CHAPTER 11 - Conclusion: Long-Term and Comparative Considerations

Abstract

This chapter presents the long-term and comparative considerations of mass schooling. E. G. Geijer presented a series of three lectures in the autumn of 1844, just a few years before his death, which were revised and expanded into a work entitled On the Essential Social Conditions of Our Time. He described the origins of this principle in primitive Christianity; its penetration of parish life in the wake of the Reformation, which made every individual responsible for his or her own salvation; and its eventual expansion into the civil realm in the 18th century, leading to the rapid broadening of individualized citizenship. Geijer was an exceptionally astute observer of the profound changes that were occurring in 19th-century Sweden. By the 19th century, the corporate structure of estate society had been displaced by a new institutional framework in which the individual and the polity were the only primordial social units. The 20th-century reforms that led to the elimination of the academic schools in favor of the common schools were not departures from the path staked out in the 19th century but an extension of it.