Where parents had no say in hiring a teacher, or where their resources were too meager to attract a qualified one, their children must often have put up with mediocrity or even brutality. What is surprising and telling about the history of school reform in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, is that the impetus for reform did not come from parents. On the contrary, even if many parents throughout Western Europe silently acquiesced to the reform of the school, the records of popular response to educational innovation suggest that these reforms often met with a great deal of active or passive resistance. Efforts to repress unlicensed schooling, to introduce new textbooks, or to force full-time school attendance, as well as efforts to impose new standards of teacher training and qualification often generated irate complaints and noncooperation on the part of local communities. Whatever misgivings parents may have had about the quality of instruction available to their children, it was not from them that the urge to reform the schools came.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 34)