Traditionally, the history of schooling has often been written through the lens of school acts, leaving readers to believe that the school acts were synonymous with the school system and that they, almost by themselves, brought schooling to the people. This way of writing the history of education came under harsh critique by so-called revisionists as early as the late 1960s. Since then, historians of education have tried to find other ways to approach the rise of mass schooling. One may therefore wonder what brings the authors of this book once again to write the history of schooling through the lens of school acts.
What separates the book School Acts and the Rise of Mass Schooling from prerevisionist writing about the history of schooling is that the authors make use of tools developed in social, cultural, and economic history as they return to analyze the importance and impact of school acts on the development of mass schooling.
Despite asking such questions as, “Why were the school acts passed, and under what social and political circumstances? What was their content? What was their impact and significance?” (p. 2), the editors state that they do not present a new narrative on school acts and the history of schooling. Instead, the book is an attempt to add more nuance to established narratives.
The book also aims to create an analytical framework for defining common concepts about school acts and mass schooling. They analyze school acts in thirteen different case studies, helping to problematize not only educational concepts such as school acts, school systems, and compulsory education, but also more general concepts such as nation and citizen (p. 4).
The case studies the editors chose include many from the northern hemisphere, making the book mainly about school acts in the Western world from 1774 to 1870, although several chapters also cover the consequences of these school acts into the twentieth century. The different localities included have in common that they were, or became, sovereign states in the nineteenth century. Otherwise, they were vastly different in terms of size, economic structure, political system, religious affiliation, and ethnic composition.
This broad approach makes it possible to present a diversity of examples on the impact of school acts, from large or minor to no impact at all. Among the first, the school acts of 1774 in the Habsburg Empire, 1814 in Denmark, 1842 in Sweden, and 1870 in England and Wales can be mentioned, as several of them have been put forward as cornerstones of these countries’ school systems. Different features are highlighted when discussing these cases. The Danish case study emphasizes the government's implementation of no fewer than five school acts to adapt school regulations to different social, ethnic, religious, and geographical settings. This can be compared with the Swedish case, in which one uniform school act was interpreted differently in different parts of the country, resulting in large variations in its organization of mass education. In the English case study, it becomes apparent that the Elementary Education Act of 1870 had a great influence on the numbers of both teachers and children in school, and the Habsburg Empire's school act is put forward as an important part of state-building.
These developments can be compared with the situations in Prussia, the United States, and Italy, where school legislation was lacking or mass education was introduced slowly. In the Prussian case, the lack of any changes in the late nineteenth century to school legislation dating back to the eighteenth century is partly explained as the result of a change in the character of Prussian legislation. The United States also failed in the late nineteenth century to pass a school act that would form a national education system, in this case explained in terms of those who would not profit from a national system of education. The chapter on Italy focuses on its neglect of primary education in the nineteenth century. Comparing Italy with other countries as well as comparing the different Italian regions with each other reveals that the costly effects of such neglect continued to linger even beyond the twentieth century.
Other cases in the book show how national conditions gave rise to special lines of development. The most apparent of these is the Swiss system of mass schooling that evolved in practice as a complex body of independent school acts at the canton level. Another is the Canadian case, in which the tradition of separate systems of education within and between different regions was carried into the constitution of 1867, creating a long tradition of separate forms of schooling.
Still other cases present a different kind of development to those that revolve around one decisive school act. These chapters cover the rise of mass education in the Dutch Republic, France, and Russia. The Dutch case shows a development characterized by religious conflicts, while the French case highlights the rise of mass education as imposed from the top down, creating a system that contributed heavily to the making of French men and women as citizens. Russia stands out as an example of how both state and society contributed to the rise of mass education.
The outlines of the different chapters also show the various ways the authors chose to approach the issue of school acts. Most chapters focus on the actual school acts and their development, but those on Sweden, England, Italy, and Spain also try to measure their impact by comparing the change in numbers of pupils or teachers during the time period. In the case of Spain, the author shows that the school regulation of 1838, at least in some areas, led to an increase in the number of public primary schools.
My only reservation about this book is its lack of a chapter that draws more general inferences from the different case studies. Instead, the book ends with a chapter on the historiographical study of school legislation. Although interesting, this chapter does not help the reader reach any broader conclusions about how school acts in various parts of the Western world contributed to the rise of mass education.
Despite this drawback, the book is an impressive compilation of different high-quality case studies that give the reader an unprecedented insight into how school acts emerge and how they might (or might not) form school systems. The fact that the different chapters focus on different aspects of school acts will hopefully inspire a plethora of new case studies of school acts from other parts of the world.
