The chronological development of working-class political attitudes seems telling as well. Wherever it has been traced, the evolution in attitudes took working-class strategists from a period of creative, if somewhat utopian, planning of genuine alternative visions of the meaning and purpose of education to at least a tacit acceptance of the bounds of the school system created by the states, beholden to interests contrary to those of the emergent working classes. Not surprisingly, this evolution paralleled a more general shift in the demands and organizational strategies of working-class movements as well. In the early part of the nineteenth century, artisans and early factory workers still often struggled to challenge the very system of industrial capitalism which threatened to undermine their way of life. By the century's end, the working-class movement fought instead to secure for workers the best possible situation within a world dominated by industrial capital. Whatever their degree of opposition vis-à-vis those dominant powers, workers' organizations nonetheless accepted the new ground for the struggle.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 114)