1989, 278). By 1895, Britain (with 55 percent) finally nearly caught up to Denmark (with nearly 60 percent) in the percentage of children aged 7–14 enrolled in primary schools (Flora and Alber Reference Flora and Alber1983–1987).

Third, education systems varied on their degree of programmatic differentiation, or the number of diverse secondary education tracks serving students. Throughout the nineteenth century, most countries had dedicated primary schools that served citizens of diverse classes with different curricula. But as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, and as schools were used to address socioeconomic inequality, countries increasingly began to implement a regime of universal primary schools in which all students were expected to master a more uniform set of knowledge (Kliebard Reference Kliebard1987, 4–10; Benavot et al. Reference Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer and Ying Wong1991).

At the secondary level, policymakers either created unitary schools with a uniform academic course of study (which were less likely to include working-class youth) or multitrack institutions that included a distinctive vocational training track (with higher rates of attendance by the working class). The English-speaking world, France, and southern Europe fell into the first category, while Nordic and German-speaking countries fell into the latter (Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009; Powell and Solga Reference Powell and Solga2010; Busemeyer and Trampusch Reference Busemeyer and Trampusch2011; West and Nikolai Reference West and Nikolai2013; Gift and Wibbels Reference Gift and Wibbels2014). Thus, the British Secondary Education Act of 1902 created a unitary secondary education system and eliminated secondary vocational training on the grounds of encouraging meritocracy (Evans Reference Evans1985, 9). Only in 1844 did Britain develop technical secondary education options; however, vocation education remained severely curtailed (Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009, 11). In contrast, Denmark provided state funding for vocational training in 1892 and created multiple gymnasium tracks with the 1903 Secondary Education Act (Larsen et al. Reference Larsen2013; Peterson Reference Peterson1973; Glenn Reference Glenn2007).

Countries also offered differing curricula in their upper-secondary academic institutions, as we see with the British grammar school and the Danish gymnasium, both of which served the educational needs of academic youth. British (and American) educationalists were biased in favor of humanistic studies for upper-level students. In this vein, a report by the Yale faculty promoted a curriculum based on humanistic studies over scientific and practical subjects as necessary for human development, because these provided “the discipline and the furniture of the mind” (Kliebard Reference Kliebard1987, 5). The British, public grammar schools created in 1902 offered a single humanistic program of study and severely limited the amount of instruction devoted to math and science (Eaglesham Reference Eaglesham1962, 156–7). Britain did not include any vocational courses for nonacademic students after the completion of lower-secondary education. In contrast, students in the Danish gymnasium, created in 1903, could choose from a variety of different programs of study, including classical studies, modern languages, and a math/science line. The 1903 act also created a “real class,” a one-year course of post–lower-secondary schooling for those students going into a vocational education program or entering the workforce (“Lov om højere Almenskoler, April 24, 1903”).

The fourth area in which countries’ education systems differed was in the principles of pedagogy they adopted. Already by 1800, two competing theories of education had risen to prominence and were playing an important role in the expansion and differentiation of mass schooling: the monitorial approach and the “Philanthropinist” model. The monitorial approach, developed by Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell in Britain, became particularly popular in the Anglo countries, France, and southern Europe. The Bell–Lancaster approach emphasized rote memorization, stipulated that students should master a specific set of knowledge, and prescribed curricular content in the form of set lessons to this end (Cordner Reference Cordner2016). Educationalists in both countries specified diverse educational content for the various social classes until the twentieth century, when universal schools became more prevalent.

In contrast, the Philanthropinist approach to education initially derived inspiration in Denmark from schools formed by Johann Bernhard Basedow and Baron von Rochow (discussed below), and this approach became popular throughout northern Europe. The fundamental premise of the Philanthropinist theory was that students learn in different ways and that schools should adopt a model of experiential learning to nurture the capacities of students with “diverse intelligences” (to use the current terminology). Experiential methods of instruction would develop students’ capacities for reasoning: Students were encouraged to explore the world and master only what they needed to know, rather than to memorize a specific set of knowledge (Larsen et al. Reference Larsen2013, 50; Schleunes Reference Schleunes1979, 329). Early discussions of education reform in Denmark were influenced by a blend of ideas drawing from Philanthropinist theory, new humanism, the works of Rousseau, and Kantian moralism. These theories shared ideas about child development (education should address the whole child), recognized the importance of experiential learning for self-directed discovery of knowledge, and embraced both scientific knowledge and humanistic insights (Bugge Reference Bugge1965, 25–33). The Danish king briefly endorsed the Bell–Lancaster monitorial method in the 1820s and 1830s; however, there was a subsequent backlash against this more mechanistic approach.

Finally, the last dimension on which countries’ educational systems differed significantly was in their choice of various types of administrative structures and systems for regulatory control over education. Some countries, like Germany and Denmark, readily accepted a strong role for government and for social partners in education, whereas in others (such as Britain), the government’s role was heavily contested (Green Reference Green1990; Clark Reference Clark1983). Moreover, some countries concentrated regulatory authority within the national government, while others ceded that authority to decentralized units. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain created systems of centralized control over education in the nineteenth century, while Anglo and Nordic countries placed control in the hands of local communities (Ansell and Lindvall Reference Ansell and Lindvall2013). Countries also devised sharply different methods of measuring students’ progress and imposing accountability on school officials. Richardson (Reference Richardson2022, 3–5) differentiates between “summative assessment” (which relies on easily quantifiable grades and standardized tests to appraise outcomes) and “formative assessment” (which uses teachers’ reports and coursework product instead of exams to evaluate outcomes). Summative assessment meshes better with national level assessment regimes; formative assessment works better when quality assessments are left more informally in the hands of local officials, schools, and teachers. While Richardson’s analysis pertains to contemporary assessment procedures, countries diverged in their use of summative and formative assessment mechanisms even in the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-century Britain and Denmark both opted to delegate significant authority over school management to local governments, though in Britain, the role of the state in developing a public education system was more contested. Yet over time, British policymakers developed national guidelines for curricula, assessment criteria, and quality controls, whereas Danish policymakers exerted much less control at the national level (Ydesen and Andreasen Reference Ydesen and Andreasen2014). Robert Lowe’s Revised Code of 1862 linked funding to students’ performance on achievement tests, a move put into place by Margaret Thatcher’s Education Act of 1988 (Lee Reference Lee2019; Porter Reference Porter1994, 425; Simmons Reference Simmons2008). Contemporary neoliberal education reformers believe that market competition among schools will enhance quality (Gingrich Reference Gingrich2011), and Lowe anticipated much of this neoliberal thinking. In Denmark, control over curricula, testing, and quality remained in the hands of local authorities, schools, and teachers throughout the nineteenth century (Ydesen and Andreasen Reference Ydesen and Andreasen2014). The very concept of accountability has its roots in Anglo-Norman tradition and has no equivalent in that of Danish (Ydesen and Andreasen Reference Ydesen and Andreasen2014, 3). In the twentieth century, Denmark would eventually develop more national regulations but even then, decisions about curricula continued to be largely left to local authorities, schools, and teachers (Kelly et al. Reference Kelly, Andreasen, Kousholt, McNess and Ydesen2018).

A Tale of Three Movements

Now that we have explored the different ways that education systems differed from one another, we can return to the central question of this chapter, which is why countries chose these differing paths. Why did some countries develop systems of education for the upper and middle classes, particularly suitable for academically minded students, while others developed systems of education for all? To explore this question, we might begin by considering three great movements that drove the development of education systems: nation-building, industrialization, and democratization.

First, the development of mass primary education was often at the heart of nation-building or state-building projects, as political elites in pre-democratic regimes expanded schooling to inculcate a national culture and a shared set of values, to strengthen citizenship, to train soldiers, and to promulgate norms of obedience (Durkheim Reference Durkheim and Wilson1961; Boli et al. Reference Boli, Ramirez and Meyer1985; Soysal and Strang Reference Soysal and Strang1989; Green Reference Green1990; Benavot et al. Reference Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer and Ying Wong1991; Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009; Ansell and Lindvall Reference Ansell and Lindvall2013; Paglayan 2020). Education was a core tool for legitimizing the state, validating the hegemony of the dominant social order, and preparing civil servants for the administrative bureaucracy (Green Reference Green1990, 77–9). As nations became more and more socially stratified, universal education provided a platform for socializing individuals from disparate class factions (Boli et al. Reference Boli, Ramirez and Meyer1985, 149–61; Benavot et al. Reference Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer and Ying Wong1991).

We can imagine that different countries’ nation-building projects had different needs that contributed to variations among those countries’ education systems. Countries facing boundary disputes, for example, had a particularly strong need for public schools to foster national language acquisition and cultivate patriotic soldiers (Tilly Reference Tilly1975; Darden and Mylonas Reference Darden and Mylonas2016). Absolute monarchs in Prussia and Austria launched educational initiatives to shift power from feudal lords to the central state, train civil servants, and achieve social control (Flora and Heidenheimer Reference Flora and Heidenheimer1981; Green Reference Green1990, 31; Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009, 22).

In our case of Britain versus Denmark, nation-building may well have been a stronger motivation for developing an educational system in the latter. Danish rulers felt compelled to defend national boundaries, catch up economically, and promote Danish language and culture (Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard2004; Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009; Nygaard Reference Nygaard2009; Kaspersen Reference Kaspersen2020). Denmark was at war with Sweden for much of the period between 1523 and 1720, and Denmark suffered serious setbacks when it lost both its fleet in 1807 and Norway in 1814 – making national security a high priority (Reeh Reference Reeh2016). Denmark’s long dispute with the German states over the region of Schleswig-Holstein (which it eventually lost in 1864) reinforced the idea that public education could serve as a mechanism for cultivating a unifying sense of Danishness and consolidating territory (Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard2004). Although Denmark was initially much larger than it is today (and included the territory of present-day Norway, Iceland, and northern Germany), Danish rulers felt relegated to the periphery of Europe and sought education as a means of building economic strength (Sundberg Reference Sundberg, Sundberg, Germundsson and Hansen2004, 134).

Yet the relationship between nation-building goals and educational outcomes varies enormously across countries (Brockliss and Sheldon Reference Brockliss and Sheldon2012), and nation-building alone cannot explain the distinctive Danish and British paths. Danish school-building began in the 1780s, before the Napoleonic war and acute conflicts over Schleswig-Holstein; indeed, the period between 1720 and 1801 was a period of stability not seen since the Middle Ages (Jespersen Reference Jespersen2011, 19). Prussia, Saxony, and other states in the Holy Roman Empire (which became incorporated into modern Germany in 1871) developed educational systems similar to that of Denmark, yet they did so with different state forms.

Moreover, Britain had its own strong motivations for nation-building. British rulers faced significant obstacles in their efforts to unify the disparate parts of the kingdom and to reconcile their sharp linguistic and religious differences after 1701; in fact, national consolidation would remain a central preoccupation until 1837 (Colley Reference Colley2005, 14). While Britain had fewer national security concerns than Denmark in the nineteenth century, such concerns were not entirely absent. While Britain was a victor in the Napoleonic war, the requisites of war-making could have put national education on the public agenda, just as British imperialists later saw merit in enhanced education for future soldiers (Fiduccia Reference Fiduccia1976). Politicians also faced internal disputes among the regions of the United Kingdom – think of the Irish question – and considered how education could be used to resolve these conflicts (Niessen Reference Niessen1984; Hamer Reference Hamer1972). Colley (Reference Colley2005, 8) suggests that British culture defined itself by fighting, which is different from Denmark’s impulse for cooperation and coordination. Britain had a strong sense of mission in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with building empire, fighting Catholicism, and promoting Protestant ideology (Colley Reference Colley2005, 54), and one could imagine that schools to cultivate soldiers and patriotism would be part of the British government’s strategy for fighting the good fight. Green (Reference Green1990) concludes that British liberal cultural values also restrained the state’s role in driving education.

A second movement identified by scholars as driving the development of education systems across Europe was the process of industrialization, as schools were called upon to address the twin functions of social integration and skills (Durkheim Reference Durkheim and Wilson1961; Boli et al. Reference Boli, Ramirez and Meyer1985). As industrialization took off, more workers became involved in the manufacturing sectors, which required more complex skills than agricultural production, particularly in open economies with traded goods (Wilensky Reference Wilensky2002; Ansell Reference Ansell2008; Hanushek and Woessmann Reference Hanushek and Woessmann2015). A somewhat different industrializing argument has it that late-developing countries created national education systems to catch up to nations with more established industrial economies (Green Reference Green1990; Becker et al. Reference Becker, Hornung and Woessmann2011, 97). Some scholars also suggest that the variety of capitalism had bearing on skills training institutions, because countries with coordinated markets had higher needs for workforce skills than liberal market economies. Coordinated market economies were more likely to include strong vocational education in secondary school systems; liberal market economies tended to develop general education (Crouch Reference Crouch1993; Hall and Soskice Reference Hall and Soskice2001; Thelen Reference Thelen2004; Iversen and Stephens Reference Iversen and Stephens2008; Busemeyer and Trampusch Reference Busemeyer and Trampusch2011; Anderson and Nijhuis Reference Anderson, Nijhuis, Busemeyer and Trampusch2011; Martin Reference Martin2011; Hopper Reference Hopper1968, 32–4).

To some extent, arguments linking school-building to industrialization seem to fit with our cases. Because Denmark developed a coordinated market economy with a skilled workforce, it makes sense that the country developed strong and differentiated school programs for working class students. In contrast, Britain’s delayed public primary school fit with its emergence as a liberal market economy with fewer specific skills for the working class. Yet the requisites of industrialization do not fully capture the timing of educational initiatives (Boli et al. Reference Boli, Ramirez and Meyer1985; Green Reference Green1990, 39, 47). British labor lost skills, in part, because workers were poorly educated due to delayed school development. The largely agricultural Denmark was a front-runner, even though guilds covered a very small part of the Danish labor force. Furthermore, the expansion of and political support for Danish vocational education happened in rural communities in the form of agricultural schools and folk high schools. Finally, high levels of labor market coordination (which foster social investments in education) are not closely associated with patterns of industrialization. For example, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden all had macro-corporatist industrial relations institutions but very different economic structures: The Netherlands was an historical frontrunner in commercial capitalist development, Sweden developed large industrial corporations, and Denmark developed small and medium-sized firms. The countries did, however, share historical cultural values placed on cooperation and skills (Martin et al. Reference Martin, Nijhuis and Olsson2022).

Third, the creation of mass, public education has been associated with the process of democratization. As citizens became voters and were asked to weigh in on matters of national importance, they required a greater degree of knowledge about political choices than citizens in pre-democratic regimes. Additionally, with the expansion of voting rights, citizens found themselves better positioned to voice their demands for a more equal society and, thus, for a stronger system of education (Lindert Reference Lindert2004; Stasavage Reference Stasavage2005; Green et al. Reference Green, Germen Janmaat and Preston2006; Ansell Reference Ansell2008; Gift and Wibbels Reference Gift and Wibbels2014). As workers sought education as a means to improve their own knowledge and power, elites responded with programs to calm social instabilities (Bjerg et al. Reference Bjerg, Callewaert, Elle, Mylov, Nissen and Silberbrandt1995, 31–2). Democratization was certainly an important motivation for the creation of primary education in Britain. Indeed, the 1870 British elementary education act was passed three years after the 1867 second reform act that greatly expanded voting rights. In Denmark, the powerful peasant movement drove school expansion in the nineteenth-century (Skovgaard-Petersen Reference Skovgaard-Petersen1976).

Yet the relationship between democratization and the development of public education systems is complicated. Authoritarian regimes have their own reasons for creating mass education and cross-national comparisons suggest that democratization is tenuously connected to early school-building (Flora and Heidenheimer Reference Flora and Heidenheimer1981; Acemoglu and Robinson Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2006; Ansell and Lindvall Reference Ansell and Lindvall2013; Paglayan 2020; Del Rio et al. Reference Del Rio, Henrik Knutsen and Lutscher2023). Britain and Denmark constitute an odd juxtaposition of cases. Britain established a parliament in 1801, but Denmark was ruled by an absolute monarchy until it created a parliament in 1849. Yet mass primary schools developed under Danish absolutism long before the constitutional monarchy was established in 1849 and before the movements by farmers and workers to develop expanded schooling. Thus, the democratization narrative fits Britain better than Denmark (Archer Reference Archer1979; Green Reference Green1990, 32).

National Responses to Functionalist Imperatives

While projects of nation building, industrialization, and democratization undoubtedly motivated education reforms, policymakers across countries made different calculations about the role that schools could play (Archer Reference Archer1979). For this reason, concerns about nation building, industrialization, and democratization did not automatically translate into specific educational policy choices. To fully understand those choices, then, we must look at other factors that shaped education policy as well.

A core argument of this book is that cultural views contributed to the development of the dimensions of education discussed above: the features of the public system, the degree of access offered to all classes, the different types of programs (differentiation) provided at the secondary level, pedagogical methods and mechanisms for administrative, regulatory control. Each country’s distinctive cultural views of education, class, society and the state provided a backdrop for Britain’s creation of schools primarily serving elites and the middle classes, versus Denmark’s development of educational programs that also benefit the lower classes.

First, in collectivist Denmark, politicians developed an early, mass, public education system with a high level of educational access by workers in order to invest in society, nurture useful citizens, instill patriotism, build states, and recruit soldiers (Moos Reference Moos2017; Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009). In individualistic Britain, politicians did not view workers and farmers as societal resources (Harvey Reference Harvey2013), and they only developed a public primary system intended to serve all citizens after the legislation of voting rights. Second, Danish educators embraced educational differentiation at the secondary level (with a strong vocational component) again with society in mind: Different jobs required different skills, and individual ambitions should be secondary to collective needs. British reformers on the left sought to mitigate stark class differences with a uniform secondary education track, and many rejected vocational programs to assure equality of educational opportunity for working-class youth. But they spent less time talking about collective, societal needs for skills. Third, with respect to preferences for pedagogical instruction, British educationalists endorsed humanistic studies and the mastery of a specific curriculum to further individual self-development. Danish educationalists favored experiential pedagogical approaches to prepare Danish children for diverse societal needs (Larsen et al. Reference Larsen2013, 52). Finally, individualist Britain developed national regulations to ensure the legal rights of children; collectivist Denmark allowed for local control to meet needs of diverse communities. Table 1.2 presents cultural associations with dimensions of education systems in Britain and Denmark.

These culturally informed choices created certain paradoxes as Britain and Denmark developed their education systems. In Britain, reformers on the left were passionately concerned about inequality, and their desire for equal educational opportunity helped shape the unitary secondary education system (Green Reference Green1990, 31). Yet, in choosing such a system, Britain also abandoned any commitment on the part of the state to vocational training, which, in turn, contributed to the deskilling of the British working class. In Denmark, reformers also came to support universal education at the primary level by the end of the nineteenth-century; however, the additional concerns about societal skills helped to preserve a strong vocational education system and foster a highly skilled working class. The incorporation of a two-tiered secondary education system ultimately produced a highly skilled working class and higher levels of socioeconomic equality than in Britain. Decentralization and voluntarism were hallmarks of nineteenth-century education and private schools drove expansion of literacy in both countries. Yet nineteenth-century voluntarism limited educational commitments in Britain but expanded public support for education in Denmark (Green Reference Green1990, xi).

My argument about the role of cultural values is meant to be complementary to other arguments about the nation-specific drivers of education reform; specifically, government institutions, patterns of interest group conflict, and religious traditions were also crucial to education policy outcomes. First, consider how the nature of governmental institutions might shape educational initiatives. Nations with strong state institutions tended to build centralized public education initiatives with strong administrative controls earlier than their peers, and achieved disproportionately high rates of enrollment. Nations with weak governmental institutions tended to be later than their peers in developing public education systems and created more limited mechanisms for administrative oversight (Green Reference Green1990, 75). At the same time, federalist governments with their many centers of power offered more opportunities for reform activity and experimentation (Manna Reference Manna2006, 14).

The absolute monarchy form of government has been associated with higher levels of social and educational investments. The monarch assumed responsibility for protecting the common good and paternalistic kings used education to foster social cohesion and protect their subjects (Damsholt Reference Damsholt2000, 80; McDonagh Reference McDonagh2015). In the twentieth-century, countries with strong left parties and proportional electoral rules (which encouraged cross-party alliances) were more likely to increase education spending (Boix Reference Boix1997; Busemeyer Reference Busemeyer2009; Iversen and Stephens Reference Iversen and Stephens2008; Ansell Reference Ansell2010; Gingrich Reference Gingrich2011; Garritzmann Reference Garritzmann2016).Footnote ¹ Countries with many veto points had greater difficulty implementing postwar school reforms against the objections of teachers’ unions than those with few veto points (Moe and Wiborg Reference Moe and Wiborg2017, 17). Unitary governmental systems were more likely to produce centralized school administration than federal systems (Archer Reference Archer1979). Governmental institutions affected how international reform ideas were adopted in national vocational education (Trampusch Reference Trampusch2009).

Small states (such as Denmark) had an easier time finding a consensus on education than large states like Britain (Katzenstein Reference Katzenstein1985; Graf and Gardin Reference Graf and Gardin2018). Yet Denmark was a middle-sized nation and a linguistic potpourri of a country that included Norway (until 1814) and parts of northern Germany (until 1864) (Jespersen Reference Jespersen2011, 3). While Denmark’s linguistic diversity came under attack in the border skirmishes with Germany over Schleswig-Holstein in the mid-nineteenth century, cultural views toward education were already apparent in the eighteenth-century age of enlightenment.

Cultural values matter to the ways that institutions shape political outcomes and the same institutions often have different impacts in countries with varied cultural norms. Danish absolutism was completely different from the absolute monarchy in France; in particular, the absolute monarch in Denmark was governed by a dual duty to God and to the people and this worked against despotism (Damsholt Reference Damsholt2000, 80; Jespersen Reference Jespersen2011, 49). Similar political parties took divergent policy positions across countries; for example, the Danish liberal and social democratic parties cooperated more on education reforms than comparable British parties and this was partly due to different cultural assumptions by the parties in the two countries (Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009). Because Britain had a weaker central government than Germany, it had more fragile national regulations (Green Reference Green1990, viii). Yet Denmark’s strong state did not develop robust centralized control of education systems, because groups across the political spectrum strongly opposed centralized oversight. Moreover, cultural continuities have persisted within countries through shifts in the institutional landscape. A similar spirit of coordination was found in Denmark in the absolutism-era Chancellery, late nineteenth-century agricultural cooperatives, quasi private corporatist channels and modern national task forces (Martin and Swank Reference Martin and Swank2012).

A second factor that influenced education reform debates was the competition between various interest groups in each nation.Footnote ² Nations with strong labor movements, for example, frequently managed to secure high levels of education spending and social investment (Lindert Reference Lindert2004; Stasavage Reference Stasavage2005; Iversen and Stephens Reference Iversen and Stephens2008; Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009; Ansell Reference Ansell2010; Gingrich Reference Gingrich2011, 134; Busemeyer Reference Busemeyer2015; Solga Reference Solga2014; Moe and Wiborg Reference Moe and Wiborg2017). Workers with specific skills were more likely to demand social spending than workers with general skills (Cusack et al. Reference Cusack, Iversen and Reim2006; Busemeyer and Trampusch Reference Busemeyer and Trampusch2011, 427). In countries with strong encompassing employers’ organizations, firms were more likely than those in weakly organized countries to support educational investments and well-developed vocational tracks relevant to industrial skills (Martin Reference Martin2011; Boje and Fink Reference Boje and Fink1990, 137–8). Teachers’ unions became a powerful force in educational development, especially in the twentieth century, as teachers viewed schools as a source of jobs as well as human capital development (Moe and Wiborg Reference Moe and Wiborg2017, 1). Denmark had a weaker nobility than Britain, where the public (i.e. private) grammar schools mirrored the deeply entrenched class system (Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009, 49).

Yet we can again observe the way that cultural considerations creep into the expression of class and interests (Archer Reference Archer1979; Gonon and Deissenger Reference Gonon and Deissinger2021). Comparable British and Danish groups held different policy preferences. Around 1800, Danish elites proactively sought education to develop peasants’ skills to enhance agricultural productivity; whereas, British elites feared that education would increase mass insurrection, viewed the working class as a drain on the economy and rejected social supports as contributing to overpopulation. In the mid-1800s, Danish national liberal elites sought constitutionalism and some new political rights, but they were more concerned with the social and economic well-being of the people than with electoral expansion. British utilitarian reformers supported expanded political rights, and grounded their arguments on conceptions of individualism; however, they expressed Malthusian concerns about overpopulation in advancing social benefits. Workers in Britain and Denmark also held different preferences. Around 1900, Danish unions and the Left Party fully supported a strong secondary vocational education track to build workers’ skills (Christiansen Reference Christiansen1978). Many among British labor sought a unitary secondary education track, fearing that that vocational education would channel working-class children into inferior courses and would perpetuate class inequalities (Evans Reference Evans1985, 11). Thus, expressions of class interests were tempered by cultural factors (Archer Reference Archer1979, 3).

A third factor contributing to varied education policy choices was differences in religious traditions (Evans Reference Evans1985, 1; Wiborg Reference Wiborg2009; Petersen et al. Reference Petersen, Petersen and Christiansen2010, 39; Cox Reference Cox2001; van Oorschot et al. Reference van Oorschot, Opielka and Pfau-Effinger2008). The Catholic church had provided human capital, models of administration and sources of legal thought since medieval times (Møller and Stavnskær Doucette Reference Møller and Stavnskær Doucette2022; Grzymala-Busse Reference Grzymala-Busse2015, Reference Grzymala-Busse2023). Pastors provided the earliest forms of local government administration in Denmark (Knudsen Reference Knudsen and Knudsen2000; Knudsen and Rothstein Reference Knudsen and Rothstein1994). Lutheran countries, with their weak church-state struggles, tended to be early educational innovators (Green Reference Green1990, 28; Kahl Reference Kahl2005; van Kersbergen and Manow Reference Van Kersbergen and Manow2009). Countries that developed early mass schooling had a state church and no sizable Catholic minorities (Soysal and Strang Reference Soysal and Strang1989; Ansell and Lindvall Reference Ansell and Lindvall2013).

Yet cultural values also seem to play a role in the evolution of diverse religious traditions. Countries responded in very different ways to the Protestant reformation and made diverse choices about the relationships between church and state. Britain and Denmark both adopted an Episcopal model, which included a strong role for a state church in nation-building. Yet despite doctrinal similarities, the relationship between church and state – as well as between the state church and dissenting sects – evolved very differently in the two countries (Nelsen and Guth Reference Nelsen and Guth2015, 77–8). Both countries had a state church with strong dissenting sects, yet only in Britain did sharp religious cleavages over church schools delay public education. Danish religious leaders preached moderation and policymakers supported state funding for private, evangelical schools (“Danske Skolehistorie”).

Public opinion is a final factor contributing to cross-national variations in contemporary education policy; and differences in opinion might well have driven nineteenth-century developments as well. When education becomes a salient issue for the public and the public holds a coherent position on school reform, party institutions and interest group conflict have less influence on educational choices than the powerful pressure of public opinion (Busemeyer et al. Reference Busemeyer, Garritzmann and Neimanns2020). Attitudes toward redistribution shape views on educational subsidies for low-income students (Garritzmann Reference Garritzmann2016). People’s views of the functions of vocational education matter enormously to their opinions about VET systems (Di Stasio and Solga Reference Di Stasio and Solga2017). If public opinion is often crucial to contemporary education reform cycles, it makes sense that it also played a role in the past; yet, assessing historical opinion presents daunting methodological obstacles, as surveys, polls and experimental design research produce data confined to recent decades. Therefore, this book explores alternative routes to understanding historical, culturally informed opinions about education policy.

Of course, cultural values, interest group cleavages, institutions, and religious beliefs undoubtedly coevolve and have a reciprocal influence on one another (Alesina and Giuliano Reference Alesina and Giuliano2015, 928; Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane1978). Cultural values illuminate why new ideas are interpreted in different ways, why class factions have such different preferences across the two countries, and why Brits are more distrustful of their political institutions than are Danish citizens. Cultural constructs predate the development of contemporary party systems, unions, and employers’ associations, and the study of struggles in a single policy domain does not capture the unifying themes of culture that extend across policy areas. Yet, interests and institutions also have a feedback effect on further cultural development; for example, premodern institutions for governance reinforced regional tendencies toward cooperation and conflict (Putnam Reference Putnam1993).

Activist Writers and Cultural Work

Simply observing that culture plays a role in shaping education policy is not a particularly useful insight. Because of the complicated interaction of cultural values, interests, and institutions discussed above, it behooves us to consider precisely how cultural values are infused in specific education policy debates and how they reappear across time. I suggest a model to explain how cultural values are transmitted; namely, this happens through the agency of fiction writers and the structure of national cultural symbols and narratives found in literature. This chapter explores how literary authors as agents played a salient role in imbuing political challenges with a cultural perspective in episodes of education reform; Chapter 2 presents a theory of how authors’ collective narratives transmitted the structure of cultural symbols and narratives over time.

Fiction writers participated in struggles over policy reform in several ways that reflected their cultural power. The first was by joining other intellectuals to put neglected issues on the political agenda. In pre-democratic regimes, the general public – and even bourgeois intellectuals – had few avenues for making their concerns known. But these communities of writers and other intellectuals debated the grand issues of the day in salons and literature became a crucial medium for men and women of letters to debate issues, shape public consciousness and influence rulers (Keen Reference Keen1999, 29–33; Williams Reference Williams1963; Foucault Reference Foucault and Young1981, 58; Znaniecki Reference Znaniecki1952, 26). The relative autonomy of fiction writers allowed authors to serve functions associated with nation-building, legitimizing governance structures and reproducing class structures (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991, 655; Williams Reference Williams1963).

Even in the nineteenth century, as parliamentary mechanisms for policymaking developed in Denmark and matured in Britain, authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig viewed political channels as limited in their capacities to cope with social challenges. Therefore, authors continued to use their work to influence specific political debates. British writers addressed issues such as poverty to which politicians paid scant attention with stories about women and children suffering from social degradation at the hands of drunken, destitute men, and they led cultural campaigns to nurture the charitable impulse in the upper and middle classes (Poovey Reference Poovey1995, 57; Guy Reference Guy1996; Childers Reference Childers and David2001; Dzelzainis Reference Dzelzainis, Kucich and Bourne Taylor2012).

To have an impact, fiction needs readers, at least among the political class, and evidence suggests that a mass audience for fiction certainly existed by the mid-1800s. British elites feared the effects of rising literacy among the common man after the Glorious Revolution (Altick Reference Altick1954, 4–6, 30–1; Feather Reference Feather1988, 90–1; Watt Reference Watt2000, 36, 47). Then, as commercial capitalism fueled the expansion of a new, literate middle-class audience for fiction, authors gained more influence (Watt Reference Watt2000, 12–21, 60). Advanced printing technologies facilitated the proliferation of books, and helped to make inexpensive classics more accessible to the middle classes (Keen Reference Keen1999, 4). Sales of books soared after 1774, when the publisher John Bell began printing books on coarse paper, creating a cheaper product that was more accessible to the masses (Altick Reference Altick1954, 54). Writers became so influential that in 1789, Pitt expanded the stamp act on newspaper rentals to limit reading by potentially rebellious middle-class consumers (Keen Reference Keen1999, 37). By the 1850s, the reading public encompassed between 5 and 6 million people (Altick Reference Altick1954, 4–6). Dickens’s publishers had sold 4,239,000 works by 1882 in England alone (Altick Reference Altick1957, 384). Hardy’s Jude the Obscure sold 20,000 copies in the first three months (Altick Reference Altick1986, 238).

A second way that fiction writers participated in shaping policy reform was by using their artistic works to frame or to ascribe specific meaning to economic, social, and political problems and their solutions (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2002, 713). Narratives provide cognitive frames and this gives authors a special power to influence individuals’ beliefs about the causes of problems such as poverty and beliefs about social mobility (Lamont Reference Lamont2000; Lamont and Small Reference Lamont, Small, Lin and Harris2008, 83–4; Poovey Reference Poovey1995; Carney Reference Carney2017; Childers Reference Childers and David2001). Narratives are crucial to the development of imaginaries that organize economic action, because “fictional expectations” rather than “rational expectations” critically determine action under conditions of uncertainty (Beckert and Bronk Reference Beckert2018, 4; Fourcade Reference Fourcade2011). Cultural tools matter to political processes when they help to solve a puzzle, and they are available, forceful, and institutionally supported (McDonnell et al. Reference McDonnell, Bail and Tavory2017; Schudson Reference Schudson1989, 160). The shifting cultural interpretation of the Holocaust helped to develop new forms of regulatory control (Alexander Reference Alexander2003, 31). Of particular interest to us is the way that authors create frames that influence how people think about the basic goals of education: to benefit individuals or to serve the broader society. Matthew Arnold has in mind education to facilitate individual self-development when he writes that the “grand aim of education” for the middle class is “largeness of soul and personal dignity”; culture brings to the lower classes “feeling, gentleness, humanity” (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1971, 53).

A third way that authors influenced policy debates was by using fiction to make powerful emotional appeals that elevate the salience of political issues (Swidler Reference Swidler1986). For British political economists, individual self-interest drove social processes and fiction writers explored these themes with an intimacy unavailable to philosophers (Gallagher Reference Gallagher2006, 10–12). Beginning with his work on the Poor Law Commission, James Kay (Shuttleworth) described poverty as a social disorder resulting from a disorganized culture (Kay-Shuttleworth Reference Kay (Shuttleworth)1832). Elizabeth Gaskell gave his ideas emotional power with her best-seller, Mary Barton (2011/1848). Gaskell believed that it was the role of thinkers like Kay-Shuttleworth and Thomas Carlyle to research objective conditions, while her own role was to teach people sympathy rather than political economy by recasting their ideas through fiction (Pollard Reference Pollard1965, 34–41). Dickens anticipated that A Christmas Carol would have “twenty thousand time the force” of a pamphlet on child labor laws (Henderson Reference Henderson2000, 140–3). Benjamin Disraeli explained that he wrote Sybil (1844) as a follow-up to nonfictional work calling attention to dysfunctional party politics and to the troubles of the working man (Disraeli Reference Disraeli2020/1845, 454). In the United States, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not cause the Civil War yet it fanned the outcry against slavery (Guy Reference Guy1996, 11).

A fourth way that activist writers exercised their influence was by participating in coalitions with political allies to win policy battles; within these coalitions, fiction writers specialized in using cultural touchstones to popularize esoteric policy ideas among the wider public (Poovey Reference Poovey1995, 15; Keen Reference Keen1999, 2). Because fiction writers often appear to be one step removed from politics and therefore somewhat neutral, they can help to legitimize policy proposals. Indeed, eighteenth-century members of the “state nobility” increasingly derived their legitimacy from cultural capital (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991, 655; Spillman and Faeges Reference Spillman, Faeges, Adams, Clemens and Shola Orloff2005). In this regard, Herman Bang in Tine credits, blames and implicitly recognizes the role of the old poets who with patriotic words brought Denmark to the disastrous 1864 war: “It is the poets who have filled us with fresh visions and heralded the new age…it is his visions that have carried us to this day…even if they were only illusions…his is the responsibility” (Bang Reference Bang1984/1889, 48).

Some writers publicly worked with political parties and movements, served in Parliament, and openly participated in networks with political leaders (Carney Reference Carney2017). Danish enlightenment-era author Ludvig Holberg, for example, helped to revitalize the Sorø Academy, an important school for educating future statesmen, and used the Academy to alter the course of education in Denmark. The Danish poet and priest, NFS Grundtvig, helped to draft the 1849 constitution and inspired the people’s high school movement (Martin Reference Martin2018). Other writers hid behind their art, claiming political neutrality; this perhaps contributed to the relative lack of attention to their role in political change within the political science profession. In Britain, Arnold reviewed drafts of his brother-in-law’s Education Act of 1870 (establishing British mass education) and lobbied extensively for his view of education reform both behind the scenes and with his public essays and fiction; yet Arnold publicly demurred when asked to take explicitly political positions. As he wrote to his mother on October 17, 1871, “things in England being what they are, I am glad to work indirectly by literature rather than directly by politics” (Arnold Reference Arnold and Russell1900, 7vc7). Hardy argued for necessary political neutrality in a letter to Robert Pearce Edgcumbe on April 23, 1891: “the pursuit of what people are pleased to call Art so as to win unbiassed attention to it as such, absolutely forbids political action.” Coleridge vigorously participated in the Tory, Anglican school-building effort, yet he wrote to Beaumont in December 1811, “I detest writing Politics, even on the right side” (Coleridge Reference Coleridge1956, 352).

Some caveats are in order. Most importantly, authors and their narratives were themselves subject to control by the powers that be, as power relations permeated the production of books. Publishers, the state and other elites had the means to promote or suppress literary voices, and while the barriers to publishing were lower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, publishers gave a platform to chosen authors (Altick Reference Altick1986). Powerful actors and institutions (such as markets, laws, industrial structures) controlled what commentary was printed, what texts were published and who was allowed to engage in discourse (Foucault Reference Foucault and Young1981, 52–6; Peterson and Anand Reference Peterson and Anand2004). Fiction may have inspired social activism, but social movements also brought authors to attempt new genres of fiction (Isaac Reference Isaac2009). Authors themselves experienced an essential antagonism between their autonomy (based on their relative autonomous worlds of the ivory tower) and their political engagement (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991, 658).

Moreover, individual authors chose either to reinforce or to challenge elite power structures, and assessing writers’ influence presents a challenge when they supported opposing sides of a debate. Groups and diverse fields competed over the formation of national identities and offered diverse national myths to claim legitimate political authority (Poovey Reference Poovey1995, 15; Keen Reference Keen1999, 2). Some authors legitimized coercive institutions, as when their stories held victims responsible for structural failings or when bildungsroman conveyed cultural norms of appropriateness (Apol Reference Apol2000, 62). Yet others challenged dominant power relations, by drawing attention to the contradictions and cognitive dissonance inherent in governing institutions (Claybaugh Reference Claybaugh2003–2004, 45–6). Tensions also divided generations. Romantic writers held the poets of the French revolution in contempt for the terror associated with the so-called age of reason; and Romantics harkened back to religious and emotional themes. Romantics, in turn, lost favor with the failure of progressive reform after 1848 (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991, 657). Modernists across Europe rebelled against the social norms of the prior age: They challenged organized religion, and in some countries such as France, they protested patriotism and nationalism (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991, 658).

Yet despite political and generational cleavages among authors, common threads often brought together opposing sides. Both political camps in Britain at the dawn of the nineteenth century agreed that society was an amalgamation of individuals. British radical utilitarian thinkers – against the protests of their conservative countrymen – fought for the rights of individual workers; in contrast, Edmund Burke resolutely rejected individual rights and viewed the French Revolution as an assault on traditional British culture. But he also considered the historical construction of a people to be a “wholly artificial” construction entered into by individuals forming the social contract (Williams Reference Williams1963, 9). Burke and William Cobbett, were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but both attacked industrialization (Williams Reference Williams1963, 3). Later, British authors on the left and right worried about the culture of poverty.

If authors systematically came from different class backgrounds in Britain and Denmark, this could also contribute to cross-national differences in the cultural expressions of the literary world. For example, if Danish writers could more easily develop within the agricultural and industrial classes than British writers, we might expect Danish authors to be more supportive of education for workers. Yet, writers from both countries largely came from the bourgeois class until the late nineteenth century, although Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen were obvious exceptions to this general rule. In mid-nineteenth century Britain, working class journalists and some fiction writers sought to challenge the cultural hegemony of the middle class by disseminating their ideas through periodicals. The autodidact movement provided an enthusiastic audience for their products (Murphy Reference Murphy1994, 7–31). But many of those who most prominently championed the working class came from the bourgeoisie; for example, Percy Shelley was educated at Eton and expelled from Oxford. Novelists had close links to their publishers in the nineteenth-century and this tended to reinforce the hegemony of the middle class (Feather Reference Feather1988). In Denmark, a working-class literature developed only at the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of Martin Andersen Nexø, Jeppe Aakjær, and Johan Skjoldborg (Lund Reference Lund, Lennon and Nilsson2020, 51, 56).

Finally, fiction writers undoubtedly wielded greater influence in the early days of education expansion, before political institutions and interest groups were fully established. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, trends toward mass education accelerated as economic and political globalization took off, and these likely reduced cross-country differences in authors’ depictions of education. With time, writers also became more supportive of mass education, and this was particularly true in Britain, where authors once divided by diverse political perspectives came to share views about the powerful social and political forces driving educational expansion.

This model for understanding how education systems developed suggests that cultural frames provided context for struggles among social actors. Movements of nation-building, industrialization and democratization broadly inspired expansion of schooling. The western world experienced periods of individualism/liberalism (such as the mid nineteenth century and the late twentieth century) and collectivism/coordination (such as the late nineteenth century and period after the second world war). Changing paradigms in education policy set off new trajectories, and coalitions of authors, politicians, and other agents competed to advance their preferred solutions to educational problems. Dynamics of political contestation, labor power, business organization and party politics all contribute to educational outcomes. Yet beneath these very real power struggles, cultural frames, marshalled by activist authors, slyly informed the articulation of interests and the interpretation of ideas. These frames persisted even through periods of individualism and collectivism, and they had a bearing on the fault lines of contestation.

Authors in Policymaking Episodes

The following section of this chapter will explore how writers engaged in reform episodes as political agents and how they used cultural tropes to advance specific educational solutions to pressing economic, political and social problems. Danish and British writers were active at three critical junctures in the development of education systems: the establishment of initial primary schools in the early nineteenth century, the expansion of primary schools in the mid-nineteenth century and the enactment of secondary schooling in the early twentieth century. In each case, challenges associated with nation-building, industrialization and/or democratization broadly inspired educational initiatives. New ideas about education often precipitated reforms in both countries; however, these reforms were picked up in somewhat different ways. Networks of authors and intellectuals advanced specific approaches, lobbied for change with political allies, popularized educational appeals, and helped to unite other social actors from diverse class fractions around educational strategies. These cases are developed at much greater length in Chapters 3 to 5. Chapter 2 also reports quantitative findings showing us that British and Danish authors collectively depicted education in nationally distinctive ways and suggest that these provided broad context for education policy choices.

Conclusion

This chapter probes why some countries created education for all, while other developed schools that primarily served the upper and middle classes, and particularly catered to academically minded students. I suggest that authors played a special role in educational reform episodes and that this cultural perspective expands our understanding of the comparative politics of education. Scholars have championed many different motives for the development of education systems: Arguments centered on the nation-building function of education often emphasize elite calculations (particularly in authoritarian regimes), whereas those focused on industrialization and democratization explore the contributions of class conflict to schooling (Flora and Heidenheimer Reference Flora and Heidenheimer1981; Green Reference Green1990, 39, 47; Boli et al. Reference Boli, Ramirez and Meyer1985; Wilensky Reference Wilensky2002; Acemoglu and Robinson Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2006; Ansell Reference Ansell2008; Hanushek and Woessmann Reference Hanushek and Woessmann2015; Ansell and Lindvall Reference Ansell and Lindvall2013; Paglayan 2020). One may reasonably argue that nation-building, industrialization, and democratization all motivated the expansion of education at different points in time. Yet, cultural views also mediated both policymakers’ reform agendas and social groups’ preferences for specific educational strategies to realize these functional requisites. A cultural perspective helps us to understand choices about features of education systems beyond spending levels, a topic that has been relatively understudied by social scientists (Moe and Wiborg Reference Moe and Wiborg2017).

Such a perspective provides historical context for current battles over education. Strong, coherent public opinion is crucial to contemporary education choices (Busemeyer et al. Reference Busemeyer, Garritzmann and Neimanns2020). But public opinion data became available only in the twentieth century, and this work helps to fill our gap in knowledge about historical views toward education. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, privatization has been a rallying cry for neoliberal education reformers, who believe that market competition among schools will enhance quality (Gingrich Reference Gingrich2011). This work suggests the historical cultural reasons why private schools take diverse forms and have different cultural meanings in liberal and social democratic countries. My focus on the cultural aspects of education system development complements cross-national and (sometimes) quantitative investigations of education system development and differentiation offered by scholars such as Ansell and Lindvall (Reference Ansell and Lindvall2013), Moe and Wiborg (Reference Moe and Wiborg2017), Busemeyer et al. (Reference Busemeyer, Garritzmann and Neimanns2020), and Paglayan (2020).

Finally, a cultural perspective sheds light on the historical processes that create complementarities between education and social policy (Busemeyer and Trampusch Reference Busemeyer and Trampusch2011, 433; Busemeyer Reference Busemeyer2015; Iversen and Stephens Reference Iversen and Stephens2008). Cultural constructions of education have meaning for both the historical development of education systems and contemporary cross-national variations in patterns of social investment in education today. Historic cultural debates over education anticipated contemporary discussions about the use of education to promote economic growth, social investment, and equality. Culturally constrained choices in education systems continue to have a powerful impact on the fortunes of low-skill young people, treatment of vulnerable populations, patterns of inequality, opportunities for social solidarity, and social stability (Huber et al. Reference Huber, Gunderson and Stephens2020).