It is easy for the modern observer to misconstrue the historical process that made schooling the norm. The value and impact of schooling remain subjects as politically, socially, economically and emotionally charged as they were during the reform era. Our current controversies and hopes about schooling are bound to affect our accounts of the origins and social consequences of mass schooling. On the one hand, contemporary assumptions (whether or not founded in fact) about the social functions of schools—especially as agents of career determination, social mobility, or individual self-improvement—cloud our vision of their function in the past. Our contemporary expectations have often ascribed to historical reform movements and their extension of formal schooling to the working classes with intentions and consequences that are anachronistic at best, masking the actual character of the historical development of schooling. On the other hand, because schooling is so much taken for granted today, and is so much a part of our understanding of what it means to grow up, we tend to overlook many changes associated with school expansion which European families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must have experienced as profound.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 135)