The cliometric study of the rise of popular schooling in modern times in various regions of the world offers the availability of abundant troves of quantitative data, but the challenge is how to incorporate this data into both effective econometric analysis and insightful historical interpretation and narrative. Tomas Cvrcek, in his exceptionally lucid account of the development of public schooling in the Austrian Empire, provides an exemplar of how to balance these various challenges. He contributes both a rich compilation of data sources and an insightful as well as a provocative set of interpretations of the data he analyzes.

The policy focus of the book is the influential set of public schooling initiatives introduced in the mid to late eighteenth century in the Austrian Empire by Maria Theresa and her successor Joseph II while actually devised by the influential Catholic educational reformer Johann Felbiger. These educational reforms are often cited as an example of what enlightened absolutism can accomplish, though admittedly much more fully realized with similar reforms in the case of Prussia. The book effectively uses a thematic rather than a chronological organization to examine salient dimensions of how these initiatives played out over the subsequent century until the major further schooling reforms of 1869 were introduced in the Austrian Empire.

The themes themselves are ordered according to basic developmental logic. The first major chapter takes up the initial policy initiatives and their subsequent development and modification. The Theresian reforms were modeled on those introduced by Pietists in Prussia but under Felbiger were modified for the Austrian Empire’s Catholicism. The second chapter then turns to the building and provision of schools, employing various records documenting the presence and construction of schools at various points between the eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. The third chapter considers the financing of schools, presenting a rich array of quantitative evidence demonstrating the various funding sources, employed both public and private. The fourth chapter focuses on teachers using sources such as local directories to provide data on numbers and training of teachers and on teacher compensation. This includes evidence on various sources of nonmonetary compensation such as housing and also on the practice of linking school teaching with other duties such as those at local church services. The fifth chapter examines students, including their enrollment and attendance patterns and the extent to which these were influenced both by school fees and the market for child labor. The sixth chapter considers the content of the education students would have received both in terms of prescribed curriculum and in terms of outcome measures such as literacy and numeracy. One central issue in this chapter concerns the time and energy allocated to religious versus secular subjects. Another important issue concerns whether schools provided instruction beyond that of the initial two years of basic literacy and religious instruction. The seventh chapter turns to the political economy of school reform and presents quantitative evidence on the public choice of stakeholders’ positions regarding supporting or opposing such reform in the 1860s. The book concludes with a provocative consideration of counterfactual alternatives to the actual reforms introduced in the Austrian Empire. Throughout these chapters, Cvrcek makes adroit use of cliometric methods to tease out insights from data that would appear otherwise quite recalcitrant. He also pays careful attention throughout to the substantial differences between various regions within the Austrian Empire.

Cvrcek’s findings offer insights and challenges to common views on the rise of mass schooling. Chapter Two on schooling establishes, on the one hand. that there already was a reasonably extensive network of schools in the Austrian Empire prior even to the initiatives of the mid to late eighteenth century. Thus it could be argued that this documents a natural local impetus to establish schools even in the absence of central government initiative. On the other hand, it also establishes that the initiatives to provide universal access to schooling were almost certainly deficient, and if anything, previous qualitative analyses have underestimated the deficiencies indicated by Cvrcek’s quantitative analysis. Chapter Three on finance challenges the common view that elite land owners have been overwhelmingly hostile to popular education seeing it as counter to their economic interests, a view featured in unified growth theory and in the work of Stanley Engerman, Elisa Mariscal, and Kenneth Sokoloff (“The Evolution of Schooling in the Americas, 1800–1925.” In David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds. Human Capital and Institutions: A Long-Run View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). While Cvrcek finds that landowners were not necessarily the most enthusiastic, supportive of groups providing funding for public schooling, neither were they notably derelict or hostile relative to other stakeholders funding schools in Austria during the time period he considers. The same attitudes show up in Cvrcek’s analysis of the political economy of school reform in which he finds that anticipated costs at the local level of implementing school reform were a more telling indication of opposition to reform than either landownership status or other measures of conservatism such as Catholicism.

Cvrcek throughout emphasizes that the motives for the Austrian initiatives in providing public education were to promote elite social control of subject populations, indoctrination, and stability rather than to promote social mobility, empowerment, or human capital formation for purposes of economic growth. There has been a long-standing tradition in the educational history of arguing for the presence of at least implicit social control motives for the provision of mass schooling in both the United States and Britain, much of it with a Marxist flavor. In the case of the Austrian Empire, the social control interpretation was put forward in James Melton’s influential intellectual history of these reforms in comparison with Prussia, though in the case of the Austrian Empire via the influence of Felbiger as pedagogue and education minister, the social control motive was quite explicit not just implied (see James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). As noted previously, Crvcek provides further support for the influence of the social control motive with his quantitative analysis of voting patterns in the Austrian parliament by various stake holders for and against particular reform measures in the later nineteenth century. One telling indication of this was the ongoing resistance to expanding the schooling curriculum beyond that of the first two years in which the curriculum concentrated on religious instruction and on indoctrination in acceptance of one’s place in the social order. The concluding chapter further underscores the prominence of the social control function of schooling in the Austrian Empire by suggesting that Austrian schooling policy actually impeded rather than promoted popular schooling compared to what would have occurred with the purely private provision in the absence of government policy. Cvrcek suggests that in comparison with early nineteenth-century Britain, Austrian regulations to control entry into the schooling market squelched the private so-called winkelschulen that, in his view, most effectively responded to lower class popular demand for schooling.

For this latter comparison, the book could have done more to compare British and Austrian popular culture as well as their labor markets with regard to demands for literacy. Britain underwent not only industrialization at a much earlier stage than the Austrian Empire but also more extensive urbanization and transformations in agriculture. These influences on popular demands for schooling in the two regions warrant further consideration. Also, more allowance could have been made for the possibility that there were opportunities for using literacy and other aspects of basic education in Austrian agriculture. Finally, while Cvrcek makes a good case for the reforms of 1869 as an appropriate end point for his account, educational developments thereafter in the Austrian Empire would also seem to warrant consideration in some future study. All the same, Cvrcek’s current volume is a superb contribution not only to the history of Austrian education but to the cliometric study of the rise of popular schooling more generally.