Handbook of Historical Studies in Education by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811023620
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Passing legislation and enforcing it are, of course, two rather separate processes. The United Kingdom saw a rapid rise in school attendance, from around one third of the total population in 1860 to effectively universal attendance by 1920. This rapid transformation is suggestive of a particular form of state formation in which old patriotisms, and relatively homogenous societies in terms of language and religion, could draw on established traditions of governance to deliver tax revenues that paid for schools and enforced attendance at them. By way of contrast, school enrolment in newly independent states where programs of nationalism tended to follow independence, as in the case of Argentina (see Fig. 1), for example, the finance, administrative systems, and ideologies of nationalism were less well established and contributed to relatively low rates of school enrolment.

Yet discussing access to education, and specifically to primary schools, as though these were the simple and direct results of the relative wealth and strength of different state nationalisms is misleading. Access to education was never simply a functional question of providing schools and nor was it a simple outcome of processes of either industrialization or modernization. Instead, the emergence of state educational systems made explicit ideological questions, around who might qualify as a citizen and the kinds of knowledge and attributes necessary for citizenship. The outcomes of these debates were central to deciding which organizations built schools, where they did so, who had access to them, the kinds of instruction they implemented, and for what ends (Archer 1979; Beadie 2016). So even though increasing access to formal education can be viewed as a characteristic and universal feature of modernity, particular features of education around the world are the outcome of political struggles. This helps explain one other striking feature of Fig. 1. The ascription of racial characteristics to cultures or groups identified as having particular racial or ethnic identities conditioned, as the enrolment rates in British colonial India suggest, the formal education offered to the peoples tribes, religions and races imagined by nation and empire builders around the globe. Moreover, and as the next section argues, typologies and classifications of humans, and specifically ideas about the nature of childhood and about children’s development, behavior, and intelligence, would crucially affect who had access schooling and how they experienced it.

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