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Moreover, whatever interests were ultimately served by the reform of the schools (and I will return to this problem), it is clear that the driving energy behind the reform did not always originate in the same kinds of social groups. It is safe to say that the reform impulse did not come from "the people"—that much is clear. But precisely which sectors of the ruling classes—entrepreneurial, landowning, professional or bureaucratic—were the most active proponents and sponsors of school reform seems to have varied a great deal.

Likewise, both landowners and industrial entrepreneurs were counted among the original supporters of obscurantism—sobered by the social and political upheaval of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although eventually converted by the advocates of popular schooling.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 60)

But, in 1844, there was a confrontation between the mine owners and the workers in the region. The labor unrest, the strike, and the animosity it brought to the surface changed the tune of the owners with respect to education. Apparently it dawned on them that workers were learning, despite efforts to keep them ignorant, and that it made more sense to supplant their informal learning with schools controlled by the owners themselves. In 1845, Londonderry wrote his chief agent in a letter which revealed his change in attitude, for he lamented "the want of a better and more improved plan of education for the Pitman's children, many of whom appear in a forlorn and ignorant state of wildness, neglected (I much fear) by their parents, and not so likely to be instructed morally or become even civilized unless we adopt some energetic measures. . . ."

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 56)

At the same time, however, proponents of the same sort of carefully controlled popular education being advocated on the Continent were stating their case. Indeed, more clearly than on the Continent, educational reform was undertaken in England as a defensive response against the feared results of the education that the people were receiving in institutions of their own devising, like the Sunday schools so numerous by the end of the eighteenth century.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 55)

It is significant that every French ruler after Napoleon viewed control over the schools as essential to political success. In 1816, the restored Bourbon monarch attempted to turn back the clock in a variety of ways, but refused to give up the power that state-controlled education inherited from the Revolution represented. Instead, he signed a decree which maintained that instruction founded "on the true principles of religion and morality [is] not only one of the most fertile sources of public prosperity but also . . . [contributes] to the good order of society, [prepares] the way for obedience to the law, and for the performance of duties of all sorts."

Still, at this time, the government was willing to let the church dominate education, although under state direction, and to allow the important role of local, particularly aristocratic, patronage to continue through the private endowment of charitable schools run by religious orders. Some officials within the educational bureaucracy were also eager to support alternatives like the schools using pupils as monitors, as proposed by the newly-founded Société pour l'Instruction Élémentaire. But the closely identified interests of the monarchical state, the Catholic Church, and the aristocratic classes in the period of the Restoration allowed for a compromise in the control over education between public and private efforts and between church and state interests. Indeed, to the conservatives who held sway during this epoch, religious schooling was often regarded as the surest safeguard of stability.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 53)

The most radical formulation of the role of education came from the Jacobin, Lepelletier. Proceeding from materialist, environmentalist, and thoroughly statist assumptions, Lepelletier proposed that the greatest part of the socialization process be made public and relegated to state institutions. Children—boys and girls—were to be placed in state schools, supplied with food and clothing at public expense, and trained for an occupation useful to the general public. His plan was a response to his awareness of the sad economic plight of the families of the poor. "It's all very fine to educate the poor," he wrote, "but first of all they need bread." Still, his ideas also reflected the crudest environmentalist urge to regulate the child's early experience. "The totality of the child's existence belongs to us [that is, the state]; the material . . . should never leave the mold."

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 52)

Tallyrand, who formulated one of the most discussed proposals, restated the importance of education and maintained that "politics is the end of instruction. The child is an apprentice citizen." He and other leaders of the Revolution felt strongly that education in the French language was especially important for the aims of the new government. Only through sharing a common language could French citizens be expected to respond to the new sorts of claims about their responsibilities to the nation which the Revolutionary governments were laying on them. Linguistic unity was one part of the cultural unity required if the people of France were to be transformed into a citizenry. Yet in social terms, most plans reflected a utilitarian concern for the careful preservation of the class and gender division of labor.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 52)

What made them especially attractive to the propertied classes, however, was that they were always cast in a limited framework—the envisioned "improvement" of the people was never so dramatic as to challenge the social order. The end was a better-fed, more industrious, more productive and consequently more prosperous people, but a people who remained distinct from and inferior to those who offered to improve its prospects. As such, the proposals for a utilitarian reform of education reflected the milieux and the times from which they emerged—their authors were educated, propertied, activist, and hopeful, despite their anxieties. They embody the ideals of a class which sensed a potential for improvement of the human lot, and which was often involved in schemes to increase economic productivity, but which nonetheless had a vested interest in the preservation of the social hierarchy as it was.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 45)

Within this broad stream of thought in a great many circles throughout Europe in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, there were many versions of the argument that schools could channel children into appropriate social roles. Friedrich von Rochow, for example, felt he was being quite practical in establishing schools in his villages, and he saw his educational efforts as complementary to his activities as director of the Patriotic Society for Agriculture in the Mark Brandenburg at Postsdam. Only educated peasants, von Rochow believed, could cooperate intelligently with their landlords in projects for improving agrarian techniques. "Only through a revolutionary change in the parish schools which lay in his properties," von Rochow felt, "was he to expect an improvement in the yields of his agricultural undertakings."

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 44)

But schools were regarded as more than institutions for the moral improvement of the people. Utilitarians assigned specific social functions to them as well. Harvey Chisick's social history of the French philosophes' ideas about education establishes the main areas of agreement among the advanced thinkers of the day. These shared assumptions reveal much about the society that produced these thinkers and, as Chisick argues so well, that ultimately limited their concrete policies and their very ideas themselves.

Chisick carefully analyzes the proposals on education that appeared in increasing numbers in France beginning around 1760. These proposals, despite their faith in the power of education to improve human potential, were, Chisick argues, all in the end limited by an underlying belief that proper early socialization would always have to help maintain social stability and the social hierarchy in a situation of scarcity. The proposals about popular education nearly all assumed that the chasm which divided "the people" from their social and political superiors would remain. Indeed, for many of these writers—themselves products of and linked to the propertied classes—one of the prime functions of education was precisely to assure that each individual had the skills and the frame of mind appropriate to his or her station in life. "To make the people love its lot. That is the true goal of the education of the people," was the way that the philosophe Philippe de Madeleine put it. And Chisick argues that de Madeleine's views, if somewhat baldly stated, were nonetheless typical of his milieu. The implication, of course, was that even if the early training of people was to be encouraged, that training had to be limited so as not to kindle undue aspirations.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 43)

Without discrediting the role which a proper home environment could play in a child's moral development, the Mannheim report nonetheless made a direct argument that poor were simply incapable of providing this proper home environment. Not only did their children need schooling, but they needed to be separated from children from better homes so as not to contaminate them. It is interesting to note that perhaps the fullest expression of this association between deficient home life and popular immorality would come with the discussion of the children of the new class of factory workers that began to appear throughout Western Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 42)

Part and parcel of the eighteenth-century argument for the social value of schooling (as opposed to home education) was the belief that the home environment of the poor was deficient for proper socialization.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 41)

That writers all over Europe had begun to draw conclusions about the power of education from the new sensationalist epistemology is clear. The late seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke was quick to draw the educational implications from his insights about the workings of the human mind and the learning process. After formulating his famous thesis that the mind was like a blank slate—a passive absorber of facts presented by the world around, he also went on to describe the ideal educational methods. Later educational theorists drew heavily on the ideas of Locke and his followers. Perhaps the inference drawn by the notorious French materialist philosopher Helvetius—"L'éducation peut tout!" (Education can do anything!)—went farther than most people were prepared to go. But William Godwin's restatement at the end of the century—"If education cannot do everything, it can do much"—reflected a widespread opinion. Faith in the power of the proper childhood socialization fed into an educational reform movement that gradually supplanted official indifference or hostility toward education.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 40)