User Profile

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)

The particular constellation of social crises and ideological ferment by the second half of the eighteenth century had reached the point where discussion of educational issues came to the forefront. Its relevance was clear. If the human mind and human behavior were malleable because of the nature of the early learning process, then directing the process could change its nature and that of human behavior. If educational processes were brought out of the private sphere of the family and the private tutor, and made more public and more rational, then the problems associated with haphazard or inappropriate upbringing could be avoided (although on this issue there was much debate). Finally, the unfortunate results of miseducation or overeducation could be avoided.

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

Still, obscurantists of the most recalcitrant sort were losing ground during the ancien régime. Their simple-minded program of denying education to the poor seemed increasingly impractical even to those who shared many of the obscurantists' fears. For one thing, the growing economic, fiscal, and demographic crises whose manifestations were clear, even if their causes were not, called for a more active and determined program. Simply leaving the poor to their own devices meant abandoning any effort at all to shape their direction, and ran the risk of letting the ambitious among them become a real threat. The emergent epistemology based on sensation, so central to Enlightenment thought, emphasized the role of early experiences in the shaping of human ideas and human behavior. This suggested that influence over youth were too valuable a form of power to be left to chance. "The people" were learning one way or another; it was certainly better for the leaders of the state and civil society to take popular education into their own hands and direct it, in their own self-interest as well as that of the people.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 39)

Whatever the degree of satisfaction or disinterest felt by consumers—the parents of the children who went to the little schools of the ancien régime—from other quarters came criticism of these institutions and development of experimental alternatives. Innovations in both pedagogic theory and practice came at the instigation of state governments, and from influential members of civil society as well. Indeed, at a time when in most European states concern with schooling was minimal and largely theoretical, the situation of the schools was determined more by local governments and churches. And in these, the role of local notables was paramount. Their attitudes about schooling could affect the allocation of their own personal resources, or those of the communities or churches in which they were an influence. There are some cases, of course (for example, in the Alpine regions of France and Switzerland), where community governance retained a democratic cast. But by and large, village affairs throughout Europe were run by the better-off landholders—in some cases petty, in others aristocratic. In the towns, the notables included property-owners, rentiers, merchants, professionals, officials, and the like, who by the late ancien régime had secured control over town politics and exercised oligarchic power. In towns where the new industries were established, entrepreneurs were a critical force. And it was the attitudes of people like these that helped to shape both public disbursement and private bequests for the support of schooling. The beliefs about education held by these elites thus were central in the history of schooling.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 37)

Closely connected with economic restructuring was a dramatic growth in population—this was the era of the first "vital revolution," during which populations in most Western European countries broke out of the constraints imposed by the system of peasant production and bounded upward at rates that in most places would only slow down toward the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, there were shifts in law, custom, and morality: The traditional moral economy and estate society was challenged by the new conditions. The emergent capitalist order demanded a new kind of labor force, indeed, a new human psyche. Schools, along with a variety of other institutions, could help to create it.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 36)

In the process of transformation of Europe into an industrial capitalist society, roughly between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, the social structure and the character of social relations changed, and with it the place of the school in the social system. Throughout Europe, the chasm between "the people" and their social and political superiors became more problematic. Whether referred to as the menu peuple in France, as das Volk in Germany or as any of the many other terms employed in other languages, the common people were distinguished by criteria of occupation, property, culture and power and kept at a distance by barriers of both a material and an ideological sort from the dominant classes who worried over and analyzed them. The popular classes included artisans, peasants, small shopkeepers, landless laborers, streethawkers, domestic servants, beggars as well as the still miniscule factory proletariat - in short, individuals of widely varying conditions. No hard-and-fast distinction such as that which would later distinguish between the buyers and sellers of labor formed the division. Still, everyone understood that the popular classes and their "betters" constituted a social and political division rarely challenged, a barrier rarely crossed even if individuals from both sides of the divide were linked with one another through a dense network of asymmetrical patronage relations. And despite the challenges of the French Revolution and the tumultuous opposition movements so characteristic of the early and mid-nineteenth century, indeed because of them, the need to construe "the people" as "other'' and to create institutions especially for them profoundly marked writing, thought and legislation about popular education in this era. Concern with new ways of securing social barriers and reinforcing the cultural distance between the ruling classes and the popular classes, as well as with reshaping the character of "the people" to meet new political and economic needs, was central to the school reform program.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 35)

To be sure, there are some social historians who interpret the expansion of schooling as the result of rising popular demand for skills which would have found institutional expression with or without upper-class intervention. But for many of the new social historians, the significance of schooling history lies in its centrality to an evolving system of social relations. For the historian concerned first and foremost with the evolution in social relations, school reform usually appears as a harbinger of a new program to impose a different, subtler, and more effective style of discipline upon the working population.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 34 - 35)

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)

It was no doubt true that early modern parents often found occasion to complain about the instruction their children were receiving. Where the teacher had been hired directly by parents, they could always remove their children and look for another teacher. Where an official teacher held a monopoly, of course, things were not so easy. In communities where the teacher was hired by the municipal council for a year's term, pressure could be brought to bear to hire someone else. But the problem could be especially severe where the teacher was hired and supported by outside church authorities or by a local school patron. In these regions, parents had little recourse but to complain or petition, and records of parental complaints about teachers, and petitions to higher authorities to make the improvements which parents could not make themselves, are testimony of at least occasional parental dissatisfaction. For example, parents from the Catholic community of Schriesheim in the Electoral Pfalz in Germany complained to church authorities in 1750 that their children were not learning anything in school because of the teacher's incompetence. As a result, the parents had simply stopped sending their older children to school. "Little children," the complaint argued, "are sent to the school but only with the idea of keeping their noise out of the house for a few hours a day; as for the older ones, no matter how unlearned they are, we are better off setting them to handicraft work than letting them waste their time going to school."

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 33)

School—and the word itself had very different connotations then than it would later—was a relationship with one master, good or bad. School was a place where most children went for a few hours a day, a few months of the year, for a few years of their life, to learn a limited number of skills and a certain familiarity with the scriptures, prayerbooks, and bills of credit or pulp books that were increasingly significant, if not dominant, features of life.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 31)

The pedagogy of the Brothers clearly anticipated many of the features of what would evolve as modern pedagogy in the nineteenth century. The insistence on orderliness, the simultaneity and impersonality of instruction, the reliance on codes and signals to usher large numbers of pupils through a rigorously ordered daily program—all of this would appear laudable to the average reformer of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. But the schools of the Brothers were far from typical for the Old Regime.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 31)

... it is useful to glance quickly at the exception—the one type of school which, although springing from the same preindustrial context as these already described, did produce an alternative pedagogy—namely, the schools run by the Brothers of the Christian Schools in France, Italy, and Belgium. These schools were charity schools for boys endowed by combinations of pious bequests and municipal poor funds, much like other kinds of poor schools. In fact, the Brothers were only one of many orders founded to staff these schools and to perform many other functions associated with the Catholic Counterreformation. Where these differed from the rest was not so much in the goals of their instructors as in their insistence on following a strict routine in the classroom, for which teachers were prepared in specialized seminaries. The Brothers were important both in their substantial number of pupils (perhaps as many as a quarter to a half of the boys in about a hundred French towns on the eve of the Revolution, as well as a sizable number of Italian and Belgium towns), but also in their popular pedagogic model, which persisted into the nineteenth century, gripping the imagination of even secular reformers and playing a central role in the reform of pedagogy which became general in the early part of that century.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 30)