education

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noun

1. The act, process, or art of imparting knowledge and skill: instruction, pedagogics, pedagogy, schooling, teaching, training, tuition, tutelage, tutoring. See teach/learn.
2. Known facts, ideas, and skill that have been imparted: erudition, instruction, knowledge, learning, scholarship, science. See knowledge/ignorance.

n

Definition: instruction, development of knowledge
Antonyms: ignorance

Massachusetts enacted America's first compulsory education law in 1852. State statutes and constitutional provisions governed most of public elementary and secondary education for the next century. Although the federal government's role in elementary and secondary education has increased over time (e.g., No Child Left Behind Act, 2001), it remains far more pronounced in higher education. Historically, few education disputes resulted in litigation, and state courts generally resolved those that did on relatively narrow grounds. The involvement of the United States Supreme Court in public school litigation was rare, accelerating only in the period after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Compulsory Schooling and Socialization

The constitutional framework for modern education cases was established in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), and Farrington v. Tokushige (1927). In Pierce, the Court held that Oregon could not constitutionally require all parents of school‐age children to send their offspring to public schools. Relying on substantive due process and the natural rights of parents to raise their children, the Court, while recognizing the legitimacy of compulsory attendance laws, held that the private school alternative may not be abolished. Pierce has never been repudiated by the Court, though some commentators argue that it would rest today more persuasively on First Amendment grounds. They maintain that a state monopoly over elementary and secondary education would present a danger of indoctrinating youth to particular beliefs, thereby undermining the ability of citizens to formulate and articulate their own points of view. The “Pierce compromise” requires the state allow parents to choose private schools, but it does not require the state to defray the additional costs of such schooling.

Meyer and Farrington shed additional light on Pierce. In those cases, the Court held that the states may not regulate private education in such an intrusive manner as to convert private schools into public schools in all but name. The state must allow private schools reasonable latitude in shaping the curriculum.

The Court has recognized only one limited exception to the proposition that all children may be required to attend public school or a reasonably regulated private school. In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the Court held that a Wisconsin law, requiring all children to attend public or private school until age sixteen, violated the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause as applied to Amish parents and children (see Religion). The Amish believed that public high schools introduced their children to modern values that were antithetical to their religious beliefs. Balancing this free exercise claim against the state's interest in preparing all children for adult citizenship, nurturing economic self‐sufficiency, and stamping out ignorance, the Court held that minimal education after age fourteen (or the eighth grade) was sufficient to achieve the state's objectives.

Taken together these cases stand for the proposition that there are constitutional limits to the state's role in socializing children in private and public schools. With respect to private schools, the Court has held that the state support of parochial schools violates the Establishment of Religion Clause of the First Amendment unless the funding has a clear secular purpose, the primary effect is not to advance religion, and there is no excessive entanglement between church and state (Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971; Committee for Public Education & Religious Liberty v. Nyquist, 1973). While parents have the constitutional right to seek to inculcate religion in private schools, state financial support of that inculcation violates the constitutional ban on establishment of religion.

The application of the Establishment Clause to a multitude of state efforts to channel funds to religious schools has been chaotic. For example, in Wolman v. Walter (1977), the Court disapproved of public funding for transportation for field trips and the load of instructional materials although it had previously approved the provision of funds for bus fares and the loaning of textbooks (Everson v. Board of Education, 1947; Board of Education v. Allen, 1968). In Committee for the Public Education and Religious Liberty v. Regan (1980), the Court permitted state subsidies to private religious schools for particular secular programs (testing and taking attendance), while in Mueller v. Allen (1983), then Justice William H. Rehnquist suggested that benefits to parents of children in public and private schools (tax deductions for tuition, transportation, and textbook expenses) did not impermissibly advance religion despite the Nyquist decision. Establishment Clause jurisprudence in the education context gained more clarity when the Court, in Zelman v. Simmons‐Harris (2002), concluded that a publicly funded school voucher programs can include religious schools. The Zelman opinion emphasizes that public funding finding its way into religious schools through a tuition voucher program flows from private, independent decisions of schoolchildren and their parents and, consequently, does not constitute a state endorsement of religion.

In the public sphere, the Court has held that it is unconstitutional for public schools to seek to indoctrinate students to religion, though teachers may teach about religion in its historical and social context. School prayer and some forms of moments of silence are not permissible (Abington School District v. Schempp, 1963; Wallace v. Jaffree, 1985), and a state may not require the teaching of creationism or a balanced curriculum between creationism and evolution (Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968; Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987). In this context, the Establishment Clause acts as a substantive limitation on the messages that public schools may convey to students. Conversely, lower courts have held that curricula and textbooks emphasizing secular values do not constitute an unconstitutional establishment of a religion or a violation of the Free Exercise Clause (Smith v. Board of School Commissioners, 1987; Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education, 1987).

Student Rights

Numerous Supreme Court cases, mostly decided under the speech clause of the First Amendment, bear on the constitutional limits on socialization in public schools. The earliest case is West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), in which the Court held that students may not be compelled to salute the flag and to affirm beliefs they do not hold. Public school officials have a legitimate interest in educating students to their citizenship responsibilities and the political culture (Ambach v. Norwick, 1979), but Barnette limits the means of accomplishing these objectives.

In 1969 the Court, reacting to the assertion of students' civil rights during the Vietnam era protests, held in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that “state‐operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism” (p. 511). Students may engage in expressive activities on campus so long as school authorities cannot reasonably forecast that “substantial disruption” of school activities will result (p. 513). The students' right of expression is limited by the state's legitimate interest in carrying on its educational functions.

The Tinker standard is not applicable to vulgar or offensive speech (Bethel School District v. Fraser, 1986). And while Tinker protects the personal expression of students, it does not protect their speech within curricular activities—for example, the articles they write as staff members of a school newspaper operated as part of the curriculum (Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 1988). Tinker also does not apply to the expressive activities of the school itself. For example, a majority of the justices appear to embrace the proposition that library books may be removed for good faith educational reasons, including efforts to eliminate vulgar or obscene books, but school officials may not do so if their purpose is to impose an official orthodoxy or ideology (Board of Education v. Pico, 1982).

Due Process Protections

The Supreme Court has afforded due process protection (e.g., hearings) to suspended or expelled students and held that the Fourth Amendment limits the methods that school officials may use to gather evidence of infractions (Gross v. Lopez, 1975; New Jersey v. T.L.O., 1985). Due process guarantees, however, run only to disciplinary sanctions and not to academic decisions such as grades (Board of Curators v. Horowitz, 1979; Regents of University of Michigan v. Ewing, 1985) (see Due Process, Procedural).

Equality of Opportunity

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court construed the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to forbid the deliberate assignments of students by race to segregated public schools (see Segregation, De Jure; Separate but Equal Doctrine). Once such discrimination has been found there is an obligation to take affirmative steps to eliminate the vestiges of such discrimination and to establish a unitary school system (Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 1968). Neighborhood assignment of school children, resulting in continued segregation of the races, is impermissible if it is still tainted by prior acts of discrimination (Swann v. Charlotte‐Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971). Unless there is evidence of interdistrict violations, the desegregation remedy is limited to the specific school district implicated in the wrongs, and metropolitan remedies are not permissible (Milliken v. Bradley, 1974). The typical remedy seeks to achieve racial balance in the schools in the district. The district must comply, in good faith, with the desegregation order for a reasonable period of time before the decree may be dissolved (Oklahoma City Board of Education v. Dowell, 1991).

The Court has construed the Equal Protection Clause as placing a substantial burden of proof on school authorities to demonstrate the necessity of discrimination by sex or gender (Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, 1982; U.S. v. Virginia, 1996). This constitutional approach is bolstered by Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, prohibiting many forms of sex discrimination in public schools (Cohen v. Brown, 1996).

In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the Court held that education is not a fundamental interest under the Equal Protection Clause and that discrimination based on the wealth of the school district in which a student attends school is not a suspect classification. It upheld state school financing plans that result in unequal expenditures per student because of the varying local property tax bases of school districts. A denial of all educational opportunity, based on an absolute inability to afford a tuition charge made by a school district, however, is a violation of equal protection (Plyer v. Doe, 1982).

See also Fundamental Rights; Police Power.

Bibliography

• Tyell van Geel, The Courts and American Education Law (1987).
• Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (1977).
• Mark G. Yudof, When Government Speaks (1983).
• Mark G. Yudof, David L. Kirp, and Betsy Levin, Educational Policy and the Law, 3rd ed. (1992)

— Mark G. Yudof

In a verse which has become part of the first paragraph of the Shema, recited in the daily morning and evening prayers, the Bible commands, "You shall teach them diligently to your children" (Deut. 6:7), referring to the biblical laws. There are four references in the Bible to the father's responsibility to tell his children about the Exodus from Egypt (Ex. 10:2; 13:8, 14; Deut. 6:20-21). Indeed, in biblical times it was the father's duty to provide instruction, both in religious ritual and in practical training, to his children. To a large extent, this was undoubtedly informal. The Bible also assigns to the Levites the task of teaching the people: "They shall teach your laws to Jacob, and your instruction to Israel" (Deut. 33:10), but there is no indication as to what form this instruction took. From its earliest history Judaism has considered the study of Torah of cardinal importance. Thus at the beginning of the Book of Joshua it says, "Let not this Book of the Teaching cease from your lips, but recite it day and night" (1:8). The Book of Proverbs contains various references to the way a child should be educated: "He that spares his rod hates his son" (13:24); "Train a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it" (22:6). After the return from the Babylonian Exile, Ezra gathered the people together and read and expounded the Torah before them (Neh. 8). According to rabbinic tradition, it was Ezra who instituted the Bible reading every Monday and Thursday morning, on the days when people came to the local markets.

The Mishnah provides a systematic directive by R. Judah ben Tema related to education: "Five years old [is the age] for [the study of] Bible, ten years old for the Mishnah, thirteen for [the obligation to keep] the commandments, fifteen years old for Gemara" (Avot 5:25). Jewish law requires the parents to begin the child's religious education at the earliest possible age, and declares that as soon as a child begins to speak, he must be taught the verse, "Moses charged us with the Teaching as the heritage of the congregation of Jacob" (Deut. 33:4).

The Mishnah stresses the paramount importance of Torah study when it lists various commandments, including honoring one's parents, charity, and bringing peace between individuals, and then concludes, "but the study of Torah is equivalent to them all" (Pe'ah 1:1, amplified in Shab. 127a). It was Simeon Ben Shetaḥ (1st cent. BCE) who first established schools, and compelled parents to send their sons to them. Nevertheless, the person most credited with forging an educational system was R. Joshua ben Gamla (1st cent. CE), who had been High Priest before the Temple was destroyed. He arranged for teachers to be appointed in every town, and the Talmud says of him: "May R. Joshua ben Gamla be remembered for the good, for had it not been for him, the Torah would have been forgotten in Israel" (BB 21a). Prior to R. Joshua ben Gamla's edict, the Talmud notes, those with fathers were taught by their fathers, while those without fathers received no instruction. Through this edict, teachers had to be engaged in each community at the community's expense, and all children had to be given an education. The Talmud provides guidelines for the size of classes. One teacher may handle up to 25 students. If there are between 25 and 40 students, an assistant must be hired to work alongside the teacher. More than 40 students require the hiring of two teachers.

Although it does not include any systematic program of education, the Talmud contains assorted aphorisms that convey a picture of education both as it was then and as it was envisioned in ideal terms. Emphasis is placed on the importance of a father's teaching his son a gainful occupation; "one who does not teach his son an occupation (by default) teaches him to be a brigand" (Kid. 29a). In fact, among the various duties imposed on the father in regard to his son is the obligation to teach him the Torah, an occupation, and, according to some, to swim (ibid.).

The Talmud itself indicates that various sages were proficient in different fields, including the sciences of their day. Astronomy, for example, was indispensable for establishing the calendar of festivals, and the Talmud states that those who have the ability are obliged to study astronomy (Shab. 75a).

In Babylonia, there were Academies where prominent scholars lectured, but these were not aimed at the masses and the subject matter was often beyond the ability of the common man. However, twice a year, during the months of Adar and Elul, special study sessions, known as kallah, were held in the study halls (see Kallah Months). The lectures given were deliberately geared to this lay audience.

It is likely that in the period between the completion of the Talmud (c. 500 CE) and the Emancipation of the Jews in modern times, the majority of male Jews received some sort of schooling and most were literate. The studies themselves were generally limited to the sacred books. There were eras, however, when education also included secular studies. This was, for example, the case among the Spanish Jews in the 12th and 13th centuries, who showed a much greater openness to the outside world. Thus, Joseph Ibn Aknin (1150-1220), who was born in Spain but later fled to Fez, Morocco, and who wrote Mevo ha-Talmud, an introduction to the study of the Talmud, felt that there was no contradiction between the necessity of studying the sacred works and his prescription that education should include the study of logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, the sciences, and metaphysics. However, as the Jews came under growing persecution, the study of secular subjects was curtailed, and in many cases totally abolished.

The typical model of the educational structure immediately prior to the emancipation of the Jews (which occurred from the beginning of the 19th century onwards), was one of a single teacher with a number of students, with the subject matter being entirely religious. This was often known as the ḥeder (Yid. and Heb. word for a room). This model was present almost universally, in both Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities. They were not schools in the modern sense, although a student might graduate from one teacher to another as he progressed in his studies. In certain communities there was an organized Talmud Torah, which had various classes, but here too the studies were largely or exclusively religious. Sometimes some secular subjects, such as mathematics and history, would be introduced, primarily to help in the understanding of the religious subjects. Most of the students would have a few years of schooling, but would then enter the labor market at a young age. Very few would have a really intensive education for a considerable number of years.

The 19th century was marked by the growth of organized yeshivot (talmudic colleges), primarily in Eastern Europe. Great talmudic study centers emerged, such as Tels, Ponevezh, and Slobodka, as well as different Ḥasidic centers. In these yeshivot there were official levels, with students progressing from one class to another. The yeshivot generally took students in their teens, and the better students might go on to a lifetime of Torah study. The subject matter was almost exclusively Talmud and halakhah, with students expected to learn the Bible and other sacred studies on their own. Secular studies were considered anathema.

With the Emancipation, Jews began once more to explore other fields of study: languages, mathematics, and the various sciences. This was the beginning of the Haskalah ("Enlightenment") movement. At the outset, such studies were often carried out surreptitiously, especially in Eastern Europe, where certain secular studies were regarded as heretical. In Western Europe, on the other hand, models began to develop of schools which combined both religious and secular studies. In the 19th century, R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, of Frankfurt on the Main, formulated the principles of Torah im Derekh Erets, a strong religious curriculum with secular studies, the basis for much of Jewish education to this day. The East European yeshivot also broadened their curriculum to study ethics under the influence of the Musar Movement. A pioneering role in the Muslim world was played by the French organization Alliance Israélite Universelle, which opened schools in North Africa and the Middle East in which the language of teaching was French and the pupils studied secular as well as religious subjects.

Once Jews were permitted to enter public schools and began doing so in increasing numbers, there was a need for Jewish education in addition to the secular studies offered during the school day. This supplementary education, which was generally known as ḥeder or talmud torah education, was in most instances offered under religious auspices and was generally held on Sundays or in the afternoons, after public school. The hours might be as few as two per week or as many as 12. To a large extent, this was the model in Western Europe and in the English-speaking world during the first half of the 20th century. In certain areas, where the community felt that this education was insufficient, day schools were set up where students would receive a full religious education as well as instruction according to the public school curriculum.

After World War II, the realization grew that supplementary education was not sufficient, and there was a tremendous growth in the day schools. Thus in the United States the number of day schools in the Orthodox Torah U-Mesorah day school network grew from under 100 schools immediately after the war to approximately 600 today. The day school movement, at first an almost exclusively Orthodox domain, later embraced the Conservative movement, with its Solomon Schechter schools. Even the Reform movement, which formerly rejected the day school as serving to separate Jews from their fellow citizens, now sponsors day schools under its own auspices. In other countries, day schools have developed under the auspices of the Zionist movement, with a strong emphasis on the study of Modern Hebrew. A number of day schools were established in Yiddish circles; however, most of these schools have either closed down or merged with others. With the growth of the day school movement, there was a decline in the enrollment and vitality of the supplementary schools. As the day schools are generally able to offer a far superior Jewish education to that of even high-level supplementary schools, this development is generally regarded as a favorable one by Jewish educators.

The emancipation marked the development of new models of schools for higher Jewish studies (see Rabbinical Seminaries), which sought to examine Judaism and Jewish practice with a modern approach. In the United States, the Reform and Conservative rabbinical seminaries, the Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, founded in the last quarter of the 19th century, were modeled after their German predecessors in Berlin and Breslau. Orthodoxy, too, made changes, the most far-reaching being the founding of New York's Yeshiva University, where a yeshivah curriculum was combined with a Liberal Arts education. These seminaries eventually developed graduate schools in all fields of Judaic Studies: Jewish Education, Jewish Communal Service, Sacred Music (Cantorial Studies), Biblical Archeology, and Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literature. Over the past century these seminaries have provided the American Jewish community not only with most of its rabbinic and cantorial leadership but also with its cadre of trained community professionals.

Until as late as the 20th century, Jewish education was largely limited to the education of Jewish males. From the earliest times, women's education had been regarded as different from that of men, and R. Eliezer stated, "He who teaches his daughter Torah teaches her lewdness" (Sot. 3:4). While such extremism was not really representative, it guided normative halakhah for centuries, and resulted in women being taught only those laws of the Torah that pertained to them. The statement was interpreted to mean that women might be taught the Bible but not the Oral Law. The Reform movement, from the outset, rejected any differentiation in regard to sex.

In 1917, Sarah Schnirer, encouraged by leading Orthodox rabbis, started the Beth Jacob (Beis Yakov) Orthodox school system, which offered women an official educational framework, though these schools scrupulously refused to teach girls the Mishnah or Talmud. The Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University does offer intensive talmudic study for women, as do a number of Orthodox day schools. The Reform and Conservative theological seminaries both now ordain women as a matter of course.

Large-scale growth has occurred in classical yeshivot for post-high school students, especially in Israel and the United States. A relatively recent phenomenon is that of a large percentage of yeshivah graduates spending a number of years after their marriage studying in Kolels, where they are supported by modest stipends and often by working wives. Since World War II, there has been a remarkable growth of Judaic Studies departments in various universities throughout the world, where thousands of students, Jewish and non-Jewish, are able to take courses in Hebrew and in various other branches of Judaic Studies.

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[For education in the Middle Ages see Scholasticism.] The history of French education since the Renaissance falls into three phases. Under the ancien régime, it belonged to a cultural domain largely controlled by the Catholic church. Between the 1789 Revolution and the early 20th c. the expansion of schooling as part of the social apparatus of an industrializing nation was accompanied by intense conflict between the Church and the secular, centralizing State. Since World War I attention has concentrated on breaking down the barriers of class and gender, to substitute a unified system for one in which élite and mass education formed separate spheres. Throughout these phases, the use of education to impose a common set of values may be seen as a characteristically French emphasis.

I. The Ancien Régime

The early history of popular education is difficult to separate from that of literacy, which spread slowly and patchily, especially among the rural population. Petites écoles giving a rudimentary education were left to local initiative, and came under religious superintendence. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation gave them a marked stimulus. While Protestants laid special stress on reading the Bible, Catholics relied on education to evangelize the countryside, combat heresy, and instil new devotional disciplines. Occasional support was forthcoming from the State, but the real work was done by the local clergy, by charitable individuals, and by religious orders like the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes founded by Jean-Baptiste de la Salle. As with literacy, there were striking regional variations within France, and by 1789 high levels of school attendance existed north and east of the ‘line from Saint-Malo to Geneva’. But even within literate areas, large numbers escaped schooling altogether; schools were most highly developed in towns, and more likely to be attended by boys than girls.

At the popular level, institutional schooling was slow to replace informal means of socializing children. For the social élite, however, a standard pattern of humanist secondary education in collèges and universities was established in the late 16th c. The Jesuits had the leading role, but religious orders like the Oratorians were also active, and there were Protestant colleges in the early years [see also Port-Royal]. Latin was at the heart of this education, which sought to train pupils in the written and oral skills of rhetoric, and to immerse them in a timeless world where the standards of beauty, truth, and conduct taught by the classical authors were fused with the Christian faith. This model also prevailed in the residential colleges which were attached to universities and prepared younger students for their degrees in arts, colleges which were especially numerous and powerful in Paris. The university system inherited from the Middle Ages expanded in the 16th and 17th c. as the lay professional faculties of law and medicine came to enjoy equal prestige with theology. But by the 18th c., although the universities' social role remained important (recent research has done something to rehabilitate their intellectual reputation), their academic life had become stagnant, with ossified teaching and examining procedures. They failed to contribute creatively to Enlightenment thought, remaining dominated by religious orthodoxy when the French élite was rejecting the direction of the Church.

The colleges and universities had a special appeal for those urban social groups—noblesse de robe and bourgeoisie—whose aspirations centred on legal training and access to public offices and professions, though they also attracted pupils from more modest backgrounds aiming at the clergy. The older nobility still favoured an education stressing gentlemanly and military accomplishments, combining the college with private education through tutors. A domestic ideal was also preferred in girls' education, which was largely in the hands of religious orders; convent schools cultivated a family atmosphere, and did not copy the intellectual rigour of the boys' colleges.

2. 1750-1914

a. Reform and Revolution. In the mid-18th c. new ideas about childhood and the formation of the personality, as expressed notably in Rousseau's Émile, brought a reaction against the stereotyped forms of élite training. Like other leading figures of the Enlightenment, Rousseau was ambivalent towards the education of the masses. But the Enlightenment belief in rational social reform stimulated thinking about national systems of education directed by the State. The closing of the Jesuit Colleges in 1762 brought upheaval, and the 1789 Revolution made the crisis more general, as the revenues of the Church were confiscated, religious orders dissolved, and priests expelled. The 24 universities then existing were abolished in 1793, and schools survived with difficulty. The 1790s saw several far-reaching reform plans, notably that of Condorcet, but political instability and lack of money meant that little was achieved. The écoles centrales (1795), secondary schools on a radical new model, were the most interesting innovation. It was only after Napoleon seized power and restored the Church that the fortunes of education revived, though he was content to leave influence over the masses to the clergy, and concentrated on the training of officers and bureaucrats. The new bourgeois élite was to have a secular ethos, and ecclesiastical influence was excluded from the ‘university’ created in 1808—the centralized corporation of administrators and teachers. Napoleon's administrative structure, including the grouping of departments into regional académies headed by recteurs, was to prove long-lasting.

b. Élite Education. Lycées replaced the écoles centrales in 1802. Supplemented by municipal colleges in smaller towns, they followed a standard curriculum leading to the new baccalauréat, returning to the humanist traditions of the colleges whose buildings they often occupied. Latin now shared the honours with Greek, French literature, mathematics, and philosophy (taught in the final year); élite culture remained deeply marked by an emphasis on analytical clarity and verbal expression. This culture générale became a badge of bourgeois status, but one angled towards the professions and the bureaucracy rather than industry and commerce. There were periodic attempts to introduce science and other modern subjects, but only in 1902 were alternative paths to the baccalauréat given equal status.

Since the lycées gave a complete liberal education, the demand for higher education was limited. Instead of restoring the universities, Napoleon created separate faculties; the vocational law and medical schools flourished, but letters and science attracted few students. The ambitious preferred the grandes écoles, specialized schools which recruited through competitive examinations. In the 19th c. their numbers were limited, the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure being the most distinguished. Later, grandes écoles multiplied, particularly in commerce and engineering. Their entrance examinations required intensive preparation, especially in mathematics, and the Paris lycées specialized in this task—part of the progressive concentration of educational and scientific institutions in the capital. Alongside the grandes écoles, the faculties underwent significant reform and expansion under the Third Republic. Germany's victory in 1870-1 was attributed to her intellectual and scientific superiority, and the German universities became the model for the reform policy directed by Louis Liard. The provincial faculties were developed with an eye to local industrial needs, the Sorbonne was rebuilt, laboratories and research institutions were founded, and the faculties of letters and science acquired a new clientele of full-time students, now including women. Reform culminated in 1896 with the constitution of 15 universities, and the system thus established changed little before the 1960s.

Another achievement of the Third Republic was the creation of lycées for girls (1880), though the curricula for boys and girls remained different until the 1920s (and it was not until the 1960s that mixed secondary education became general). The girls' lycées were a challenge to the Church, which previously dominated the field, and were accompanied by attacks on Catholic secondary schools for boys, which had revived in the 19th c. despite Napoleon's legal restrictions. Republicans saw Catholic institutions for the élite (which included Catholic faculties from 1875) as dangerously divisive and anti-modern, and it was true that Catholic colleges had a social cachet which appealed to the nobility and the more conservative bourgeoisie.

c. Popular Education. Anticlericalism was fundamental to republican policy on popular education. The lois Ferry, which made education free (1881) and compulsory (1882), have usually been seen as a turning-point, but they really marked the consolidation of a long development. Every government after 1815 encouraged the provision and improvement of schools, in co-operation with the Church and local authorities. The loi Guizot of 1833 required every commune to provide a public school, and created departmental écoles normales for training teachers. Guizot himself was typical in combining religious and humanitarian motives with the idea of social control, looking to the schools to moralize the masses and provide social stability. The loi Falloux of 1850 reinforced the influence of the Church, and Napoleon III made only limited legislative changes despite the modernizing character of his regime. Yet throughout these years schooling was steadily extending, as its social and economic value became more evident. Regional disparities were evened out, the education of girls was no longer neglected, and school attendance became part of the accepted pattern of childhood among both peasants and urban workers. Ferry's reforms filled the gaps, and created a well-financed national system.

They also reflected the passionate republican belief, already evident in 1848, that education was the instrument of democracy, social progress, and popular emancipation. The positivist creed of science provided an ideology for anticlericalism, and Ferry enforced the principle of state neutrality in religion (laïcité): religious instruction was replaced by ‘civic’ teaching, and only lay persons could teach in state schools. The reforms of the Third Republic were also inspired by nationalism, using the school to break down regional loyalties and form French citizens; this entailed the imposition of standard French, and a war against patois and non-French languages. The village school was one of the most characteristic institutions of the Third Republic, which had no more zealous servants than the elementary teachers (instituteurs and institutrices). On the other side of the Church-State battle, Catholics denounced the ‘atheist’ state schools, and devoted much energy to building up their own, especially in devout areas like the west. In the heated political atmosphere after the Dreyfus Affair, the republicans attempted to eliminate even Catholic private schools by banning religious orders; tensions were reduced after World War I, but only in the 1950s was a compromise reached by admitting Catholic schools to state subsidy.

3. Since World War I

Élite and popular education developed as separate, self-contained systems, reflecting the rigid class structure. Universities and lycées were strongholds of liberal values, symbolizing the principles of merit and talent asserted in 1789 against birth and privilege, but they had no direct connection with elementary schools, and although there were many individual success stories, the channels of social mobility were narrow. The advent of the Third Republic brought no substantial change, and before 1914 only about 3 per cent of the age-group received secondary education, 1 per cent reaching the baccalauréat. But after World War I a new impulse towards democratization created the ideal of the école unique. Instead of being divided between free elementary and fee-paying secondary sectors, each serving a wide age-range, schools would be organized in successive stages, allocating pupils to different types of secondary education according to ability. This programme was accomplished in stages between the 1920s and 1960s, but gradual reform was then overtaken by an educational ‘explosion’, driven partly by a rising birth-rate, partly by a growing demand for qualifications. More pupils staying on at school meant a surge in demand for higher education, and the consequent overcrowding helped provoke the student disturbances of May 1968. The short-term response to these was to subdivide large universities and found new ones (producing more than 60 separate institutions), and to allow more autonomy from the state; in the long term, governments accepted the need to move from élite to mass higher education. For similar reasons, the barriers within secondary education were dismantled, and schools were reorganized into two stages, the collèges common to all, and the lycées for advanced pupils, giving various forms of technical and vocational as well as academic education. The baccalauréat expanded accordingly. But the system remained highly competitive, with the grandes écoles retaining their place at its apex. As sociologists like Bourdieu pointed out, bourgeois privilege could survive within formal meritocracy, and the power of education to mould the social structure was less than idealists over the centuries had supposed.

[Robert Anderson]

Bibliography

• L.-H. Parias (ed.), Histoire générale de l'enseignement et de l'éducation en France, new edn. (1983)
• R. Chartier, M.-M. Compère, and D. Julia, L'Éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (1976)
• A. Prost, Histoire de l'enseignement en France, 1800-1967, 6th edn. (1986)

Americans have long invested importance in education as a means of social improvement and individual fulfillment. Education has entailed both formal instruction in schools, universities, and other institutions, and informal learning in a variety of settings. Schools were respected institutions early in American history, and their significance has grown with time. Education and schooling have also been at the center of social and political conflict, often over issues of status and inequality. Schools eventually became instruments of government social policy, utilized to offset historic inequities and to help achieve social justice. Education also contributed human capital to the nation's economy. In the nineteenth century, reformers focused on training reliable workers; in the twentieth century, schools prepared men and women for office and professional employment. At the same time, education has been a vital element of social and economic mobility for generations of Americans.

Historically, the primary schools were the objects of the nation's first great era of education reform. Next came secondary schools, which grew most rapidly during the early twentieth century, and colleges and universities expanded notably in the years following World War II. Schools at all levels have been indispensable to the formation of a national identity for Americans throughout history. From the very earliest stages of the new republic, schools have helped to foster loyalty to the principles of democratic governance, and to the particular tenets of American nationalism. They also have served as a forum for debate over the evolution of these principles.

Education in the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

The cultivation of skills and the transmission of culture were major concerns of English settlers in North America, evident almost immediately upon their arrival. This was apparent in New England, where early laws called for establishing schools and for educating young men—and eventually young women too. But schools were established elsewhere, along with colleges, to provide avenues of formal education. Schools were fragile institutions in the colonial world, existing alongside older and more familiar agencies of education, the family and the church. Even though there was a high level of rhetorical commitment to formal education in certain colonies, only a minority of youth were "educated" by today's standards.

New England's colonists placed special value on the necessity of moral and religious leadership, and preparing a cadre of educated leaders was considered essential. An early sign of this was the decision to establish Boston Latin School in 1635 and Harvard College a year later. In the wake of religious debates and schisms, other colleges were started in nearby Connecticut (Yale, 1701), Rhode Island (Brown, 1764), and New Hampshire (Dart-mouth, 1769). These were small institutions, enrolling fewer than a hundred students, and hardly represented a well-developed education system.

In 1647, Massachusetts enacted a law requiring towns of fifty families to establish a school, to confound the "Old Deluder Satan" in his never-ending quest to lead Christians astray. Connecticut enacted a similar law just a few years later and eventually other New England colonies did as well, with the exception of Rhode Island. It is unlikely, however, that most towns large enough to be covered by these measures complied immediately, especially if there was not a large number of families interested in establishing a school. Only eleven known schools existed in Massachusetts in 1650, serving some 2,339 households (or one for every 212); by 1689, the number of schools had grown to 23 and households to 8,088 (one for every 352). Even if the quantity of schools increased significantly in the eighteenth century, many children probably attended only briefly, if at all.

In other colonies, schools were even fewer. In 1689, Virginia had only eight schools for more than seven thousand households (or about one for every nine hundred); and New York had eleven for about 2200 families (one for every two hundred). Virginia's William and Mary (1693) was the only southern college of the colonial era. Others appeared in the middle colonies, reflecting the region's religious and cultural diversity. The College of New Jersey (today Princeton) was established in 1746, New York's Kings College (Columbia) in 1754, the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania) in 1755, and New Jersey's Queens College (Rutgers) in 1766.

While the appearance of such institutions was notable, there also was considerable indifference or even hostility to formal education, especially in the South. In 1671, Lord Berkeley of Virginia made this famous statement: "I thank God that there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope that we shall not have these [for a] hundred years." Berkeley, who was governor at the time, echoed the view of many aristocrats and wealthy planters that "learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world." Attitudes such as these no doubt accounted for some of the regional disparities in colonial education.

Schools typically were run by a single teacher, or "master." Outside of Boston, New York or Philadelphia, schools rarely were larger than a single classroom, with perhaps several dozen students. For most colonists, schooling lasted less than seven or eight years, with only four or five months in each term. Students read the Bible, along with spellers, prayer books, catechisms, and other religious materials. The famous New England Primer, first published before 1690, was the best known of a wide range of reading materials used to impart lessons in spelling and grammar, along with morality and virtue. While there were a few legendary teachers, such as Ezekial Cheever of the Boston Latin School, many were college students or recent graduates waiting to be called to a pulpit. Yet other teachers were men of modest education, ill suited for other lines of work, managing schools for lack of better employment. In certain New England towns "dame schools" were run by women, offering classes for young children of both sexes. As a rule, teaching was a relatively low status occupation, even when schools were few and education was considered at least nominally important.

Statistics on literacy seem to confirm the general regional distribution of schools, although it is not clear that reading was always linked to formal education. New England exhibited the highest rates of literacy, as measured by counting signatures on wills. About three-quarters of the male population was literate in the mid-eighteenth century, and nearly 90 percent by the time of the revolution. Literacy rates appear to have been lower in the middle colonies, New York and Pennsylvania, and were the lowest in the South. The male literacy rate in Virginia was about 70 percent by the end of the eighteenth century, comparable to England. The female literacy rate was lower than men's everywhere, although in New England the gap appears to have narrowed by the end of the eighteenth century.

Much of life in colonial society revolved around the family, the central unit of productive activities and a key site of informal education. Families were large and children were expected to contribute to the welfare of each household. Relevant skills and bodies of knowledge, ranging from farming, carpentry, husbandry, and hunting to food preservation, soap making, cooking, and sewing were imparted informally, along with basic literacy. Popular books praised the independence of children, and the virtue of lessons learned away from parents and family. Many families sent older children to board with neighbors or relatives, as a form of apprenticeship and a means of discipline. There also were traditional apprenticeships for young men interested in learning a trade, a practice with deep European roots, observed widely in the colonies. In most cases, formal contracts were drawn up, periods of service were outlined, and lessons were agreed upon. The host household typically provided food, lodging, and other necessities of support in exchange for work, training, and education as specified by the contract. Occasionally there were complaints about cruel or unfair masters who did not abide by such agreements.

A limited number of schools were established to educate Native Americans and Blacks, the principal non-European groups in colonial society. Dartmouth College included a provision for American Indians in its original charter, although this idea was short lived. The Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, or SPG, aimed to convert non-Christian residents of the colonies, particularly Native Americans and Africans. Starting in the early eighteenth century, the SPG dispatched hundreds of ministers and teachers to the New World, opening a number of schools, most of them transitory. It was more effective at printing Bibles and religious tracts that circulated widely in colonial society.

The American Revolution was a watershed event in the early history of American education. The war disrupted many institutions, forcing students to suspend studies and teachers to consider joining one side or the other. More importantly, the revolution led to a new republican sensibility in the former colonies, articulated by a generation of enlightened leaders who believed that education was essential to the new political order. Citizens of a representative democracy, they reasoned, had to be well informed and prepared to critically assess the arguments and opinions of the day.

Education and schooling became topics of discussion and debate, the subject of speeches, addresses, articles, and pamphlets. Thomas Jefferson proposed publicly supported schools throughout Virginia, in a "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," before the revolution ended in 1779. He believed that free schooling would lead to a "natural aristocracy" of talent and accomplishment, leaders for the new nation. Jefferson's plan was never adopted, but it reflected the new significance attached to education. Benjamin Rush advocated making American children into "republican machines" through improved systems of schooling. Noah Webster advocated universal free education to foster national unity. Webster called for schools to establish "an inviolable attachment to their country" in the minds of children, and urged Americans to "begin with the infant in the cradle; let the first word he lisps be Washington." Early federal legislation for the distribution of public lands, passed in 1785 and 1787, called for a portion of the proceeds to be used for establishing state education systems, including universities. Seven of the new state constitutions also made reference to education, reflecting these concerns.

Among the most important effects of the American Revolution was its impact on the lives of colonial women. Benjamin Rush probably was the best-known proponent of women's education in the years immediately following the revolution. The reasoning was plain: if children needed to be trained in the virtues of republican government, the task of early education would fall to their mothers. Consequently, American women had to be educated, at least enough to read, write, and teach their children moral precepts and principles of republicanism. Historians have labeled this view "republican motherhood," and it contributed to increased interest in women's education during the latter decades of the eighteenth century.

While the colonial era saw limited development in education, the closing decades of the eighteenth century were marked by considerable ferment about it. Revolutionary ideas about state-sponsored systems of schooling, republican socialization, and women's education marked the dawn of a new era. It would take time, and the efforts of another generation of reformers, for these notions to affect the schooling of most Americans.

Education in the Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century was a time of rapid economic growth and urbanization, an era of institution building, and education was shaped by these developments. Schools became instruments of reform, intended to help redress pressing social problems. State and city systems of schooling came into view, although local prerogatives continued to dictate most educational practices. It was a time when schools and education gradually assumed greater importance, and came to reflect prevailing social divisions and patterns of inequality in American life.

The nation's total investment in education grew dramatically, as more people attended school for greater lengths of time. In 1800, the average American received about 210 days of formal education in a lifetime. By 1850, that figure had more than doubled and by 1900, it had jumped to 1050 days, about half of what it would be in 2000. In the course of these changes, formal education began to assume the familiar dimensions of modern school experiences. Schooling became associated with the cultivation of proper "habits" of industriousness and responsibility, along with essential skills of literacy, numerical calculation, and knowledge of history, geography, and other subjects.

Education in the countryside evolved slowly, but schools developed more rapidly in the cities. Education was linked to questions of poverty and destitution, crime and social conflict. The earliest publicly supported urban institutions were called "charity schools," and were designated for the children of the poor. Started by civic-minded members of the urban middle and upper classes, they imparted proper norms of behavior along with basic lessons in literacy, mathematics, geography, and other subjects. Monitorial schools, modeled on the ideas of English educator Joseph Lancaster, featured a single teacher managing hundreds of children by using older students as "monitors." These and other schools reflected prevailing norms of strict discipline and order. Urban reformers struggled to improve attendance and introduce uniformity into lessons, at the same time that city growth created rising demand for schooling.

Industrialization posed challenges to education. With the advent of child labor, the factory became a school by default, although its lessons were usually quite harsh. While some states passed laws requiring factory owners to arrange for teaching child employees, such measures often were honored in the breach. Some reformers rejected the idea of industry altogether and attempted to establish ideal agrarian societies in isolated communities dotting the countryside. The best known of these communal experiments was Robert Owen's socialist cooperative in Indiana, called New Harmony. Established on principles of shared work and property, and an education system predicated on performing useful tasks without the imposition of discipline, New Harmony was a challenge to long-standing conventions. Although other communal experiments persisted considerably longer than Owen's, their collective influence on the educational system was limited.

Schools in the countryside were isolated and small; classes were conducted for relatively short periods and taught by itinerant masters with little formal training. A typical district school served an area of two to four square miles, populated by twenty to fifty families. These institutions helped to enhance basic literacy skills, but they built on a foundation established by local households. By the early nineteenth century, they literally dotted the countryside in most northern states, serving millions of children. Overall, levels of enrollment were quite high, over 70 percent for children aged nine to thirteen in 1830. Only Germany had higher rates, and by 1880, the U.S. led the world. These figures reflect girls attending along with boys, at least in the Northeastern states and the upper Midwest, another unique feature of American education.

Enrollments notwithstanding, the length of school terms varied, and day-to-day attendance often was inconsistent. There was scarcely any advanced training, as most teachers knew little beyond the "three Rs" and seldom remained in any one place longer than a year or two. Schools generally were ungraded, with children of all ages in the same room and enduring the discomforts of poor ventilation and threadbare accommodations. Discipline was emphasized, with rules enforced by harsh physical punishments. The chief instructional technique was recitation, requiring students to repeat portions of text they had memorized. Schools also conveyed basic mathematical and computational principles, along with a smattering of history, geography, and "moral philosophy." Contests and games, such as spelling bees or multiplication tournaments, helped break the monotony, and storytelling imparted history and geography lessons.

Early reformers were troubled by the variability that existed in the rural schools. They fretted over the haphazard training of teachers, the short terms squeezed between harvest and planting seasons, and the chance provision of such basic school supplies as books and firewood. Reformers also worried about the growing diversity of American society and the possibility of social conflict in the absence of common values and a shared identity. In light of these concerns, and the reforms they inspired, historians have referred to this period as the "age of the common school."

The best-known proponent of common school re-form was Horace Mann, an indefatigable lawyer and state legislator who accepted the newly created post of Secretary of the State Board of Education in Massachusetts in 1837. Like other reformers, Mann worked with a modest salary and little formal authority, traveling widely to proclaim the virtues of common schools. His annual reports, published by the state, became influential statements of educational reform. Mann battled over issues of religious sectarianism in instruction, property taxes for education, longer school terms, and systematic examinations and training requirements for teachers. In particular, he succeeded in persuading the Massachusetts legislature to establish the nation's first publicly supported teacher training institution, called a normal school, derived from the French word normale, in Lexington in 1838.

Mann and other reformers thought that women had a special role to play as teachers. Many believed women naturally suited for this role, due to their supposed maternal characteristics of patience and affection toward small children. Women teachers also cost less than men, even when professionally trained, so their employment could help restrain the expense of reforms. Feminization of teaching had occurred earlier in New England, but proceeded rapidly elsewhere, and by the time of the Civil War a majority of teachers in most northern states were women.

Henry Barnard was a famous contemporary of Mann who held similar appointments in Connecticut and Rhode Island and served as the first U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1867 to 1870. Other leading reformers included John Pierce in Michigan and Calvin Stowe in Ohio. This generation shared a similar set of values and assumptions about schooling and its purposes, much of it derived from their Protestant upbringing and nationalist ardor. Influential textbooks transmitted these values to generations of students, especially the popular McGuffey readers first published in 1836. These reforms found support in the fervent language regarding education in new state constitutions, particularly in the northern tier extending west from New England and the Middle Atlantic States.

Larger cities became sites of battles over the control and content of public schooling. Immigrant religious groups objected to the inveiglement of Protestant precepts and values in most curricula and textbooks, and they demanded support for parochial schools. The best-known conflict occurred in 1842, when New York's Bishop John Hughes challenged local charity school groups, prompting creation of a public board of education. Eventually, parochial schools became quite numerous in many northern cities, enrolling thousands of children and providing an important alternative to public schools.

Another aspect of reform concerned secondary or high schools, which became popular institutions in the nineteenth century. There had been little public demand for secondary schools until after the revolution, as private tutoring and tuition-based academies prepared young men for college and few occupations required advanced schooling. Beginning in 1821, with the establishment of the first public high school, Boston's English High School, American secondary schools, as distinct from a classical grammar school or academy, prepared students for a host of practical purposes. By the end of the nineteenth century, they existed in one form or another in nearly every type of city or large town in the country, enrolling nearly a half million students. The high school had become pervasive, even though it served less than 10 percent of the nation's teenage population.

High schools also featured instruction in some classical subjects, especially Latin, long considered a sign of achievement and status. Most larger public high schools admitted students by examination, and many prospective scholars were turned away. These tax-supported institutions often were quite costly, occupying palatial buildings erected at great expense and with considerable fanfare. This, along with their exclusivity, led to attacks, culminating in a landmark 1874 decision in Kalamazoo, Michigan, upholding the right of school boards to levy taxes to support such institutions. High schools in the United States also generally were coeducational. Advances in women's secondary education were envisioned by such pioneering educators as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon, and Catharine Beecher. While these reformers' influence was limited, and conservatives attacked the idea of coeducation, public support for women's education was high. By the end of the nineteenth century, female students outnumbered males in high schools across the country.

Education in the South lagged behind other regions. This was partly due to the plantation elite, which viewed popular education with suspicion. It also was linked to the legacy of slavery, and concerns with keeping the black population in a condition of servitude. Informal forms of education abounded, from tutoring to apprenticeship and other forms of vocational training. Despite their exclusion from formal education, slave families imparted lessons from one generation to another, transmitting a rich cultural tradition that left an indelible imprint on the region.

Free blacks established schools for their struggling communities, or modified those founded by philanthropic whites. This was true in northern cities before the Civil War, and throughout the South after. The Freedman's Bureau supported thousands of schools in the war's aftermath, providing critical skills and training. Black literacy rates began to improve significantly, and by 1890, nearly two-thirds could read. Even so, inequities abounded. Term lengths in southern black schools stagnated, while those in the white schools began to increase, even approaching the standard of the northern states by the 1890s. Black teachers were paid less than their white counterparts, and were allotted meager sums for textbooks and other supplies. Legal challenges to this were denied in the U.S. Supreme Court case Cumming v. School Board of Education of Richmond County, Georgia (1899). Where there had been some measure of parity during Reconstruction, southern school districts eventually spent as little on black students as a fifth of that expended for whites.

Native American education in the nineteenth century featured a deliberate crusade to alter an indigenous way of life. American Indians had long practiced their own forms of education, a process of acculturation that varied from one tribal group to another. Early schools for Native Americans were established by religious missionaries, intent on evangelizing and introducing basic literacy skills. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), established as part of the War Department in 1824, supervised dozens of schools by 1850, reaching a small fraction of the population. In 1870, programs were run by both the BIA and missionaries, as part of the federal government's "Peace Policy," although government schools eventually predominated. In 1877, there were 150 BIA schools enrolling several thousand students, and by 1900, the number of institutions had more than doubled and enrollments exceeded twenty thousand, representing half the school age population. Certain schools boarded students, the most famous being the Carlisle School, founded in 1879 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. These institutions attempted aggressive assimilation of American Indian students, but rarely succeeded. Despite these efforts, and an extensive network of BIA schools, Native Americans remained isolated on reservations, and outside the nation's social and economic mainstream.

The nineteenth century is also referred to as the "age of the college." While only a handful of higher education institutions existed in 1800, several hundred others were founded in the next fifty years. Leading state universities were established and other institutions were sponsored by religious denominations. Most fought for survival, competing for students and financial support. The Dartmouth College case, settled in 1819, granted private institutions autonomy from the state legislatures that chartered them. Many colleges offered few advanced courses, however, the rest being "prepatory" classes equivalent to those in academies or high schools. Through much of the nineteenth century, American collegiate institutions were dominated by a classical curriculum and an academic culture shaped by traditions handed down from the colonial period. Latin and Greek represented the core of the curriculum and most classes were conducted by recitation. There were efforts to introduce more scientific, historical, and literary studies. Francis Wayland advocated such innovations as president at Brown, but the Yale Report of 1828, a faculty document defending classical studies, helped to slow widespread change during the antebellum period. Tradition held the classical emphasis to be indispensable; without it, no course of study could represent collegiate standards.

Change was evident, however, in the latter decades of the century. The first Land Grant College Act in 1862, drafted by Vermont congressman Justin Smith Morrill, established support for institutions devoted to practical and scientific study. A second Morrill act in 1890 provided even more support for these state universities. Meanwhile, visionary leaders such as Harvard's Charles Eliot broke the stranglehold of tradition in the collegiate curriculum, introducing a liberal elective system that allowed students to choose courses freely. Scientific research institutes had been opened at Harvard, Yale, and other institutions even before Eliot's reforms, and new research oriented universities were established afterward, with Cornell (1868), Johns Hopkins (1876), and Chicago (1890) leading the way. These institutions were influenced by the German model of higher education, which emphasized research-based learning instead of classical training. Flagship state universities, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and California, also exhibited German influences and attracted professors dedicated to scholarship and research.

Adult education found expression in the lyceum movement, which began in 1826 and within a decade had established more than three thousand local forums for lectures and debates. After the Civil War, the Chautauqua movement sponsored traveling and local exhibitions and lectures, eventually embracing hundreds of local associations. These forms of popular learning continued into the early twentieth century, when their roles were increasingly filled by universities, museums, libraries, and other institutions.

By 1900, the basic elements of a modern education system were in place. Common school reform had established a network of primary schools, public high schools existed in towns and cities across the country, and colleges and universities were widely accessible. Americans attended school at higher rates than in any other nation and engaged in a variety of other educational activities. This keen interest in education would continue in the years ahead.

Reforming Education in the Early Twentieth Century

Education reform appeared in many guises in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Progressive education was identified with such renowned reform figures as John Dewey, Francis W. Parker, and William Wirt, and influenced a small but highly visible cadre of educational reformers. Other school reformers were less idealistic by temperament and more concerned with issues of efficiency and carefully aligning the purposes of schooling with the needs of the economy. High schools expanded rapidly, and colleges and universities also grew.

Progressive educators represented the legacy of such well-known European thinkers as Frederck Froebel, Henrich Pestalozzi, and Johann Herbart. They also were influenced the experiential psychology of William James and the work of Edward Sheldon, principal of the Oswego, New York Normal School. Dewey was the most famous of progressive educators, well known for his work with the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which he founded upon joining the university's faculty in 1894. A leading academic and popular philosopher, Dewey's best-known work on schooling was Democracy and Education (1916). Chicago had become a center for these ideas after Francis Parker arrived in 1883 to head the Cook County Normal School, one of the city's teacher-training institutions. William Wirt introduced "platoon schools" in nearby Gary, Indiana, in 1908.

Women were especially prominent in reform, founding progressive schools and occasionally providing leadership to school districts. Caroline Pratt, Marietta Johnson, and Flora Cook were leaders of innovative private institutions, and Chicago's Ella Flagg Young was among the nation's most important progressive superintendents. Their efforts met resistance, as many educators complained experiential methods did not impart academic skills. Other critics lampooned progressive education as a trendy fad among the social and intellectual elite.

Additional reformers in this period contributed to the emergence of new, centralized, and efficient city school systems between 1890 and 1920. This was a part of a sweeping reform campaign in municipal government, one that attacked the corruption associated with ward-based political regimes. Hundreds of municipalities changed from ward-level school boards and city councils to centralized and bureaucratic forms of governance and administration. Urban school systems came to be run by boards elected from across a community or municipality, and administered by superintendents selected for their experience and professional competence. This gave rise to new bureaucratic forms of school management and control. New organizational forms were adopted, the most important being the kindergarten and junior high schools.

A corollary to this was the development of standardized or mental testing, and school personnel trained in the new subfield of psychological measurement. French researchers Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon devised the first general test of mental aptitude in 1908; Lewis Terman of Stanford University and Edward Thorndike of Columbia University were among the chief American proponents of these techniques. By the latter 1920s, thousands of school districts employed standardized tests to judge student abilities, to justify curricular decisions, or simply to inform teachers and parents.

The rise of the mental testing movement was especially important for children with special needs or learning difficulties. Blind, deaf, or speech-impaired students had been educated in special schools since the mid-nineteenth century. As urban school systems grew, particular courses were established for such students. In 1879, for instance, Cleveland created a class for "feebleminded" children; Boston followed suit in 1898, as did other cities. Eventually, public fears were raised about these children intermingling with the "normal" population, sentiments fueled by pseudoscientific advocates of "mental hygiene" and "eugenics," a term for human perfectibility. Zealous proponents of these ideas issued racist bromides against immigration and the assimilation of minority groups, and even urged the sterilization of "feebleminded" couples.

This also was a time of rapid expansion for the American high school. Enrollments stood at about 300,000 in 1890 (public and private schools combined), and by 1930, the number had increased to nearly 5 million, almost half of the nation's eligible teenage population. Much of this was due to the growing number of institutions: on average, a new secondary school was established every day. The regions leading this expansion were the northern, midwestern, and western states, especially areas with high levels of income and little inequality. Enrollments tended to be higher in communities with fewer manufacturing jobs and smaller numbers of immigrants. On average, high school graduates earned higher wages, an indication of their contributions to the economy.

The general bearing and purpose of secondary education was framed by the "Report of the Committee of Ten," published in 1893. Comprised of university representatives and national education leaders, this group was chaired by Harvard's Charles Eliot, and included William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education. Its purpose was to establish order and uniformity in a secondary education system that included public high schools, academies, private and religious schools, and various other institutions. Twenty-five years later, a second national report was issued by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education of the National Education Association, chaired by Clarence Kingsley. Widely known as the "Cardinal Principles Report," this document outlined a broad range of social and academic purposes for the high school. It provided a vision of the "comprehensive high school," embracing vocational and academic curricula and uniting students in a common commitment to democratic citizenship. This would serve as an important American ideal for decades to come.

Specialized secondary curricula were developed for women and blacks. Ellen Richards, a chemist and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's first female faculty member, helped to launch a distinctive academic field called "home economics." In high schools home economics became a way of defining women's roles through training in "domestic science" and socialization in prescribed standards of conduct. At the same time, commercial education, training in stenography, typing and bookkeeping, became popular among women interested in office employment.

Due to limited opportunities, fewer than 5 percent of eligible black students were enrolled at the secondary level at this time, most of them in private schools supported by tuition, local donations, and northern philanthropy. Public high schools were established throughout the south for whites. Between 1905 and 1920 more than five hundred were established, making secondary schooling accessible across the region. By contrast, in 1916 only fifty-eight public high schools for African Americans existed in fourteen southern states, just twenty-five in the former Confederate states. Many of these schools featured a curriculum focused on manual trades and domestic science, reflecting the influence of Booker T. Washington, the period's most famous black educator. W. E. B. Du Bois was an outspoken critic of Washington, advocating high academic standards for a "talented tenth" of black students.

Nationally, post-secondary education continued to expand. Overall enrollment climbed from about a quarter million in 1900 to more than a million in 1930, representing more than 10 percent of the age group. The number of female students grew even faster, from less than 40 percent of the student body in the 1890s to almost half by the twenties. These developments infused new verve into campus life. Fraternities, sororities, and dating became popular, especially after 1920, along with spectator sports such as football.

There was a decided shift in the university curriculum, and a new utilitarian disposition was signaled by the appearance of professional schools and institutes. Nineteenth-century legal and medical training had been conducted by private schools or individuals; after 1900 universities began acquiring these institutions, or developing their own, and awarding degrees to their graduates. Similar arrangements were made for the preparation of engineers, social workers, and other professionals. The first university programs to provide training for business also appeared, offering courses in accounting, finance, management, marketing, and similar subjects.

The growth of higher education also led to new types of institutions. Among the most important was the junior college, a two-year school intended to offer preparation for higher study, later called community colleges. These schools first appeared in the West and the Midwest, numbering some two hundred by the 1920s, but enrolling less than a tenth of all undergraduates. Other more popular forms of higher education also flourished, among them municipal colleges in the larger cities and private urban universities, many of them religious. State-sponsored normal schools gradually expanded their purview, and began to evolve into state colleges and universities. These institutions served local students, providing baccalaureate education along with a variety of professional programs. Altogether, the range of higher education alternatives expanded appreciably, accounting for much of the increase in enrollments.

By the close of this period, much of the creative energy of progressive education had dissipated. Due to the Great Depression, the 1930s were years of fiscal distress for many school districts, particularly those in larger cities. Programs were cut, especially extracurricular activities and such "frills" as music and art. At the same time, high school and college enrollments increased as youth employment opportunities disappeared. World War II, on the other hand, pulled students away from the schools to serve in the military or work in war industries. Neither episode provided an environment for educational reform. Many of the developments of earlier decades remained in place, such as standardized testing, the comprehensive high school and the new research-based and utilitarian university. Yet, the impact of other reform ideals, particularly those of Dewey and his progressive allies, was less enduring.

Education in Postwar America

Among the most striking features of the latter twentieth century was the growing importance attached to formal education, both as a matter of public policy and as a private concern. The federal government became a source of funding, and education developed into a major issue in national politics. At the same time, more Americans attended school, as enrollments climbed at all levels of the educational system, but especially in the nation's high schools and colleges.

In the 1950s schools expanded rapidly, straining resources with the postwar "baby boom." A number of prominent academics and journalists criticized progressive education, linking it in the public mind with failure in the schools. This was partly due to the climate of the Cold War and suspicions that progressive educators were "soft headed" or left-leaning. It also reflected perceptions of a lack of discipline in American children, particularly teenagers. When the Russian Sputnik spacecraft was launched in 1957, many attributed American failures in the "space race" to shortcomings in the schools. This led to passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958, boosting federal support for instruction in science and mathematics.

The major events in postwar education, however, revolved around questions of race and inequality. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregated schools to be inherently unequal, was a milestone of national educational policy and in popular thinking about social justice. The decision was the culmination of a series of legal challenges to segregated education undertaken by the NAACP in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. It immediately led to vows of non-compliance by southern politicians and educators. Consequently, desegregation proceeded slowly but gained speed in the following decade, when compliance was linked to federal school funding. Civil rights activists waged local battles against segregation and educational inequality, first in the South and later in the North, where de facto segregation was widespread. De jure policies of separate schooling ended, but overall patterns of segregation proved much harder to change.

The changing racial and ethnic composition of the nation's principal metropolitan areas exacerbated these issues. With the migration of millions of blacks after World War II, big city public schools systems became divided along racial lines. Despite the principles of integration and equity embodied in the "Brown" decision and the efforts of liberal-minded educators, growing inequalities in education came to characterize metropolitan life. Because of residential segregation, school resources were also spatially distributed, a point that eventually became contentious. Schools in black neighborhoods tended to be overcrowded, with larger classes and fewer experienced teachers than schools in white areas. Migration to the suburbs, widely known as "white flight," also made it difficult to desegregate city schools. Between 1960 and 1980, the country's suburban population nearly doubled in size, making urban desegregation an elusive goal.

Civil rights organizations issued legal challenges to de facto patterns of school segregation, charging school districts with upholding segregation to avoid aggravating whites. A series of federal court decisions in the latter 1960s and early 1970s articulated a new legal doctrine requiring the active pursuit of integrated schools. In the landmark case of Swan v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971), a federal district court established mandatory bussing of students as a remedy to residential segregation. In sub-sequent years, desegregation plans requiring bussing were implemented in scores of cities, most of them by order of federal or state authorities. These decisions were supported by research, particularly a national survey under-taken in 1966 by sociologist James Coleman, finding that integrated schooling produced high achievement levels in minority students. The Supreme Court's 1974 Miliken v. Bradley decision, however, limited the impact of desegregation plans by prohibiting bussing across district lines, effectively exempting most suburban communities.

Meanwhile, education became an integral part of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty." In 1965, he sponsored the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), dramatically expanding federal assistance to schools. Title 1 of this legislation provided resources to schools with high numbers of poor students, to address inequities. Other educational initiatives begun under the Johnson administration included Head Start, a preschool program aimed at children from poor families. By 1972, more than a million children were enrolled in the program and studies showed that it boosted academic achievement.

Legislation addressing inequality and discrimination extended to other groups of students. The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 provided funding to schools serving the nation's 3 million students who did not speak English as a primary language. In 1970 the Office of Civil Rights issued guidelines requiring districts where such students constituted more than 5 percent of the population to take "affirmative steps" to meet their needs. At about the same time a series of court cases challenged the principle of separate classes for special education students, a group that had grown rapidly in the postwar period. In 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act was signed into law by President Gerald Ford. With this measure, the federal government required school districts to provide these students with free and equitable schooling in the least restrictive environment possible. Similarly, the National Organization of Women (NOW) included a provision in its 1967 Women's Bill of Rights calling for "equal and unsegregated education." Five years later, Title IX was included in ESEA, declaring "no person … shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." School districts responded most visibly in the area of women's athletics. The 1970s witnessed a five-fold increase in female participation in competitive sports, although change in other areas was much slower.

The post-World War II period also witnessed significant change in higher education. An influential Harvard faculty report in 1945 advocated flexible curricula under the heading "general education," and a presidential commission on higher education in 1949 presciently argued the need for greater capacity. By 1970, enrollments had quadrupled to more than 8 million. Early growth was due to the GI Bill, which provided tuition benefits to veterans, but the major source of new students was the affluent postwar "baby-boom" generation, a third of whom eventually enrolled in college. The number of institutions did not increase significantly, but the size of campuses grew dramatically. Colleges dropped any pretense of governing the daily living habits of students, even those residing on campus, creating a fertile field for alternative lifestyles and cultural practices. It also opened the door to widespread sexual freedom. The Supreme Court decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District (1969), limiting the ability of schools to control student self-expression, extended many of the same freedoms to secondary students.

Perhaps more important, the large concentrations of young people with little supervision abetted the development of political organizations, and students became conspicuous participants in both the civil rights and antiwar movements. The latter was based largely on campuses, and came to a head in the spring of 1970, when four students were killed by national guardsmen at Kent State University. Yet other protests focused on curricular issues, leading to a number of new courses, departments, and programs. The most important of these were African American (or Black) Studies and Women's Studies programs, but there were others as well.

All of these developments helped to make education a contentious national political issue. Bussing plans produced heated reactions from white urbanites. Others believed the schools had drifted away from their academic mission, and that the universities cultivated protestors. The Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke decision, barring quotas but allowing race to be considered in university admissions, further polarized public opinion. In 1980, promising to end federal involvement in education, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan vowed to remove the U.S. Department of Education as a cabinet position. It was a promise that remained unfulfilled, however. A national commission's 1983 report on the schools, "A Nation at Risk," further galvanized support for federal leadership in strengthening the education system. These concerns led George H. Bush to campaign as the "education president," even though he proposed little change in policy.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, American interest in formal education reached historic highs. With public expenditures on education (in constant dollars) more than doubling since 1960, by 1990 there was growing interest in student performance on tests of scholastic achievement. As the economy shifted away from manufacturing, rates of college enrollment among secondary graduates increased from less than 50 percent in 1980 to nearly two-thirds in 2000. Spurred by the women's movement and growing employment options, the number of female students increased even more rapidly, after lagging in earlier decades. At the same time, vocational education programs considered integral to the comprehensive high school were increasingly seen as irrelevant.

Growing disquiet about the quality of public education contributed to movements to create "charter schools," publicly supported institutions operating outside traditional school systems, and "voucher" programs offering enrollment in private institutions at public expense. These and other "choice" or "market-based" alternatives to the public schools were supported by Republicans, keen to challenge existing systems and to undermine Democratic teacher's unions. By 2000, there were more than two thousand charter schools in communities across the country, with states such as Arizona and Michigan leading the movement. Voucher experiments in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and a few other cities have not produced decisive results.

In the 2000 presidential election, candidates Albert Gore and George W. Bush both placed education policy initiatives in the forefront of their campaigns. This was a historic first and an indication of the heightened significance of education in the public mind. Bush's narrow victory in the election was at least partly due to his calls for greater accountability in schooling at all levels. Passage of federal legislation re-authorizing ESEA, popularly known as "Leave No Child Behind Act," established testing programs as a requirement for receiving federal assistance. Even though this was a natural extension of the "systemic reform" initiatives undertaken by the Clinton Administration, encouraging state testing regimes, it marked a new level of federal involvement in the nation's school system.

Conclusion

American education has changed a great deal since 1647, when Massachusetts passed its first school law. The reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helped to establish a comprehensive education system extending from the primary school to the university. The ferment of the postwar period revolved around issues of equity and excellence, as ever more Americans attended some form of school. Much has been accomplished, however. Many of the most abhorrent inequities have been narrowed considerably. As a result of past struggles there is considerable parity in black and white education, despite persistent segregation and achievement gaps. Gender differences have diminished even more dramatically. This is not to say that problems do not exist. The United States is host to a new generation of immigrants, and battles have been waged over bilingual education and other cultural issues; but the outlook is bright, as Americans still exhibit a firm commitment to education as a means of providing opportunity. That, more than anything else, is the principal legacy of American education, and its great hope for the future.

Bibliography

Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Angus, David L., and Jeffrey E. Mirel. The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890–1995. New York: Teachers College Press, 1999.

Axtell, James. The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.

Cremin, Lawrence Arthur. American Education; the Colonial Experience, 1607–1783. New York, Harper and Row, 1970.

———. American Education, the Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

———. American Education, the National Experience, 1783–1876. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

———. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957. New York: Knopf, 1961.

Kaestle, Carl F. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Levine, David O. The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Lockridge, Kenneth A. Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York: Norton, 1974.

Ravitch, Diane. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945– 1980. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Reese, William J. The Origins of the American High School. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.

Rury, John L. Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Tyack, David B., and Elisabeth Hansot. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.

———. Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Tyack, David B; Thomas James; and Aaron Benavot. Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785–1954. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1965.

—John Rury

Education and literacy were highly politicized issues in both Imperial and Soviet Russia, tied closely to issues of modernization and the social order. The development of an industrialized society and modern state bureaucracy required large numbers of literate and educated citizens. During the Imperial period, state officials faced what one scholar has dubbed "the dilemma of education": how to utilize education without undermining Russia's autocratic government. During the early Soviet period, on the other hand, the Bolsheviks attempted to use the education system as a tool of social engineering, as they attempted to invert the old social hierarchy. In both cases, the questions of which citizens should be educated and what type of education they should receive were as important as the actual material they were to be taught.

The Education System in Imperial Russia, 1700 - 1917

Before 1700, Russia had no secular educational system. Literacy, defined here as the ability to comprehend unfamiliar texts, was generally taught in the home. Although there was a considerable spike upwards in literacy in seventeenth-century Muscovy, the overall percentage of literate Russians remained low. In 1700 no more than 13 percent of the urban male population could read - for male peasants, the rate was between 2 and 4 percent.

This was well below Western European literacy rates, which exceeded 50 percent among urban men. The hostility of many Orthodox officials towards education and the absence of a substantial urban class of burghers and artisans were two factors that contributed to Russia's comparatively low literacy rates.

Like many aspects of Russian society, the educational system was introduced and developed by the state. Peter I opened the first secular schools - institutes for training specialists, such as navigators and doctors - as part of his plan to turn Russia into a modern state. A number of important institutions, such as Moscow University (1755), were created in the next decades, but it was not until 1786 that a ruler (Catherine II) attempted to create a regular system of primary and secondary schools.

This was only the first of many such plans initiated by successive tsars. The frequent reorganization of the school system was disruptive, and since new types of schools were opened in addition to, rather than in place of, existing schools, the situation became quite chaotic over time. This confusion was compounded by the fact that many schools lay outside the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, which was created in 1802. Other state ministries regularly opened their own schools, ranging from technical institutes to primary schools, and the Holy Synod sponsored extensive networks of parochial schools. As a result, there were sixty-seven different types of primary schools in Russia in 1914.

Most schools fell into one of three categories: primary, secondary, or higher education. Primary schools were intended to provide students with basic literacy, numeracy, and a smattering of general knowledge. As late as 1911, less than 20 percent of primary school students went on to further study. Many secondary schools were also terminal, often with a vocational emphasis. Other secondary schools, such as gymnasia, prepared students for higher education. Higher education encompassed a variety of institutions, including universities and professional institutes.

From Peter I onward, the Russian state devoted a disproportionate amount of its educational spending on higher education. This was partly due to the pressing need for specialists, and partly because these institutions catered to social and economic elites. Ambitious plans notwithstanding, Russia developed a top-heavy educational system, which produced a relatively small number of well-educated individuals, but which failed to offer any educational opportunities to most Russians until the end of the nineteenth century. The number of primary school students in Russia grew from 450,000 in 1856 to 1 million in 1878 to 6.6 million in 1911; even then, there were still not enough spaces for all who wanted to enroll.

Access to education was, as a rule, better in cities and large towns than in rural areas, though it was still limited in even the largest cities until the 1870s. In 1911, 67 percent of urban youth aged eight to eleven were enrolled in primary schools (75% of boys, 59% of girls). In the countryside, the school system developed more slowly. Many rural schools opened before the 1870s were short-lived, and it was only in the 1890s that a concerted effort began to establish an extensive network of permanent rural schools. In 1911, 41 percent of rural children aged eight to eleven were enrolled in primary school (58% of boys, 24% of girls). Peasants in different areas had different attitudes about education, and there has been some dispute about how useful literacy was considered by rural populations.

The better access to education in urban areas is reflected in literacy statistics. The literacy rate among the urban population (over age nine) was roughly 21 percent in 1797 (29% of men, 12% of women); 40 percent in 1847 (50% of men, 28% of women); 58 percent in 1897; and 70 percent in 1917 (80% of men, 61% of women). In rural areas, the literacy rate was 6 percent in 1797 (6% of men, 5% of women); 12 percent in 1847 (16% of men, 9% of women); 26 percent in 1897; and 38 percent in 1917 (53% of men, 23% of women).

Social and Cultural Aspects of Imperial Education Policies

While military and economic needs forced the Russian state to create an educational system, social and political considerations also played a role in shaping it. Tsars and their advisers carefully considered who should be educated, how long they should study, and what they should be taught. Above all, they were concerned about the educational policy's impact on Russia's political system and social hierarchy, both of which they wanted to preserve.

This was evident in the higher educational system, which was shaped to a degree by the tsars' desire to maintain social order and the nobility's support. Special institutes, such as the Corp of Cadets (1731), were created exclusively for the sons of hereditary nobles. While non-nobles were not barred from higher education (with a few exceptions), the very nature of the Russian school system made it difficult for such students to qualify for advanced institutions. Escalating student fees at gymnasia and universities in the nineteenth century provided an additional barrier.

Just as the nobility's position had to be defended, the lower classes had to be protected from "too much knowledge." Nicholas I and his Education Minister Sergei Uvarov (1831 - 1849) believed that excessive education would only create dissatisfaction among the peasantry. Accordingly, they placed strict limits on the curriculum and duration of rural primary schools. But they also increased the number of such schools, since they understood that basic literacy was of social and economic value. Uvarov, like many other Russian pedagogues, saw education as an opportunity to instill in young Russians loyalty to the tsar and proper moral values. A centrally controlled school inspectorate was created to ensure that teachers were imparting the right values to their students. All textbooks also required state approval.

Schools were used in other ways to maintain or modify the social order. A separate school system was created for Russia's Jews, and strict limits were placed on the number of Jewish students admitted into higher educational institutions. In the annexed Western provinces, schools were used as a weapon in the aggressive Russification campaign of the 1890s. And while most primary and secondary schools were coeducational, higher educational institutions were not. Separate women's institutes were only opened in 1876, and Russia's first coed university, the private Shaniavsky University, was established in 1908.

In order to prevent the circulation of subversive ideas, the state placed strict limits on private and philanthropic educational endeavors. In the 1830s all private educational institutions and tutors were placed under state supervision. The activities of volunteer movements trying to provide adult education, such as the Sunday School Movement

(1859 - 1862), were severely constrained, though zemstvos (local governmental bodies) were later allowed more leeway in this area. Alarm over the proliferation of unofficial (and illegal) peasant schools helped motivate the state's expansion of its rural education system in the 1890s.

Ironically, it was the educated elite the state had created that ultimately challenged the tsar's authority. Discontent became widespread in the 1840s, as large segments of educated society came to see state policies as retrograde and harmful to the peasantry. Frustrated by the conservative bureaucracy's disregard of their ideas, many educated Russians began to question the legitimacy of the autocratic form of government, with a small number of them becoming revolutionaries. This was one reason why the tsarist government found itself with little support among educated Russians in February 1917.

Even as educated society was becoming estranged from the autocracy, its members were growing distant from the masses they wished to help. As educated Russians adopted Western values and ideas, a vast cultural and social divide developed between them and the mostly uneducated peasantry, which largely retained traditional beliefs and culture. The growth of the education system in the last decades before 1917 was starting to bridge this gap, but the inability of these groups to understand one another contributed to the violence and chaos of 1917. Scholars debate whether a more rapid introduction of mass education into late Imperial Russia would have stabilized or further destabilized the existing order.

Education in the Soviet Union

While the Bolsheviks shared their tsarist predecessors' belief in education's potential social and political power, they had a different agenda: swift industrialization, social change, and the dissemination of socialist values. Although they lacked an educational policy upon seizing power, the Bolsheviks pledged to make education accessible to all, coeducational at all levels, and to achieve full literacy.

The Russian Republic's educational system was placed under the control of the Russian Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narodnyi kommisariat prosveshcheniia, or Narkompros), a republic-level institution created in October 1917. Its first leader was Anatoly Lunacharsky (r. 1917 - 1929). Like all Soviet institutions, Narkompros was controlled by the Communist Party. Before 1920, however, it had little authority. Many instructors had supported the Provisional Government's moderate reform program, and they refused to cooperate with the Bolsheviks. During the civil war (1918 - 1921), education was under the control of local authorities.

After 1920, Narkompros' officials tried to implement the ideas of progressive pedagogues, such as John Dewey, in primary and secondary schools. Their attempts were largely unsuccessful, hampered by a lack of funds and teacher opposition. Narkompros also faced challenges from the economic commissariats, which eventually took control of vocational education. This was the first round in a decades-long debate over the roles of general and vocational education. Teachers were frequently harassed by members of the Leninist Youth League (Komsomol).

Bolshevik higher educational policies were even more ambitious. Most members of educated society did not support the communists. Bolshevik leaders responded by creating a "red intelligentsia" to replace them. The children of "socially alien" groups were largely excluded from higher education, their places taken by young, poorly educated workers and peasants, known as vydvizhentsy. The number of technical institutes was expanded to accommodate the rapid growth of industry. A network of communist higher educational institutions was also opened. The influx of vydvizhentsy into higher education, and the persecution of "socially alien" teachers and students at all levels, climaxed during the cultural revolution (1928 - 1932). It has been argued that the vydvizhentsy, many of whom rose to prominent positions, provided an important base of support for Stalin's regime.

After 1932, experimental approaches were abandoned in favor of more practical teaching methods. Primary schools were returned to a more traditional curriculum, class-based preferences ended, and the separate communist educational system eliminated. The minimum duration of schooling was raised from four to seven years. Schools were now open to all students, though children whose parents were arrested faced serious discrimination until Stalin's death in 1953. Most of Narkompros' functions were transferred to the new Ministry of Education in 1946.

By the late 1950s, all children had access to a free education. Social mobility was possible on the basis of merit, although inequalities still existed. Children of the emerging Soviet elites often had access to superior secondary schools, which prepared them for higher education. Members of some non-Russian ethnic minorities had spaces reserved for them at prestigious higher educational institutions, as part of the Soviet Union's unique affirmative action program. After the 1950s, however, unofficial quotas again limited Jewish students' access to higher education.

There were also numerous adult education programs in the Soviet Union. These ranged from utopian attempts to train artists during the civil war to ongoing literacy campaigns. Literacy rates continued their steady rise after 1917 (88% in 1939, and 98% in 1959). Adult education programs were run by many groups, including the trade unions and the Red Army.

Soviet schools were expected to teach students loyalty to the state and instill them with socialist values; teachers who did otherwise were liable to arrest or dismissal. Political material was a constant part of Soviet curricula. In some periods, it was restricted mainly to the social sciences and obligatory study of Marxism-Leninism. During Stalin's rule, however, almost every subject was politicized. Rote memorization was common and student creativity discouraged.

Despite its flaws, the Soviet educational system achieved some impressive successes. The heavily subsidized system produced millions of well-trained professionals and scientists in its last decades. After 1984 the state began to loosen its grip on education, allowing teachers some flexibility. These tentative steps were quickly overtaken by events, however. Since 1991 the Russian school system has faced serious funding problems and declining facilities. Control of education has been transferred to regional authorities.

Bibliography

Black, J. L. (1979). Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth Century Russia. Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly.

Brooks, Jeffrey. (1985). When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture, 1861 - 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

David-Fox, Michael. (1997). Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918 - 1929. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Dunstan, John, ed. (1992). Soviet Education under Perestroika. London: Routledge.

Eklof, Ben. (1986). Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861 - 1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1979). Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921 - 1934. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hans, Nicholas. (1964). History of Russian Educational Policy, 1701 - 1917. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc.

Holmes, Larry E. (1991). The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917 - 1931. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kassow, Samuel D. (1989). Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marker, Gary. (1990). "Literacy and Literacy Texts in Muscovy: A Reconsideration." Slavic Review 49(1): 74 - 84.

Matthews, Mervyn. (1982). Education in the Soviet Union: Policies and Education Since Stalin. London: Allen & Unwin.

McClelland, James C. (1979). Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mironov, Boris N. (1991). "The Development of Literacy in Russia and the USSR from the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries." History of Education Quarterly 31(2): 229 - 251.

Sinel, Allen. (1973). The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dmitry Tolstoi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Webber, Stephen L. (2000). School, Reform, and Society in the New Russia. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Whittaker, Cynthia H. (1984). The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

—BRIAN KASSOF

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Education and social transformation in the Middle East.

Institutions of formal education have undergone marked transformations in societies of the Middle East since 1800. Education refers to processes in which knowledge, skills, moral behavior, values, tastes, loyalties, and a range of cultural competencies and dispositions get transmitted, learned, and negotiated in various settings. Schooling, on the other hand, refers to a set of practices and behaviors that occur in the bounded institutional universe of the school and is referred to as "formal education."

Institutions of learning in the Middle East once held a position of global preeminence. During the height of the Islamic civilization from the ninth to possibly as late as the sixteenth century, they contributed to staggering advances in fields as diverse as optics, mathematics, medicine, physics, astronomy, philosophy, geometry, translation, architecture, and music. Similarly, the madrasa (plural, madaris), the Islamic college of law, produced the dual intellectual movements of humanism and scholasticism which, as George Makdisi methodically documents, were borrowed in the medieval period by the Christian West and incorporated into their institutions of higher learning (Makdisi 1981, 1990). Despite the primacy of formal learning in the Muslim Middle East for many centuries, by the eighteenth century the region began looking elsewhere for educational models. In the wake of the European Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and rise of Europe as a global economic and imperial force, and also within the context of Russian imperial expansion, there rose an urgency among the leaders of Ottoman, Egyptian, and Iranian states to modernize their armies and supporting institutions, including scientific and humanistic educational institutions. The educational model from Europe and to some extent Russia was considered to contain the formula for achieving power, economic success, and scientific advancement in the new world order.

The type of schooling that became increasingly important for projects of military, social, political economic, scientific, and cultural reform throughout the last two centuries has been variously termed "modern," "Western," "civil," "foreign," "secular," "new order," "new method," or simply "new"; what is clear is that this new schooling was intended to transform the organization of knowledge transmission by utilizing new disciplining techniques of power, as Timothy Mitchell and Brinkley Messick elaborate in their discussions of new schooling in Egypt and Yemen respectively (Mitchell; Messick). In their ideal configurations the new schools differed in content, organization, and culture in certain fundamental ways from the existent Islamic indigenous madaris and schools for elementary learning, the kuttab (plural, katatib) or maktab (plural, makatib), in which students learned the Qurʾan by rote and might acquire basic writing and reading skills. Among the more distinguishing features of the new schooling were that students were separated into classes by age groups; knowledge - including religious knowledge - was codified and fixed into textbooks and curricula, thus contributing to secularization; the school day was organized according to a regimented timetable; school grounds, classrooms, and equipment were spatially arranged to instill discipline and order in students; a new professional class of teachers competent in new pedagogies and located to a large degree outside the Muslim scholarly class (ulama) was trained to staff the new schools; and the planning and administration of formal schooling over time became more centralized in state bureaucratic apparatuses.

In actuality, however, the new schools often overlapped with and contained elements of the preexisting indigenous schools in areas such as staff, disciplinary codes, and texts, testifying to their syncretic nature. As Benjamin Fortna demonstrates in his outstanding social history of new schooling in the late Ottoman period, members of the ulama often served as teachers in the new schools, in which (Islamic) morality played a central role. Furthermore, even with the rise of new schooling as a dominant educational paradigm, Islamic institutions of learning in countries such as Iran and Morocco maintained a position of eminence, as Roy Mottahedeh and Dale Eickelman show in their portrayals of religious education in the contemporary period in the two countries respectively (Mottahedeh; Eickelman).

Although the appearance of "Western"-looking and -organized schools in the Middle East from the nineteenth century has sometimes been interpreted as reflecting a kind of cultural Westernization of those societies, or at least of their institutions, the reality has been much more complex. The new schools have embodied the tensions, aspirations, and negotiations inherent in processes of institutional and cultural adaptation.

Pre-1800 to 1877: The Incipient New School Movement between the State and Private Sphere

As early as the 1720s official state delegations from the Ottoman Empire traveled to Europe to visit and study their institutions of learning. As Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu notes, one of the first attempts to "set up an Ottoman intellectual institution without an organic structure" occurred during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Ahmet III when scholars were assembled in 1720 for the purpose of translating works of history and philosophy from European languages into Turkish and Arabic (Ihsanoğlu, p. 165). By the first decades of the nineteenth century, states more systematically supported the use of nonorganic education for modernizing reforms.

The figure most often credited with utilizing new schooling for military and accompanying scientific and technological reform was the viceroy of Egypt, Muhammed Ali Pasha (r. 1805 - 1849). In 1809 he sent the first group of students on an educational mission to Europe, and over the next decades he established numerous schools in Egypt - roughly equivalent to vocational high schools and technical colleges - that specialized in military sciences, medicine, agriculture, veterinarian medicine, midwifery, pharmaceutics, chemistry, engineering, and translation (Heyworth-Dunne). With the exception of the School of Midwives, all schools were exclusively for male students. In 1825 the first state preparatory (postprimary) school for boys, Qasr al-Ayni, was established to supply students for the new specialized schools. The new schools, many of which did not endure beyond his reign, were administered by the Ministry of War (Diwan al-Jihadiyya) and depended largely on foreign staff. The education policies under his grandson Khedive Ismael (1864 - 1879), in which the famous teacher-education college, Dar alUlum (est. 1872), and the first state school for girls, al-Saniyya School (est. 1873), were established, had more lasting impact.

Parallel developments occurred throughout the Ottoman Empire under the reigns of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789 - 1807) with his "New Order" (Nizam alJadid) program; Mahmud II (1808 - 1839); Abdülmecit (r. 1839 - 1861), the Tanzimat sultan; and Abdülhamit II (1876 - 1909). Similar to Egypt, students were sent on educational missions abroad, state schools for higher technical and vocational training were established, and primary (rüşdiye) and preparatory (idadi) schools were developed. Among the more famous Ottoman state schools for secondary and higher learning were the School of Military Medicine (est. 1827), the War College (Mekteb-i Harbiye, est. 1846), Mülkiye School (est. 1859), and Galatasaray Lycée (Mekteb-I Sultanî, est. 1868). The ulama in Iran, who were politically stronger than ulama in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, maintained a near monopoly on formal education, and very few new schools were founded. During the reign of Qajar Shah Nasir al-Din (r. 1848 - 1896), however, Crown Prince Abbas Mirza initiated a New Order reform program and established the renowned Dar al-Funun (est. 1851), an elite military institution in which French was the language of instruction.

As it became increasingly evident in the early decades of the nineteenth century that the new education was to become an enduring part of state apparatuses of power and reform, legislation was issued and new administrative bodies formed to manage it. Among the early landmark education legislation from Istanbul was an 1824 decree mandating compulsory elementary education for boys. In Egypt the Primary School Regulation of 1836 led to the establishment of the first education ministry, the Department of Schools (Diwan al-Madaris). Tanzimat era (1839 - 1876) reforms included the Education Regulation of 1869 (Maarif Nizamnamesi), which was the blueprint for the empire's first centrally organized and controlled network of schools, and the 1876 Iranian Constitution stipulated that elementary education was to be compulsory and provided by the state free of charge. Such ambitious far-reaching plans would not begin to be effectively implemented until the middle of the twentieth century, but they indicated the hopes the Muslim majority government placed on new schooling for societal change.

States also pursued policies of school expansion with the aim of cultivating a Muslim middle class that would be able to compete with the prosperous segments of foreign and minority communities in matters of trade and other commercial endeavors. The economic success of non-Muslim groups in Egypt and the Ottoman territories was attributed in part to the legal privileges afforded them by the capitulations, but also to the skills, languages, and other competencies they acquired through their participation in the new schooling.

New education had been spreading among minority millet and foreign communities since the eighteenth century. By the 1860s, a period of precarious European economic investment and colonial encroachment in the region, there arose a vast proliferation of schools established by religious missions, foreign governments, local communities, and private associations from France, Britain, Austria, Greece, England, Germany, the United States, and Italy. They served ethnic minority and religious communities such as the Armenians, Jews, and Christians, and also progressively higher numbers of elite Muslim children who were attracted to the prestigious foreign schools. Among the organizations with notable quantitative and qualitative educational impact were the Church Missionary Society of Great Britain (CMS) (est. 1799), the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (est. 1810), and the French-based Alliance Israélite Universelle (est. 1860). Collectively these organizations founded hundreds of schools throughout the region, serving tens of thousands of students. Foreign schools played pioneering roles in, among other areas, girls' and women's education, and higher education (Thompson). The institutions of higher education founded by foreign missions and organizations included the Syrian Protestant College, later named the American University of Beirut (est. 1866); Saint Joseph University, also located in Beirut and founded by French jesuits (est. 1874); Robert College, Istanbul, which became the location for Bogazici University in 1971 (est. 1863); the Istanbul-based American College for Girls (est. 1890); and the American University in Cairo (est. 1920).

The proliferation of foreign educational institutions in the region did not occur without a great deal of tension, and schooling became an ever more hotly debated issue as the century progressed.

1878 to 1913: Colonialism, Nascent Nationalist Movements, and Fragmented Schooling

The new schooling was involved in forging a different kind of society, and its role in societal transformation was widely debated by government officials, foreign missionaries, social reformers, public intellectuals, ordinary citizens, Muslim clerics, and colonial government representatives. They raised pressing questions relating to what populations should participate in the new schooling, who should fund and regulate it, and what its content, methods, and objectives should be. Whereas the British Mandate government in Egypt (1882 - 1922), for example, advocated limited educational development to maintain the local population in a subordinate position, the French considered the spread of schooling as part of their mission civilatrice. Members of emerging reform and nationalist movements, engaged citizens, local notables, and officials, on the other hand, perceived new schooling as a requisite for much-needed social reform; however, they largely frowned upon foreign control over it. Foreign schooling was criticized for contributing to a climate of intensified sectarianism and for threatening local religious, cultural, and national sovereignty. Local groups and individuals spearheaded educational alternatives for the moral, scientific, and political socialization of their youth.

A notable experiment that took place in the Levant and Egypt was the Benevolent Society school movement. Benevolent societies were locally funded Muslim, Christian, and intersectarian associations that provided social services by way of support for widows and the poor, hospitals, libraries, student hostels, and, most prominently, schools for boys and girls. These schools were modeled on the government and foreign schools but placed more emphasis on Arabic studies, regional history, vocational training, religion, and morals. The first school of this type was the Maqasid School of the Maqasid Benevolent Society (Jamʿiyat al-Maqasid alKhayriyya), established in Beirut in 1878 by Abd al-Qadir al-Qabbani. The following year the Benevolent Society School of Alexandria, which later added the word Islamic to its name (Madrasat al-Jamʿiyya alKhayriyya al-Islamiyya bi al-Iskandariyya), was opened in Egypt by Abdullah al-Nadim. Within two decades a growing network of benevolent-society schools spread in the region, the most famous among them the al-Maqasid schools of Egypt started by Muhammad Abduh in 1892. Similar examples of local alternative schooling in later periods include the Moroccan Free Schools, which proliferated in the 1920s as an alternative to French colonial schools, and the extensive network of Muslim Brotherhood schools in Egypt from the 1920s until the organization was outlawed in the 1940s.

It is no coincidence that the founders and advocates of benevolent-society schools were in many instances prominent figures in the emerging press, which constituted, with the schools, a powerful component of the new education. With the growth of the press (including a vibrant women's press), an active and engaged public sphere was in the making. As with schools, governments increasingly regarded with trepidation the press because it could be a means of fomenting popular unrest and political opposition. The new education ministries in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, for example, took on the task of not only supervising schools, but also of censoring the press. School texts, journals, pamphlets, plays, and books of all sorts were subject to censorship. Education ministries have also been closely linked with state security apparatuses. During the Hamidian period, for example, the secret police monitored classes in the Ottoman University (est. 1890), where potentially subversive subjects such as politics, sociology, history, and philosophy were excluded from the curriculum. Censorship and surveillance policies were ultimately unsuccessful, for the secret revolutionary society that eventually aided in the overthrow of the Ottoman sultan, the Committee of Union and Progress or "Young Turks," was begun by four cadets in the Military Medical College in 1889, and their literature spread largely through the growing networks of schools and school inspectors.

Throughout the period leading up to World War I, schooling, including religious schooling, was gradually taken out of the jurisdiction of the ministries of religious endowments (awqaf) and put under the legal authority of new state education ministries. The process of centralization of formal schooling would continue with a vengeance in the period following World War I.

1913 to 1960s: Nationalization and Centralization of Mass Education

In the post - World War I era the Ottoman Empire was dismantled and the political configuration of the region altered substantially. Turkey became an independent republic, and the Arab territories of the Gulf, Maghreb, Levant, Transjordan, and Egypt were carved up and divided between England and France. In 1948 the Jewish State of Israel was established by British mandate. The age of direct European colonialism came to an end as sovereign nation states were born. The new governments, influenced by modernist ideologies that advocated mass education as the panacea for economic, social, and political development, pursued policies of vigorous educational expansion. Education also figured prominently in the new and revised constitutions, which, with the exception of Saudi Arabia's and Bahrain's, made stipulations for compulsory schooling for boys and girls. This period also witnessed the development of national universities, to which women eventually gained full access.

Two major features characterized national education at the preuniversity level in the Arab states and Iran: Education was centrally administered, one consequence being that foreign schools to a large degree were incorporated into national systems; and education was organically linked to upbringing (tarbiya in Arabic, and parvaresh in Persian). Schools are socializing institutions par excellence, but in Muslim majority states the upbringing aspect of schooling is expressed in explicit terms. As Gregory Starrett notes, "Muslim states have followed a different course to modernity, insisting explicitly that progress requires a centrally administered emphasis upon moral as well as economic development" (Starrett, p. 10). Most of the education ministries in the region contain the word upbringing in their official designations, as in the Ministry of Upbringing and Education (Wizarat al-Tarbiya wa al-Taʿlim) in Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates; the Ministry of National Upbringing (Wizarat al-Tarbiya alWataniyya) in Algeria and Morocco; and the Ministry of Education and Upbringing (Vezarat-e Amuzesh va Parvaresh) in Iran.

The upbringing component of state-monitored formal schooling serves as a way of ensuring that indigenous, usually Islamic cultural tenets get incorporated into national, and tacitly "secular," education programs. Through school policies that include mandatory religion classes and a host of formal and informal cultural policies such as sex segregation, dress and grooming codes, and supervision of youth behavior in and outside school grounds, educators attempt to guide youth toward socially acceptable conduct. Yet the contours of what is "acceptable" shift and differ according to the historic moment and individual interpretation, social class, region, life stage, and gender. Similar to the Muslim majority states, in the Jewish state of Israel religion is a required subject in state schools from the first grade through high school. The state also supports Jewish religious state schools in which moral conduct and behavior based on Jewish principles play a central role.

Education has long been regarded as a means of national-identity building. Schools are infused with ideological and nationalist content that gets transmitted through curricula, rituals, celebrations, and symbols. In the Arab states, particularly in the post-1950s when pan-Arabism was at its peak, education was seen as a means of solidifying the "Arab nation." In Israel, schools and kibbutzim were intended to generate allegiance to the Jewish state, a process that the non-Jewish Arab minority remained outside of. In secular republican Turkey, education was a means of forging a secular citizenry, and in Iran under the Pahlavi Dynasty, education was geared toward cultural secularization. However, national-identity building does not always evolve according to state policy. The decline of Arab nationalism, the onset of the Iranian revolution, the rise of Islamism throughout much of the region (including "secular" Turkey), and the appearance of an increasingly fragmented polity in Israel have all posed challenges to national education systems. National educational policies would undergo further challenges and changes in the succeeding period characterized by a new globalization.

1970s to the Present: Education between the Local and the Global

The Middle East has undergone dramatic economic, political, and ideological changes since 1970, all of which have had a major impact on development and practice of formal education. The 1970s oil boom in Persian Gulf countries and subsequent massive interregional labor migrations; the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which gave way to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran; the Iran - Iraq War; the 1967 Arab - Israeli War and ensuing Israeli occupation of Arab lands; the first and second (al-Aqsa) Palestinian intifadas; the ongoing civil war in Sudan; the 1990 Gulf War; the U.S. war on and occupation of Iraq; the rise of Islamism as a political and sociocultural movement; and the rise of Middle Eastern states as major debtor nations are all some of the major factors that have contributed to profound changes in the realm of education.

Education has long developed as a result of transnational, regional, and global exchanges, borrowings, and adaptations, but certain unique characteristics underpin education in the current period of globalization. To a growing extent supranational, nonlocally accountable organizations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.), and United Nations (UN) determine policies and measurements of education as Robert Arnove and Carlos Torres put forward in their tome on comparative education (2003). The "success" or "failure" of national education sectors tend to be measured in quantitative terms and based on factors such as enrollments rates and test scores, with scant attention to "quality." The Arab world has not fared well in these global assessments with illiteracy rates in the mid-1990s as high as roughly 55 percent for females and 30 percent for males. Debtor states of the Middle East and elsewhere have also been compelled to follow certain austerity measures that have included increased privatization and decentralization of national education. Studies on the Middle East region and other regions of the south have repeatedly shown that such policies unequivocally disadvantage the poor, rural populations, and women, and accentuate social inequality. Indeed, these "global" policies are often in direct contravention of national and community interests, indicating a lack of real autonomy and sovereignty among postcolonial states and in educational policy design.

Yet, with growing homogenization of education policies a host of local responses have emerged. In the Middle East there has been an unmistakable revitalization of religious-oriented education. In "secular" Turkey, for example, there was a prodigious growth of the Islamic-oriented Imam Hatip schools until they were curbed by legislative intervention from the end of the 1990s. There has also been a rise in religious Jewish schools in Israel. Various types of Islamic schools, including katatib and new hybrid private Islamic schools, have been on the rise in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and Palestine. With the growing privatization and subsequent commercialization of education (with its lucrative financial possibilities), new manifestations of religious schooling have appeared, such as the "five-star" Islamic school, which incorporates up-to-date computer labs, swimming pools, and other signs of prestige and desires being produced in a globalized world in their programs (Herrera, p. 185). In keeping with the privatization pattern, the decade of the 1990s also witnessed prodigious growth in the private university sector, with the opening of twelve new private universities and higher education institutions in Jordan, fifteen in Turkey, seven in Lebanon, and six in Egypt, with plans in all countries for more. Much of the privatized higher education discourse has focused on issues of accreditation, competitiveness, professional degrees, financing, profit, and the needs of the global economic markets, largely removing the new private universities from humanistic endeavors.

The record of national regional universities in social science, humanities, and sciences, however, has been mixed at best. The scientific quality of universities and individual faculties varies substantially. In the Arab countries and Iran, national universities have reflected authoritarian political systems and been characterized by especially cumbersome bureaucratic structures and severe restrictions on academic freedom, both of which have contributed to the problem of "brain drain." In the Persian Gulf countries, for example, scholarly research is allowed except where the "general social system . . . religious precepts, social traditions, cultural and ethical considerations are concerned" (Morsi, p. 44). National universities in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria are heavily monitored and censored by state security apparatuses that interfere in aspects of research, student conduct, travel of faculty, and topics of conferences. In Iran during the "cultural revolution" under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (r. 1979 - 1989), faculty and students were purged from universities on ideological grounds and materials censored. Under the previous regime of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, censorship and surveillance were also widespread. Lack of freedom in academia, however, is not necessarily indicative of the absolute power of political regimes, for state policies have often been subverted and resisted at the sites of schools and universities. Students movements, as Ahmad Abdallah documents in the case of Egypt from the 1920s to the 1970s, have been a powerful social and political force.

Early in the twentieth century women struggled for the right to join universities as full participating members. In the 2000s the participation of women in universities throughout the region is proportionally high. In Persian Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, women make up more than half of the undergraduate population. In 2001 Iranian women overtook men in university entrance. In Egypt women make up more than half of the students in some of the prestigious medical faculties. Although women have made tremendous strides in higher education, at present the attainment of university degrees does not translate into comparable participation in the political arena and the labor force. However, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, the outcomes of mass education are unpredictable at best, and the trend toward increased female attainment of higher education could very well translate into far-reaching social changes.

Conclusion

The "new" education of the past two centuries has developed alongside movements of modernism, nationalism, pan-Arabism, Islamism, and globalism. As with other forms of institutional borrowing and adaptation, education has been characterized by "intertwined and overlapping histories" (Said, p. 18). It has served as a force in cultural and political reproduction and in social transformation, with often unintended and unpredictable consequences.

Bibliography

Abdallah, Ahmed. The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt, 1923 - 1973. London: Al Saqi Books, 1985.

Arnove, Robert F., and Torres, Carlos Alberto, eds. Comparative Education: The Dialective of the Global and the Local, 2d edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Little-field, 2003.

Eickelman, Dale. Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Herrera, Linda. "Islamization and Education in Egypt: Between Politics, Culture, and the Market." In Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East, edited by John L. Esposito and François Burgat. London: Hurst and Company, 2003.

Heyworth-Dunne, J. An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt, 2d edition. London and Edinburgh: Frank Cass, 1968 [1939].

Ihsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin. "Genesis of Learned Societies and Professional Associations in Ottoman Turkey." Archiuum Ottomanicum 14 (1995/1996): 160 - 190.

Makdisi, George. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning inIslam and the West. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.

Makdisi, George. The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and theChristian West. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press, 1990.

Messick, Brinkley. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination andHistory in an Islamic Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Morsi, Monir Mohamed. Education in the Arab Gulf States. Doha: Educational Research Center, University of Qatar, 1990.

Mottahedeh, Roy. The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Starrett, Gregory. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, andReligious Transformation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Thompson, Elizabeth. Colonial Citizens. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

— LINDA HERRERA

European preuniversity education from 1500 to 1789 underwent three major developments. First, Renaissance humanists created the classical Latin curriculum, which dominated schools throughout these centuries. Second, church institutions, both Catholic and Protestant, took leading roles in organizing schools and providing teachers for the vast majority of schools from the late sixteenth century onward. Third, Enlightenment school reformers of the eighteenth century attacked the church's role in education and proposed state schools as an alternative. Their proposals did not win acceptance until after 1789.

The Organization of Schooling in 1500

Renaissance Europe inherited from the Middle Ages an uncoordinated and diverse structure of schools. Different kinds of schools competed with or complemented each other. One way to understand them is to note their sponsors—that is, the institution, entity, or person that governed or paid the expenses for a school. A single schoolmaster created an independent school, the equivalent of a "private school" in the twenty-first century. He typically opened a one-room school in his home or rented quarters. There he taught neighborhood pupils whose parents paid him fees to teach their sons. His only qualifications were his teaching skill and his ability to persuade parents to send their children. The teacher might possess a university degree, which meant facility in Latin and acquaintance with higher learning in rhetoric, philosophy, law, or theology. Or he might be only slightly better educated than his pupils.

The tutor was another independent schoolmaster. He lived and taught in the home of a noble or wealthy merchant or visited the household daily. In both cases he taught only the children of the household or two adjacent households. A few tutors were the constant guides and companions, at home or in travel, to single boys or youths of considerable wealth and social standing.

Other independent masters presided over their own boarding schools that housed, fed, and instructed children sent to them. This independent master became a substitute father to his charges. He taught boys in the classroom, chided their manners at table, and improved their morals throughout. At least parents hoped this happened. Some of the most famous humanistic schools of the Italian Renaissance operated by such famous pedagogues as Vittorino Ramboldoni da Feltre (1373/78–1446/47) and Guarino Guarini of Verona (1374–1460) were independent boarding schools.

The endowed school was an independent school that endured beyond the lifetime of a single teacher or founder. A wealthy individual left a sum of money for a school. Endowment income paid the master's salary and rent for a schoolroom or building where boys learned for free. In England before the Protestant Reformation, the master of an endowed school often had to be a priest so that he could celebrate daily a mass for the repose of the donor's soul. Schoolboys learned reading, Latin, and sometimes chant. A large endowment could create a boarding school in which boys both studied and lived. An inadequate endowment might mean that boys had to pay supplementary fees. Sometimes endowed schools became municipal schools when the town council paid additional expenses and took over direction.

One group of endowed schools, the English public schools, occupied a unique place in the life of England. Despite the name, they were expensive private schools. The Renaissance and Reformation era saw the foundation of the most prestigious: seven boarding schools—Winchester (founded 1382), Eton (1440), Westminster (late sixteenth century), Shrewsbury (1552), Harrow (1571), Rugby (1576), and Charterhouse (1611)—and two day schools, St. Paul's, founded by the English humanist John Colet (1467–1519) in 1508, and Merchant Taylors (1561). But England added many more public schools over the centuries. The public schools educated boys from the highest ranks of society, many of whom went on to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The public schools of England produced a large number of clergymen, army officers, and members of government and became even more important in English life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The local civil authority, such as the town council, might sponsor a school. The town government chose and paid the master, sometimes imposed curricular directives, and sent a visitor to see that teacher and pupils performed satisfactorily. Sometimes municipal schools were free. But they never enrolled all the school-age boys of the town, and they seldom taught girls. The town government typically supported only one or two municipal teachers, who taught perhaps 50 or 60 percent of the town's school-age boys. Often the town permitted the municipal teacher to collect fees from the students to augment his modest salary. Universal public education, with or without fees, did not exist and only gradually won acceptance in the nineteenth century.

A third kind of school was the church school. An ecclesiastical authority or institution, such as a bishop, a cathedral chapter of canons, a monastery, or even the parish priest, opened a school. They were not numerous until the Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century created church schools, which dominated the educational landscape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Regardless of its sponsorship, the actual school was usually modest. It normally consisted of a single teacher instructing a group of boys of varying ages and abilities, anywhere from a half dozen to thirty, in a single room. If the teacher had forty pupils or more, he might have an assistant who drilled the younger boys in their lessons, such as Latin conjugations and declensions. The schoolroom might be in the teacher's home or a rented room outside it. It is unlikely that the school had an outdoor area for play or physical exercises. Drinking water and food had to be brought in. If the schoolroom had a stove, each pupil might be required to bring a stick of wood on cold days.

Only a minority of boys and a tiny minority of girls aged six to fifteen attended school. Probably about 28 percent of boys attended formal schools in Florence, Italy, in 1480, and 26 percent of boys attended formal schools in Venice in 1587. The girls' percentage was low, probably less than 1 percent. About 20 to 25 percent of boys and less than 5 percent of girls attended school in sixteenth-century England. About 40 percent of boys received enough schooling to become literate in the town of Cuenca (in Castile, Spain) in the sixteenth century. And perhaps 12 percent of Polish males attended school in the 1560s.

School attendance closely followed the hierarchies of wealth, occupation, and social status. Sons of nobles, wealthy merchants, and professionals, such as lawyers, physicians, notaries, high civil servants, university professors, and preuniversity teachers, were much more likely to attend school than sons of craftsmen, artisans, small shopkeepers, wool workers, laborers, and servants. The primary reason for the different schooling rates was that schooling almost always cost money. The social and occupational expectations of parents offered additional reasons.

Boys were far more likely than girls to attend school. They needed schooling, especially Latin schooling, to qualify for leadership positions in society. But such positions and all the learned professions were barred to women. Hence few parents believed that daughters needed formal education. Some girls received informal teaching at home, but the number is impossible to estimate.

Urban dwellers were more likely to attend school than those who lived in the countryside or in farming villages, because more teachers were available in towns and cities. Rural areas had few resources to dedicate to schooling and few available teachers. The distances that students might have to walk to get to school and the exposure of the schoolroom to the elements, a serious consideration in northern Europe, also helped explain the lower schooling rate of rural children. In theory, schools taught all year. Of course numerous saints' days and civic holidays, long vacations at Christmas and Easter, and Carnival before Lent broke up the schedule. So did the need to work in the fields during harvest. And extremes of summer heat and winter cold shut down schools or kept children home.

The Classical Curriculum of the Renaissance

The most significant event in European schooling in these centuries was the adoption of a classical curriculum for the Latin schools in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Medieval Latin schools taught a mixture of manufactured verse texts of pious sentiments, grammar manuals and glossaries, and limited material from ancient classical texts. Renaissance humanists discarded the medieval curriculum in favor of the works of Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.), Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), Terence (186/185?–159 B.C.E.), Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.E.), and other ancient authors. These authors taught grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, the famous humanistic studies that imparted virtue and eloquence to the free person, or so the Renaissance believed. Students learned to write Latin in the ornate and highly rhetorical style of Cicero's Epistolae ad familiares (Familiar letters), which was very different from the clear, functional, and sometimes graceless medieval Latin. They studied Virgil and Terence for poetry and Caesar and Valerius Maximus (fl. c. 30–40 C.E.) for history. Humanist pedagogues sought guidance on Latin rhetoric and ancient pedagogy generally from the Institutio oratoria (Institutes of oratory) of the ancient Roman teacher of rhetoric Quintilian (c. 35–c. 100). Italy adopted the classical Latin curriculum in the first half of the fifteenth century, and the rest of Europe followed in the early sixteenth century.

Attending a Latin school to learn classical Latin was the prerequisite for every professional career because Latin was the language of law, medicine, science, and theology into the eighteenth century and sometimes beyond. To mention one example among many, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) wrote his masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; Mathematical principles of natural philosophy) in Latin. All students who wished to go to the university had to learn Latin because the lectures, texts, disputations, and examinations were conducted in Latin. And even after Latin ceased to be the universal language for learning, pedagogues and parents believed the study of Latin and Greek grammar prepared the mind for any intellectual endeavor. Latin and Greek literature also conveyed high purpose and lofty moral sentiments that society and parents wanted leaders to emulate.

Social and intellectual consequences of the classical curriculum. The adoption of a classical humanistic curriculum had profound consequences. The division of European education into a classical Latin curriculum for the leaders of society and professionals and a vernacular education for the rest (see below) made schooling the key to social hierarchy. Certainly social divisions existed before the adoption of the classical curriculum and would have continued without it. But now a Latin classical education was crucial for anyone wishing to obtain or hold a certain position in society. Even a bright child could not learn Latin without long and difficult study. And only parents possessing a certain amount of income could afford the fees to send a son and occasionally a daughter to Latin schools for many years and to forgo the assistance and income that a working child brought to the family. From the Renaissance through the eighteenth century and beyond, the classical curriculum defined the academic secondary school, which divided the upper and middle classes from the working class. At the same time, using a classical education as the gateway to advancement also meant that boys, and later girls, of poor and humble origins might advance through merit if they could obtain a Latin education. Free Latin schools eventually became available to some children.

The adoption of a curriculum based on reading the ancient works was a remarkable but strange decision with far-reaching consequences. The ancient world, culturally Greek, spiritually pagan, and politically united under a militaristic Rome, differed greatly from modern European civilization, which was Christian and politically divided into numerous states. Yet Europe's intellectuals and political leaders decided that future leaders of society should study the classics of ancient Rome and Greece in order to become eloquent and morally upright. They did not change their minds until the twentieth century.

The classical curriculum also imparted a secular spirit to European schooling. Even though western European civilization was profoundly otherworldly in its ultimate goal, the Latin classical curriculum emphasized education for this life. Neither Cicero, Virgil, nor any other ancient pagan text urged men and women to do what was morally right in order to enjoy union with the Christian God in the next world. Of course Renaissance educators were convinced that Christianity and the classics taught an identical morality of honesty, self-sacrifice for the common good, and perseverance. But the classics did not teach one to love either enemy or neighbor. Even though Catholic religious orders and Protestant divines added considerable religious content to the classical curriculum, the secular spirit of the classical curriculum remained a significant part of European education far beyond the Renaissance.

Vernacular Schools

Vernacular schools also existed in every region of Europe. Indeed all of Europe had two school systems, classical Latin and vernacular, throughout these centuries. For example, in the major commercial city of Venice, half the boys in school attended vernacular schools in 1587 and 1588. They taught reading and writing in the vernacular and often commercial mathematics to boys (and a small number of girls) destined for the world of work. This curriculum emerged from the practical experience and lay culture of the merchant community. Vernacular schools probably underwent little change during the Renaissance and beyond. Since church and state authorities did not hand down directives for vernacular schools, the teachers, who were almost always modest independent masters, taught what they pleased. Hence the children learned to read from the same adult books of popular culture that their parents enjoyed. Indeed Venetian boys sometimes brought from home popular vernacular texts that parents wanted them to learn to read. The vernacular textbooks were a diverse lot, ranging from medieval saints' lives to Renaissance chivalric romances. Obviously they imparted conflicting moral values. Students would read about heroic saints who endured martyrdom for Christ, then read about knights who killed for revenge and ladies who committed adultery for love. Italian vernacular schools also taught advanced commercial mathematical skills and elementary bookkeeping. Vernacular schools in other parts of Renaissance Europe taught arithmetic but not the rest of the commercial curriculum of Italian vernacular schools.

German vernacular schools were called Winkelschulen ('backstreet' or 'corner schools') because they were located in out-of-the-way places, such as the back room of a shop or the attic of a crowded home, in larger towns or cities. There male and female teachers of modest backgrounds taught boys and some girls basic literacy and elementary arithmetic for small fees. The name also indicates the attitude of authorities, who saw them as unsupervised schools teaching questionable doctrines. A Prussian government evaluation of 1768 saw Winkelschulen as lacking method and discipline and as potential sources of depravity. The self-appointed teachers varied widely: members of dissident religious sects, unemployed preachers, would-be clergymen, artisans, injured soldiers, and women. Despite official disapproval, they continued through the eighteenth century and beyond in German states because they offered a service to a segment of the population that had little or no other access to schooling. Other European countries also had modest vernacular schools but on a more regular basis and enjoying better reputations.

Printing and the Expansion of Education

Printing aided education by making available multiple copies of textbooks. The use of movable type began about 1450, and by the 1480s and 1490s publishers were producing significant numbers of reading primers and manuals of Latin syntax (the construction of sentences according to the rules governing the use of words) and morphology (the inflected forms of words). No longer would students have to rely on handwritten manuscripts available only to the teacher or to wealthy students. As the cost of printed books declined drastically in the sixteenth century, it is possible that most pupils had the resources to own a grammar manual and primer. Whether they did or not is impossible to determine.

Historians sometimes believe that more and cheaper printed books stimulated an increase in education and literacy. Rather, four factors working together probably increased the amount of schooling by 1600 and beyond: (1) inexpensive printed books, (2) greater availability of free or inexpensive schooling, (3) the desire of students and parents for more education, and (4) society's willingness to reward those who took the trouble to learn.

The Protestant Reformation and Education

Martin Luther (1483–1546) argued for universal compulsory education, at least at the elementary level. And when German princes embraced the Reformation, Lutheran clergymen drafted new arrangements for the church and state that almost always included a Schulordnung ('school order'). Protestant school orders firmly placed the state (prince or city council) in charge of the schools. By the 1560s and 1570s Protestant school orders created a relatively integrated set of schools, beginning with an elementary school to teach reading and writing. Abler students advanced to a higher school, which taught Latin, and the most gifted and socially privileged to an advanced secondary school, which led to university. The goals were twofold: (1) to train future clergymen and administrators of the state; and (2) to impart to a larger fraction of the male population enough reading and writing to function at an appropriate station in life. The students studied the same classical curriculum taught in Catholic lands along with a great deal of catechetical instruction in Lutheran Christianity. Protestant Germany and nearby border regions, such as Strasbourg, had some excellent secondary-level Latin schools.

It appears that the number and possibly the quality of schools increased during the age of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. But the Protestant Reformation did not mark the beginning of modern schooling. The goals were high, the results often modest. The level of instruction was not always elevated. The schools still often charged fees, which poor parents could not afford. Sometimes parents could not even provide the stick of wood that a child was expected to bring for the school fire in winter. A school seldom enrolled all the boys in the village, and enrollments waxed and waned according to the work seasons. Even though the state was supposed to organize and direct schools, the Winkelschulen continued.

Nevertheless, the Reformation did provide some interesting developments. In 1560 the Scottish Calvinist leader John Knox (1513–1572) called for a system of parish schools in Scotland that developed over the next two hundred years. Legislation required landowners to appoint a schoolmaster for each parish, to pay him a small salary, and to build a schoolhouse. Parish schools enrolled both boys and girls, although girls' education emphasized reading and sewing rather than the broader range of academic skills imparted to boys. All children had to pay small fees, but the church or community paid the fees of poor children. Although parish schools were less numerous in remote and poorer regions of Scotland than in the affluent lowlands, it was a rudimentary national system of elementary education. By the eighteenth century Scotland had one of the highest schooling rates, especially for girls, in Europe.

Despite such local successes as Scotland, it seems unlikely that the Protestant Reformation made education more available than did Catholic Europe. Indeed because Protestantism abolished religious orders, it did not enjoy the access to the extensive networks of new schools that the religious orders of the Catholic Reformation provided. Nor can the thesis that Protestantism created a permanent expansion of schooling and literacy so that every individual could read the Bible be supported on the basis of current research. The only example in which the Protestant Reformation achieved almost total reading literacy occurred in Sweden in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There the state Reformed (Lutheran) Church undertook to teach the entire population, male and female, how to read. Thanks to great effort and governmental threats (such as refusing permission to marry to those who failed to learn to read), the effort succeeded. It was an impressive achievement but unique. Nothing comparable occurred anywhere else in Protestant or Catholic Europe.

Religious Order Education in Catholic Europe

The new Catholic Reformation religious orders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries altered the educational landscape of Catholic Europe. The Society of Jesus (founded in 1540) and other religious orders that followed its pedagogical example created new schools and sometimes took control of existing municipal schools. Because they did not charge fees, the new schools of the Jesuits, Piarists, and other orders expanded educational opportunity and dominated education in Catholic countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Jesuit schools. The Jesuits had not intended to become educators. But in December 1547 the city government of Messina, firmly nudged by the Spanish viceroy who ruled Sicily for Spain, petitioned Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) to send ten Jesuits to Messina, five to teach and the rest to undertake spiritual and charitable activities. The city government promised food, clothing, and a building. Recognizing this as an intriguing opportunity and knowing that one did not refuse a viceroy, Loyola managed to send seven Jesuits, including some of the ablest scholars of the young order. According to the agreement with the city, the Jesuit fathers would teach nine classes. In effect they created a classical Latin elementary and secondary school along with higher studies in philosophy. The city would erect a building, the people of Messina would support the Jesuits through freewill offerings, and the viceroy would also help. The school formally opened in October 1548. It was an immediate success, as two hundred boys enrolled by December. The school averaged an enrollment of about three hundred boys in the next two decades.

Free instruction largely explained the instant success of the Messina school. The Jesuits inaugurated the first systematic effort to provide free education for several hundred boys in a town, something entirely new for Italy and Europe. The opportunity must have seemed heaven-sent to boys and their parents. In addition the Jesuit fathers were learned scholars and teachers. Many other Jesuit schools followed.

The Jesuit schools offered the same Latin curriculum that the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century had created and that Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) and other northern humanists promoted. But they made several additions: prayers, religious training, and insistence that the boys attend mass, confess, and communicate; better pedagogical organization, including imaginative teaching techniques; and higher subjects, like philosophy, logic, mathematics, and theology.

The Jesuit schools soon refined their goals. Beginning in 1551 they phased out the introductory class that taught beginning reading and writing and the rudiments of Latin grammar. A boy had to learn these before entering a Jesuit school. And the Jesuits decided to concentrate their energies on those likely to stay in school for many years. With this decision, partly provoked by a shortage of teachers, the Jesuits narrowed their educational mission chronologically and socially: they taught the Latin humanities to upper- and middle-class boys aged ten to sixteen. Since the Jesuits followed the policy of free education until the nineteenth century, they sought and received financial support from wealthy lay or ecclesiastical leaders of the community and sometimes from the town government. The growth in the number of Jesuit schools was extraordinary. There were about 35 schools worldwide in 1556, 121 in 1575, 245 in 1599, 293 in 1607, 444 in 1626, 578 in 1679, 612 in 1710, and 669 in 1749. All but a few were in Europe, with the largest number in France and Italy.

A handful of Jesuit schools in large Italian cities, such as Rome and Milan, taught several hundred boys between the ages of ten and sixteen and a few older students. Jesuit schools in France, Germany, and Portugal often taught five hundred to fifteen hundred students. The largest and best-known Jesuit schools taught university-level philosophy, mathematics, and physics to the older and brighter students. At the same time the vast majority of Jesuit schools enrolled only one hundred to two hundred students who studied, under four or five teachers, the Latin humanities curriculum and religious instruction.

The Jesuit schools appealed to the community at large with their public programs. Students at Jesuit schools in Spain and Portugal began to give public performances with scenery, stagecraft, and music of Latin tragedies, both sacred and secular. They also presented what might be called achievement days, in which students orated, recited, and debated before parents and dignitaries of the city. The schools of other Catholic Reformation teaching orders, such as the Barnabites (Clerics Regular of St. Paul) and Somaschans (Clerics Regular of Somascha), did the same.

Schools for nobles. Boarding schools limited to boys of verified noble lineage were a feature of the stratified society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Princes and others founded boarding schools for noble boys who mixed with their peers from different parts of Europe. They entered between the ages of eleven and fourteen and might stay until the age of twenty. The schools for nobles supplemented the standard Latin curriculum with lessons in singing, dancing, designing fortifications, French, and above all, horsemanship. These schools cost a great deal. Ranuccio I Farnese (1569–1622, ruled 1592–1622), duke of Parma and Piacenza, founded a famous school for nobles in 1601 in Parma and gave the Jesuits direction of the school in 1604. It had a peak enrollment of 550 to 600 boys between 1670 and 1700, then began to decline. The Jesuits were the teachers in many noble schools and boarding schools with upper-class boys. Other religious orders followed their lead but to a lesser extent. Some schools for nobles also developed in Protestant lands.

France. In the early sixteenth century many French towns established Latin classical schools open to the boys of the town and staffed by teachers who had imbibed the Renaissance humanistic curriculum at Paris. Then the crown in the early seventeenth century encouraged the Jesuits and other orders to establish schools in the kingdom. Through financial subsidies or royal command, King Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610) persuaded the religious orders to take direction of the town schools. Sometimes the towns agreed because the schools were going poorly. The town could not provide enough funding, teachers were in short supply, enrollments were declining, academic standards were falling, and the students were disorderly. Under the protection of the crown, the new religious orders of the Catholic Reformation became the schoolmasters of France.

Numerous towns across France replaced their secular schoolmasters with the Jesuits, the French Congregation of the Oratory, and the Doctrinaires (Secular Priests of the Christian Doctrine). They established some remarkable schools. In 1603 Henry IV gave the Jesuits a château in the town of La Flèche in the Loire Valley. Le Collège Henry IV at La Flèche (usually just called La Flèche) began with that gift. The king provided additional financial support in the following years and strongly encouraged members of his court to send their sons there. The school was an instant success, boasting an enrollment of twelve hundred to fourteen hundred students, of whom three hundred were boarders, in a few years. La Flèche's most famous pupil was René Descartes (1596–1650). Entering in 1606, Descartes spent nine years there, the first six studying Latin grammar, humanities, and rhetoric, the last three studying philosophy, which included mathematics, physics, and Galileo's telescope discoveries. Although he eventually rejected the philosophy learned there, Descartes in 1641 strongly endorsed La Flèche for the excellence of its instruction, its lively students from all over France, and the spirit of student equality the Jesuits fostered.

The Collège de Clermont (1560–1762), renamed the Collège Louis le Grand in 1682, was the Jesuit school in Paris. It enrolled boys aged twelve to twenty. The number of students steadily rose from fifteen hundred (including three hundred boarders) in 1619 to twenty-five hundred to three thousand students (including five hundred to six hundred boarders) in the late seventeenth century.

Students in the Jesuit schools and probably in most Latin schools in both Catholic and Protestant Europe were placed and promoted according to their achievement, not their ages. This meant that boys of many ages might be in a single class. For example, the rhetoric class at the Collège de Clermont in Paris had 160 pupils (obviously taught by more than one teacher) in 1677. One pupil was ten years old, three were eleven, eight were twelve, fifteen were thirteen, thirty-five were fourteen, thirty-seven were fifteen, twenty-five were sixteen, twenty-eight were seventeen, six were eighteen, two were nineteen, and one was twenty. While the rhetoric class normally took two years to complete, some pupils may have required more time.

Jesuit schools in Europe, Asia, and the Americas followed the program of studies minutely organized in the society's Ratio Studiorum (Plan of studies) of 1599. It prescribed texts, classroom procedures, rules, and discipline. The Ratio Studiorum frowned on corporal punishment; if unavoidable, a non-Jesuit should administer it. Other Catholic religious order schools offering Latin education often copied Jesuit educational procedures to greater or lesser degree.

Piarist schools. Not all schools of the religious orders taught a Latin curriculum to middle- and upper-class boys. The Basque priest José Calasanz (c. 1557–1648) had the revolutionary idea of offering comprehensive free schooling to poor boys when he opened his first "pious school" in the working-class area of Trastevere, Rome, in 1597. The first pious school accepted only pupils presenting certificates of poverty issued by parish priests. It aimed to educate poor and working-class boys so they might earn a living in this life and attain salvation in the next. The school offered free instruction in vernacular reading, writing, and arithmetic plus some Latin to bright boys, an early attempt to combine the vernacular and Latin curricula. It also furnished books, paper, pens, ink, and on occasion food to needy pupils. Calasanz established a religious order, the Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools (usually called the Piarists) in 1621 to carry on his work. In time the Piarists dropped the certificate of poverty as a prerequisite for enrollment and accepted students from the middle and upper classes. But they continued to see the poor as their primary student constituency. Their schools enabled poor boys to move up the social ladder, those who learned Latin into professional positions. The Piarists had over two hundred schools, the majority in Italy and Spain and a smaller number in central Europe, in 1784.

Education for Girls

Boys and girls almost always attended separate schools in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. A large number of female religious convents educated Catholic girls as long-term boarders. Parents sent a girl to a convent for several years to be educated and to learn sewing and manners. She emerged educated, virtuous, and ready to marry. Some girls decided to remain as nuns. Indeed professed nuns living in convents had a higher literacy rate and were consistently better educated than laywomen.

Church organizations also offered charity schools for poor girls. For example, in 1655 the papacy contributed funding to hire numerous female teachers to staff free neighborhood schools for girls in Rome. Each schoolmistress taught vernacular reading and writing to any number, from a handful to more than seventy girls. These schools lasted until the Kingdom of Italy seized Rome in 1870. Catholic Europe also had an abundance of catechism schools (called Schools of Christian Doctrine), which taught the rudiments of Catholicism and a limited amount of reading, on Sundays and numerous religious holidays, to boys and girls in separate classes. Protestant Europe also had catechism classes or Sunday schools, about which less is known. And numerous clergymen lacking benefices, livings, or parishes in both Protestant and Catholic Europe supported themselves as schoolmasters.

The Enlightenment

Until the eighteenth century, central governments played no direct role in schooling, with the partial exception of state-church collaboration in some small German Protestant states. In the middle of the eighteenth century, educational reformers, strongly influenced by Enlightenment views, began to argue that church schools should be eliminated and the state should become the directing force in education.

State education and attacks on church schools.

Enlightenment reformers, who always came from the upper ranks of society, believed that the absolutist state could and should improve men and women through reform from above. They accepted the psychology of John Locke (1632–1704), educated at the public school of Westminster and at Oxford University, who published two influential works on education, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693). He held that the child was a tabula rasa ('blank slate') on which anything could be written. Thus the right early education would impart useful skills and would form the child with proper values, which included good manners and deference to authority. Children so formed would become useful and loyal citizens; if wrongly educated, they would not. Hence the central government, rather than the church or local authorities, should control schools and choose the teachers. Numerous Enlightenment figures echoed or expanded Locke's views.

The attack on church education began in Catholic countries just as the ruling classes in Catholic Europe began to find fault with the most famous of the church schools, those of the Jesuits. For example, enrollment at La Flèche dropped to four hundred, of whom two hundred were boarders, by 1760. The reformers launched a general attack on the Society of Jesus for many reasons, of which their domination in education was one. The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764, and from Spain in 1767. Their schools (105 in France) were closed or assigned to other religious congregations. Bowing to pressure from governments, the papacy suppressed the society in 1773. But needing to maintain educational institutions for their Catholic subjects, Frederick the Great (1712–1786) of Prussia and Catherine the Great (1729–1796) of Russia, neither of whom was Catholic, rejected the papal bull and welcomed the Jesuits in their realms.

State authorities across Europe also confiscated numerous church buildings and properties during the last years of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century, further weakening the capacity of church groups to support schools. Governments seldom succeeded in eliminating church schools in either Catholic or Protestant lands. But they seriously weakened churches as rivals to the central state governments as the chief force in schooling.

Numerous eighteenth-century school reformers filled with Enlightenment views fanned across Europe, offering schemes to replace church schools and to change preuniversity education. They offered advice to any ruler who showed an interest, however fleeting, in school reform. Their plans had many similarities, because they came from a common stock of Enlightenment principles and because the reformers borrowed from each other, helped by the fact that Europe's educated classes all read and spoke French.

The educational reform plan of Louis-Renéde Caradeuc de la Chalotais (1701–1785) attracted the most attention. As royal attorney for the parlement of his native Rennes, La Chalotais published an influential work against the Jesuits and their schools, Comptes rendus des constitutions des jésuites

(Report on the Constitution of the Jesuits) in 1761–1762. In 1763 he published his Essai d'éducation nationale, ou plan d'études pour la jeunesse (Essay on national education; or, a plan of studies for youth). Much of the treatise reiterated views held by others, but he added something new, the idea of national education.

La Chalotais's plan had several parts. He advocated the teaching of French while not eliminating Latin. He wanted children to learn national history, another difference from the classical schools. The state should ensure that children were taught good morals based on fundamental ethical truths, because good morals were essential for the well-being of society. La Chalotais allowed that churches might teach religion, but outside of the school. He also believed that girls should be educated, albeit with the substitution of needlework and like skills appropriate to their gender for some of the studies of boys. The most important part of the treatise was his belief that schools were a national concern, and therefore the state should organize schools, regulate studies, appoint teachers, and provide school buildings. This was revolutionary at a time when governments left the regulation of schools to local authorities and church institutions. But he did not advocate universal education; he thought there already were too many collèges, that is, secondary schools. Too many would entice working-class parents to send their children, who would become secretaries, thus depriving society of men for the manual trades, recruits for the navy, and other useful workers. Most Enlightenment reformers agreed; Voltaire (1694–1778), for example, congratulated La Chalotais for proposing to limit the number of collèges. La Chalotais even thought elementary education should not be too extensive: it was enough that some people learned how to use tools, he wrote.

Enlightenment school reformers held a hierarchical view of society that limited their commitment to universal education. Most other Enlightenment educational reformers agreed with La Chalotais on his major points. State schooling should be free for lower-class boys but limited to elementary education, ending at the ages of ten to twelve. Otherwise they would aspire to rise above their station, thus depriving society of their labor and upsetting the right order of things. By contrast, the sons of the ruling classes should avoid state elementary schools and continue to study with tutors or attend elite schools. They should go on to secondary schools, including boarding schools, with their classical Latin and Greek curriculum.

Rulers in France, Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, Russia, Spain, Piedmont, Sweden, and elsewhere showed interest in reforming schools. Numerous reformers gave them advice; for example, Denis Diderot (1713–1784) advised Catherine the Great of Russia, and Étienne Bonnet de Condillac (1715–1780) advised the duke of Parma. They all agreed that the state, not the church, should control education and that education should aim to produce good citizens by teaching good morals. They wanted limited universal education, a contradiction in terms.

The results were negligible. Rulers promulgated sweeping school reform proposals but failed to support their proposals by providing more lay teachers, teacher training, school buildings, or even textbooks. Nor did they change the religious orientation of schools. Rulers offered halfhearted support for educational change because they feared that universal education would upset the social order. Most education remained in the hands of church institutions, except for the banished Society of Jesus.

Frederick the Great, king of Prussia from 1740 until his death in 1786, was typical. Declaring that uneducated citizens were like animals, he promulgated sweeping new school regulations for Prussia in 1763 and then forgot about them. Part of the reason was his fear that, if rural children learned more than reading and writing, they would run off to the city for higher occupations. The state needed peasants, laborers, and soldiers.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in his novel Émile ou de l'éducation (Emile, or about education) of 1762 offered the most radical educational approach. Totally opposed to Locke's views that basic ideas could be implanted in a boy and that he should be raised for a specific role or occupation in society, Rousseau believed the child should be allowed to develop his or her unique nature. Rousseau saw the child not as a small adult but as a developing person. He would postpone moral training until later and raise the child independently of religious doctrine or the influences of civilization. Rousseau's book stimulated great discussion but had no discernible influence on contemporary education. Not until the French Revolution, the Napoleonic era (1789–1815), and the nineteenth century as a whole did some of the proposals from the school reforms of the eighteenth century come to fruition, and then only slowly.

Conclusion

Education was an integral part of the intellectual life and social fabric of Europe. Education divided the population into an educated elite, a middle group who received vernacular educations, and an unschooled or little-schooled third group. From their first days in the classroom children received different educations according to the social and economic position of a child's parent, usually the father, a child's intended position in society, and a child's gender. Education enabled some academically gifted individuals to rise.

From the Renaissance onward the classical secondary school was the center of European elite education. Educational leaders and probably the majority of society believed that learning ancient languages and literatures developed mental discipline and offered examples of the highest human culture in the original language. Skills learned in Latin classes shaped rhetorical patterns, moral attitudes, habits of thought, and even vernacular speech and writing. The study of Latin and Greek grammar developed mental discipline, while ancient Latin and Greek literature offered examples of the highest human culture in the original language. The classical curriculum also offered practical skills, since university education, law, the church, and government service required a knowledge of Latin. Children not destined for leadership roles attended vernacular schools. Despite the limitations, the organization and curricula of the schools of these centuries was surprisingly rich and varied.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Kallendorf, Craig W., ed. and trans. Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge, Mass., 2002. Translations of four influential fifteenth-century treatises.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile; or, On Education. Introduction, translation, and notes by Allan Bloom. New York, 1979.

Secondary Sources

Brizzi, Gian Paolo. La formazione della classe dirigente nel Sei-Settecento: I seminaria nobilium nell'Italia centrosettentrionale. Bologna, 1976. Study of Jesuit boarding schools for nobles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Charlton, Kenneth. Education in Renaissance England. London, 1965.

Chartier, Roger, Dominique Julia, and Marie-Madeleine Compère. L'éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1976. Much statistical information.

Chisick, Harvey. The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudes toward the Education of the Lower Classes in Eighteenth-Century France. Princeton, 1981.

Cruz, Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran. "Education in the Renaissance." In Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, edited by Paul F. Grendler et al. Vol. 2, pp. 242–254. New York, 1999. Good pan-European survey.

Delattre, Pierre, ed. Les établissements des jésuites en France depuis quatre siècles. 5 vols. Enghien and Wetteren, Belgium, 1949–1957. Articles on all the Jesuit schools in France.

Farrell, Alan P. The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education: Development and Scope of the "Ratio Studiorum." Milwaukee, 1938.

Friedrichs, Christopher R. "Whose House of Learning? Some Thoughts on German Schools in Post-Reformation Germany." History of Education Quarterly 22 (1982): 371–377.

Gawthorp, Richard L., and Gerald Strauss. "Protestantism and Literacy in Early Modern Germany." Past and Present 104 (1984): 31–55.

Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600. Baltimore and London, 1989. Comprehensive study of all forms of preuniversity education in Italy.

Grendler, Paul F., ed. "Education in the Renaissance and Reformation." Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 774–824. European coverage with extensive bibliography.

Hans, Nicholas A. The Russian Tradition in Education. London, 1963. Russian pedagogical thought for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Houston, R. A. Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education, 1500–1800. 2nd ed. rev. Harlow, U.K., and London, 2002.

Huppert, George. Public Schools in Renaissance France. Urbana, Ill., and Chicago, 1984. Latin secondary schools in France.

Jewell, Helen M. Education in Early Modern England. Basingstoke, U.K., and New York, 1998.

Leith, James A., ed. Facets of Education in the Eighteenth Century. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 167. Oxford, 1977. Rich collection of articles on education in Europe and North America.

Maynes, Mary Jo. Schooling in Western Europe: A Social History. Albany, N.Y., 1985. Survey for 1750 to 1850.

Melton, James Van Horn. Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988.

Pelliccia, Guerrino. La scuola primaria a Roma dal secolo XVI al XIX. Rome, 1985. Comprehensive account of Roman elementary education from 1513 to 1829.

Roggero, Marina. Insegnar lettere: Ricerche di storia dell'istruzione in età moderna. Alessandria, Italy, 1992. Italian education 1500 to 1800.

Spitz, Lewis W., and Barbara Sher Tinsley. Johann Sturm on Education: The Reformation and Humanist Learning. St. Louis, 1995.

Strauss, Gerald. Enacting the Reformation in Germany: Essays on Institution and Reception. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1993. Includes several essays on schools in the German Reformation.

——. Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore and London, 1978. Critical assessment of the aims and results of education in the Lutheran Reformation.

Toscani, Xenio. Scuole e alfabetismo nello Stato di Milano da Carlo Borromeo alla Rivoluzione. Brescia, Italy, 1993. Model study of schooling and literacy in Milan, 1560 to 1800.

Tuer, Andrew White. History of the Horn Book. New York, 1979. Study of the primer used throughout Europe with many illustrations; first published in 1897.

—PAUL F. GRENDLER

A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce

n.

That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

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IN BRIEF: The knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. — Aristotle.

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sign description: Both hands begin with E-handshapes facing each other. Both hands then move outward and change to D-handshapes.

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Quotes:

"Our attitude towards ourselves should be to be satiable in learning and towards others to be tireless in teaching." - Mao Zedong

"Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the worlds work, and the power to appreciate life." - Brigham Young

"Education, we see, is not merely gaining knowledge or skills helpful toward productive work, though certainly that is a part of it. Rather it is a replenishment and an expansion of the natural thirst of the mind and soul. Learning is a gradual process of growth, each step building upon the other. It is a process whereby the learner organizes and integrates not only facts but attitudes and values. The Lord has told us that we must open our minds and our hearts to learn. There is a Chinese proverb: Wisdom is as the moon rises, perceptible not in progress but in result. As our knowledge is converted to wisdom, the door to opportunity is unlocked." - Barbara W. Winder

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." - Oscar Wilde

"The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence." - Oscar Wilde

"No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God... and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven." - Orson F. Whitney

See more famous quotes about Education

n

The act or process of imparting or acquiring knowledge, skill, or judgment.

For a list of words related to education, see:

• Curricula, Studies, Learning, and Tests - education: act and process of acquiring learning; knowledge and growth produced by schooling

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  See crossword solutions for the clue Education.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - opdragelse, uddannelse, oplæring, udvikling, dannelse

idioms:

• adult education    voksenuddannelse
• education authority    undervisningsautoritet, undervisningsmyndighed

Nederlands (Dutch)
onderwijs, opvoeding, opleiding, pedagogie

Français (French)
n. - éducation, enseignement, formation, instruction, études, culture, pédagogie

idioms:

• education authority    (GB) délégation départementale de l'enseignement

Deutsch (German)
n. - Erziehung, Ausbildung

idioms:

• education authority    Schulaufsichtsbehörde, Schulamt

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - εκπαίδευση, διαπαιδαγώγηση, μόρφωση, σπουδές, παιδεία, επιμόρφωση

idioms:

• adult education    επιμόρφωση ενηλίκων
• education authority    εκπαιδευτική αρχή
• higher education    τριτοβάθμια ή πανεπιστημιακή εκπαίδευση

Italiano (Italian)
educazione

idioms:

• adult education    insegnamento per adulti

Português (Portuguese)
n. - instrução (f), ensino (m)

idioms:

• adult education    curso (m) supletivo

Русский (Russian)
образование, культура, воспитание

idioms:

• adult education    образование для взрослых

Español (Spanish)
n. - educación, enseñanza, formación, preparación

idioms:

• education authority    inspección de enseñanza

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - utbildning, undervisning

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
教育, 教育学, 训练

idioms:

• adult education    成人教育
• education authority    教育局

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 教育, 教育學, 訓練

idioms:

• adult education    成人教育
• education authority    教育局

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 교육, 길들이기, 교수법

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 教育, 教養, 教育学

idioms:

• continuing education    継続教育
• education authority    教育機関
• higher education    高等教育

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) تعليم, تربيه, علم التربيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮חינוך‬

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