The Virtues of Archaism: The Political Economy of Schooling in Europe, 1750–1850

Abstract

Schooling is now a routine part of childhood in Western Europe, but this has not, of course, always been the case. The historical process of incorporation into school systems was one which affected the children of some social groups earlier than others and which occurred earlier in some regions than in others. In Western Europe, the contrast between the Protestant North and the Catholic South has proven to be significant in schooling history as in so many other realms: in general the South was less literate and less schooled than the North apparently from the sixteenth century until the accomplishment of universal school attendance and literacy around the beginning of the twentieth century.