Combining Global and Local Narratives: A New Social History of the Expansion of Mass Education?

Abstract

This article discusses how an increased interest in the global, the international and the cross-national may be informed by the recently renewed focus upon the social and economic history of education. The history of school buildings in a comparative framework offered here illustrates how such approaches also have important contributions to make to the study of international and cross-national phenomena. This article therefore makes a case for a social history turn in this field.

Introduction

The nineteenth century Western world saw the expansion of schooling from Russia in the east, to the USA in the west. This process was certainly national in the sense that it was marked by the efforts of central governments to create national school systems by issuing laws and distributing state subsidies, and local in the sense that schooling largely was organized and funded by local bodies in the decentralized school systems of the nineteenth century (Westberg, Boser, & Brühwiler, 2019).

Although schooling often have been interpreted within a national framework, with emphasis on the creation of national identities and the role of government intervention through school acts such as the French Guizot law of 1833, the Russian Elementary School Statute of 1864 and the English Elementary Education Act of 1870, the international and transnational dimensions of this history has been increasingly acknowledged. Investigating phenomena that crosses and surpasses national boundaries, which include borrowing, modeling, diffusion, transfer, reception and adaptation, historians of education have given us an immensely improved understanding of phenomena including mass education (see, e.g., Caruso, 2015; Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992; Lundahl & Lawn, 2015).

The aim of this article is to address how this interest in the global, the international and the cross-national may be informed by, what I believe is, one of the most promising strands of recent historiographical trends, namely the renewed interest in the social and economic history of education. Following this line of thought, the main argument of this article is that the study of the international and transnational history of schooling may benefit from a social history turn, inspired by the so-called revisionist or new history of education of the 1960s and 1970s.

Presenting this argument, this article starts with an introduction to the revisionist history of education that was promoted in the 1960s and 1970s. Using the history of school buildings as an example, I will thereafter argue that such approaches have important contributions to make to studies addressing international and cross-national phenomena. By shifting focus from national policies and transnational transfer processes, to issues of organization, labor and funding among the average men and women on the level of local school districts, a social turn will provide additional layers to the international and transnational history of education.

From a new social history of education to the linguistic turn

The interest in the social and economic history of education was part of the new history of education or revisionist history of education that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. These new ways of approaching educational history was a reaction toward traditional histories of education that tended to excessively emphasize the significance of individuals, legislation and educational ideas (Gordon & Szreter, 1989; McCulloch, 2011). Historians of education agreed that the focus of educational-historical research needed to change. Education needed to be more closely related to its social, economic and political basis, education-historical research needed to utilize new social science methods and theories, and education history could no longer be written as a story of progress and prominent individuals (Harrigan, 1986).

As a result of such efforts, research strands denoted “revisionist history of education”, “new history of education”, or “Sozialgeschichte der Bildung” developed (Franklin, 1999, p. 25; Jarausch, 1986, pp. 225–226). These strands of history of education questioned the narratives of progress presented in traditional educational history, and instead adopted a consciously critical approach to the educational system. This research was less interested in educational ideas, and more interested in the relationship between education and society, benefiting from the concepts and methods developed by the social sciences (Jarausch, 1986).

As a result of this reorientation, the study of educational history changed in some respects. Theoretical concepts of social class, mobility, power, profession, human capital and gender gained an increasing impact as part of a growing interest in sociology, political science, economics and anthropology. As a part of growing interdisciplinary tendencies, new methods and a wider range of source materials were utilized (Bruno-Jofré, 2014). Furthermore the dominant top-down perspective that focused on successful men and their reforms initiatives was replaced by a variety of perspectives that highlighted the working class, family history, minorities and women’s history of education (Herbst, 1999). Instead of being perceived as the result of a series of political victories, the school system was considered in a critical light as an institution that reproduced the existing social order, discriminated minorities and immigrants, and undermined the teacher profession (Donato & Lazerson, 2000). Some did, for example, emphasize schooling as a part of system of social stratification, while others investigated education as part of the many institutions that (re)produced the culture of a society (Modell, 1982).

Accompanying such theoretical innovations, the new history of education brought an increased interest in the relationship between education and society. Instead of focusing on pioneering individuals and legislation, historians of education formulated an ambition to analyze education in a broad social, economic, cultural and political context. In this respect, history of education was certainly inspired by social history. As Eric Hobsbawm noted, social historians have never been interested in isolating one dimension of the social reality. Unlike economists, who may isolate economic activities, and old-fashioned intellectual history that isolated written ideas from its human surroundings, Hobsbawm argued that social historians must place its subject in its non-reducible context. A social historian investigating Shakespeare should, Hobsbawm concluded, therefore place his work in a wider context that includes both economic and intellectual history (Hobsbawm, 1971, pp. 24–25).

This interest in society was often coupled with an interest in grassroot history, and the history of the ordinary children, men and women, involved in education. Barbara Finkelstein argued, for example, that the history of education must go beyond the level of politics and the work of planners, to include “the educational experiences of ordinary people” (quoted in Marsden, 1987, p. 16). As a result, these lines of research were marked by the use of new kinds of source materials. As Rosa Bruno-Jofré noted, social history “brought an interdisciplinary tendency and a desire to explore methodologies” that included the posing of new questions and the use of other kinds of new source materials, including census data, tax registries and oral histories (Bruno-Jofré, 2014).

In line with this ethos, a wide range of studies have been published in the last 10 or 20 years that have dug deeper into the complexity of the social, economic and cultural contexts of education. These include Nancy Beadie’s impressive study of nineteenth century schooling in its context of social, political and financial capital, and R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar’s encompassing book on public education in early twentieth century Canada (Beadie, 2010; Gidney & Millar, 2012). The interest in the social, economic and politic determinants of schooling have been advanced by economic historians such as Peter Lindert, Francesco Cinnirella, and Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia, and historians have contributed with fascinating case-studies of teachers’ livelihood and the education of the laboring poor (Go & Lindert, 2010; Cinnirella & Hornung, 2016; Beltrán Tapia & Martinez-Galarraga, 2018; Carter, 2016; Crone, 2018).

As their precursors in the investigations of Carl Kaestle, Lawrence Stone, Brian Simon, and Mary Jo Maynes, these studies certainly raise question regarding how international and cross-national phenomena can be addressed from the point of view of social history. That is, a study in the history of education that investigates the complex social, economic and political context of education, has an keen eye for the history of ordinary men, women and children that national school systems involved, and takes and interest in a broad range of theoretical perspectives and source materials.

A social twist to the transnational turn

The international and transnational dimensions of schooling have, probably as a result of a wide range of factors including current globalization processes in business, politics, culture an education, been addressed in an increasing number of studies in the human and social sciences (see, e.g., Iriye, 2004; Caruso, 2008; Fuchs & Roldán Vera, 2019). These studies have, for example, addressed international relations between sovereign states, transnational processes that cuts across the boundaries of these states, and histoire croisée, which put certain emphasis on the self-reflexive process at the heart of the shared history that cross-national relationships imply (Iriye, 2004, p. 13; Werner & Zimmermann, 2006, pp. 31–32).

The research into the international and transnational history of education has been informed by the linguistic turn, that is the increased research interest in the role of language and discourses powered by developments in cultural history, gender history, and post-structuralist theories (Surkis, 2012, p. 704; Bruno-Jofré, 2014, p. 778). Important research has been carried out that examines the transfer or reception of educational ideas, the circulation of notions and images, policy borrowing, and the creation of global models or ideals (see, e.g., Caruso & Roldán Vera, 2005; Lundahl & Lawn, 2015; Meyer et al., 1992; Ringarp & Waldow, 2016). The linguistic turn has, without a doubt, invigorated the history of education by emphasizing the formative role of language in education, not the least on an international level. In the context of this article, however, I would like to argue that the new social history of education has great potential to contribute to the international and transnational histories of education.

The study of nineteenth century school buildings provides a good example of this potential. As the national school systems expanded during the nineteenth century, schools were built most intensively across Europe and North America. In the US, 212,000 one-room schools had been built by 1913, in France 81,400 by 1898, and in the Russian Empire, 2,838 schools per year were on average opened in 1894–1898 (Zimmerman, 2009; Eklof, 1986, p. 288; Grew & Harrigan, 1991, p. 257). These school building, obviously, had discursive features. The American little red schoolhouse is perhaps the most well-known example of a national icon, and the English school buildings have been regarded as “beacons of civilization” and symbols of culture (Zimmerman, 2009; Burke & Grosvenor, 2008, p. 26–27). School buildings has consequently been examined as “fragmented sites of cultural memory and creation” (Burke & Grosvenor, 2008, p. 19), as sites of discipline and power relations (Markus, 1996), or in terms of agential realism (Rasmussen, 2019). This interest in the discursive features of school buildings also marks studies that examine national policy and international knowledge transfer. Studies has, for example, shown how Danish, Swedish and Swiss school buildings was informed by international debate (de Coninck-Smith, 2010; Westberg, 2015; Helfenberger, 2018).

School buildings were, nevertheless, also something else. They were built on a specific location, by certain people using specific building materials, and funded and organized in a specific manner. By investigating this building process, and its national and international patterns, the potential added value of a turn towards the social history of education in the study of the international rise of mass schooling may be indicated.

In this context, this new social history of the international and transnational history of education would have the following features. First, instead of placing education in a relative isolation or merely loosely linked to society, this approach strives to examine education within a complex and multifaceted context. This may be compared to what Carl Kaestle described as a multidimensional ecological model of research, that includes a wide range of social, cultural and economic variables (Kaestle & Vinovskis, 1980, p. 1), or what elsewhere has been described as the organic relation between education, culture and society (McCulloch, 2011, p. 39).

Secondly, far away from a historical analysis that has focused on politics and politicians, this approach would put particular emphasis on the broad strata of the population who built and attended schools. In that respect, this would be an international or transnational analysis that puts particular emphasis on so-called grassroot history. As evident from the example presented below, there are in this respect several advantages in examining education in its local and regional settings. Apart from the potential of local studies to examine a specific social, economic and cultural context, studies of a city, a municipality or a county may also avert the researchers gaze away from nationally prominent actors, and toward actors of a much more average position.

Thirdly, this social turn implies an interdisciplinary tendency. If a historian of education is interested in such a complex contextualization, such an history of education cannot remain merely a history of education but has to widen its scope to include theories and methods from adjacent research fields that include history, economic history, sociology, anthropology and political science. On a related fourth point, such a social history of education, will therefore have to use a wide range of source materials. In addition to policy documents and journals – the focus of traditional history of education – such investigations would also include parish records, wedding registries, school memories, probate inventories, court documents and account books.

The social and economic history of building schools

In order to accomplish such a social and international history of school buildings, I have based my studies on the field of building history. In line with the social history of education presented above, Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley has strikingly defined building history as being less concerned with architecture and more concerned with builders, and not as much focused on the architectural visions than the actual process of building (Wilson & Mackley, 2000, p. i). Following this line of research, my investigations has examined school building on the local level. Starting from a case study of 12 school districts in the Sundsvall region 1840–1900, I have compiled evidence from Europe (primarily Russia, France and Germany) and North America on the local context required for schools to be built. Informed by recent work in social history, I have applied the principle of source pluralism (Myrdal, 2012), using a wide range of sources including board minutes, account books, maps and proceedings from rural courts to investigate school building matters.¹ In a sense, this evidence indicate that it certainly took a village to build a school. These local preconditions were, nevertheless, not uniform, but did exhibit national as well as international patterns in terms of organization, land, labor, building materials and funding that will be presented below.

To begin with, school building required an organization which varied across the countries included in this investigation. In this respect, the emerging Swedish school system was well-supplied. With its medieval ancestors, the parishes formed a solid organizational foundation for the school districts, which received both rights and opportunities to tax their residents. This was unlike local school organization in Russia (Eklof, 1984a, pp. 568–569) whose ability to tax gentry land was restricted, but also, for example, England, Canada and Prussia, where such rights were periodically limited (see, e.g., Curtis, 1988, pp. 54–55, 83; Lindert, 2004, p. 114; Schleunes, 1989, p. 203). In the parishes of Sweden, this meant that the main responsibility for the organization and funding of the school system was given to the school districts’ school boards and the parish meetings, the latter having the final decision in certain school issues. When building new schools, the school board often delegated some of the tasks to a building board, which in turn could hire an entrepreneur to manage the entire building project, or parts of it.

Apart from organization, schools required land; sites where the schools could be placed. Studies of nineteenth century schools indicate that the allocation of schools was structured by available lands and land ownership. Evidence from the US indicate that schools often were placed on low-value land plots, and evidence from Spain indicates that schools were at times placed on common lands (Beltrán Tapia, 2013, p. 499; Fuller, 1982, p. 60–62). In the Sundsvall region, a large proportion of the school sites were subdivided from land that had previously been privately owned. Schools were also placed on church lands, land plots formerly owned by corporation, and various forms of common lands were used. These land plots were acquired in different ways. Most of them were bought, but the school districts also received lands from church or by donations from, for example, farmers and sawmill companies.

In addition to organization and land, labor was crucial to school building. While this issue has remained largely neglected in the history of schooling, researchers has noted that peasants’s labor duties at school building sites in Russia were significant (Eklof, 1984a). We also know that nineteenth century schools in England was occasionally built by local craftsmen (Horn, 1978, p. 122), and that US primary schools prior to the Civil War had been built by local farmers (Fuller, 1982, p. 71). An examination of the construction workers at three school building projects in the Sundsvall region, in northern Sweden, indicates that the school system was dependent on a local labor force. About three quarters of the workers lived in villages within a radius of 5 km from the school building, and about as many were living within the school district. The school buildings seem to have mainly been dependent on the work of landless crofters, land-owning farmers, and to some extent even craftsmen. It was thanks to their work, either paid or taxed in kind, that schools could be built.

School building also required building materials. Internationally, nineteenth century school buildings were frequently criticized. According to a contemporary investigation, Russian nineteenth century school buildings were often damp and cold: in Smolensk, three quarters of the schools had unplastered walls, and in the Kherson province, teachers in 14% of the schools complained that wind blew through school walls (Eklof, 1988, p. 128). Similar critique was voiced regarding schools in, e.g., France and Italy (Weber, 1976; Cappelli, 2016).

The school buildings of the Sundsvall region in Sweden were, from an international perspective, comparatively well-built, mainly made up of timber and boards. In addition, school building records indicate costs for bricks, hardware, glass, paint, tiles and iron spikes. In the Sundsvall region, this school construction was made possible by a range of suppliers. Farmers delivered mainly wood, which was a material that also was provided by local sawmill industry. Furthermore, the school districts purchased hardware from rural and urban tradesmen. These provided schools with items such as hinges, nails, iron curtains and various slides, but also wallpaper, tiled ovens and paint. In this respect, traders such as G. O. Stadin and G. Strömberg were fundamental prerequisites for the development of the Swedish school system.

In addition, school buildings had to be financed. An international overview shows that the costs of school buildings could be distributed in different ways, depending on the social and legal context of schooling. In Prussia, landlords did not have to pay school taxes (schulbeitrage) according to the act of 1794, but they were responsible for providing school buildings with necessary timber from their forests (Lamberti, 1989, p. 18). In the US Midwest, the land-owning farmers usually were responsible for the construction of schools, which meant that landless agricultural laborers were withdrawn from school building costs (Theobald, 1995, p. 44). A similar approach was applied in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century. In principle, the farmers covered the school building costs, while the noblemen funded teachers’ salaries and costs of textbooks (Eklof, 1984b, p. 567).

In Sweden, the expenditure on school buildings were divided between landowning farmers and the landless in accordance with the law of 1734 (Backman, 1831). Expenditure on building materials and freight was to be distributed among landowners (farmers and noblemen) while labor was to be distributed across both landowners and the landless. In order to cover the rising costs of an increased number of school buildings, school districts employed various tactics. Judging from the incomplete material that is preserved, taxes in kind played a significant role during the first thirty years following the school act of 1842. The school buildings were partially financed by the district residents themselves working at the school building, and providing schools with necessary building materials from their lands. Over time, the funding methods changed. As more and more expensive schools were being built, school districts chose to increasingly cover construction costs through money taxes and loans. School districts turned to church funds, parishes and private individuals, and took bank loans from, for example, Sundsvall’s savings bank and Kredit Aktiebolaget Sundsvall. The school system thus appears, as the Swedish industrial revolution (Magnusson, 2002, p. 305), dependent on the expanding credit market of the nineteenth century.

School buildings and the transnational history of schooling

To conclude, this condensed account of school building in Europe and North America has indicated some of the contributions that a social history of education approach may make to the study of international and transnational phenomena in the history of education. Most importantly, this article shows how such a social history of school buildings may enable an investigation that places schooling in its multidimensional social, economic and political context. Although international processes of knowledge transfer, policy borrowing, and international models did inform the design of school buildings, this investigation indicates that it was the local organization of schooling, the labor that the population could provide, and available funding opportunities that enabled schools to be built. As a result, even this condensed account of school building places the school system in a more general historical context. In this case, it is possible to argue that the Swedish school buildings indicates how schooling relied on a wider set of societal conditions: the resources created by the agrarian and industrial revolutions; the historical developments of the parishes; changes in the real estate market; the emergence of new forms of commodity production and goods distribution, and an expanding credit market. A nuanced analysis of the relationship between schooling and its social, economic, cultural and legal context is thus enabled that extends beyond recurrent general observations regarding schooling and societal change.

Such a history of school buildings also indicates the potential of the interdisciplinary tendency that lay at the heart of the new history of education in the 1960s and 1970s. A history of school building can never remain only a history of education, but must (almost by necessity) also be informed by the disciplines of social history, economic history, and particularly relevant in this case, building history. Similarly, the history of school buildings indicates how a social history of education may place a stronger focus on the history of the average man. Nineteenth century school systems may have been designed by the political elite, and influenced by ideas of school men and architects belonging to a social, cultural and economic elite, but nineteenth century primary schools were built, maintained and occupied by ordinary men, women and children.

These features of an investigation into the history of school buildings illustrates how an international history of schooling may be informed by a social history approach. As evident from above, such an approach shifts focus from the models, policies and ideas that was formulated by nationally or internationally influential men, to the historical realities of ordinary people and the local level of schooling. The comparisons, or analyses of cross-national transfers, will thereby concern issues such as organization, labor, and finance. As a result, such studies will be able to examine differences and similarities between various local government bodies (school districts, communes, townships), the role and character of various social groups involved in schooling, ranging from smallholding farmers in the Scandinavian countries to landed nobility such as the Russian pomeshchiks and the Prussian Junkers, and the various kinds of non-monetary resources (including grains, timber and even, in some European regions, wine) that were used to fund schooling.

Although these issues may seem local, as in the case of school building, they nevertheless exhibited international patterns that over time may be described in terms of divergences or convergences (Cf. Fuchs & Roldán Vera, 2019). In the case of school buildings, there is, for example, much more to learn about who built schools, and how that varied nationally as well as internationally, and how school buildings were financed, and by whom. What role did, for example, loans play in nineteenth century school building, and what role did landowners play in that respect? By widening the range of questions asked by international and transnational studies to also include such question, I believe that important contributions can be made to national historiographies. Not the least can the narratives of national exceptionalism, that has been frequent in histories of nineteenth century schooling be questioned and nuanced. Rather than exceptional, the historical trajectories of schooling in Russia, France, USA and Sweden features a wide range of both differences and similarities. First when we address these complex patterns, I believe that a truly international or transnational history of education is possible.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank the editors of this special issue for their valuable comments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council under Grant 2016-05230.

Notes on contributors

Johannes Westberg

Johannes Westberg is professor of education at Örebro University (Sweden) and professor of theory and history and University of Groningen. His recent publications include School Acts and the Rise of Mass Schooling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), edited with Lukas Boser and Ingrid Brühwiler.

Notes

1 My investigations into the history of Swedish school building, its results and its source materials, is presented in length in Westberg, 2014.