The Social Origins of National Education Systems

Abstract

The social origins of national education systems remains a relatively unexplored question in comparative sociology. Despite the extensive debates about the nature of schooling in the nineteenth century, none of the classical founders of social science provided a systematic analysis of the origins of mass schooling. Saint-Simon, Marx and Weber were all interested in the development of education and made more or less casual allusion to it, but nowhere produced a formal theory. Durkheim, alone of the ‘founding fathers’, devoted a study to it and gave regular lectures on the subject, but he never produced a comparative theory on the scale of his studies of suicide and religion. Modern sociology has only recently begun to fill this gap. However, theoretical studies of the functions of schooling, of which there have been many, have remained largely ahistorical and rarely include a full comparative dimension. Margaret Archer’s two studies of the origins of education systems in France, England, Denmark and Russia, represent a sole, courageous effort to explore the field in depth.1 In the light of considerable advances made in recent years in comparative and historical sociology, this theoretical lacuna is somewhat surprising and leaves one of the most fascinating problems in historical development largely unexplored.