450Chapter 23
law limited children below the age of twelve to eight
hours of work per day.
The Old Regime legacy of children working at an
early age in agriculture, factories, mines, or apprentice-
ships left little room for universal education. A study of
French schooling in the early nineteenth century found
that more than fifteen thousand towns (40 percent of
the communities in France) had no schools whatsoever.
A study of Russia on the eve of emancipation (1861)
found that 0.8 percent of the population was attending
school. The German states had long been the leaders of
European education because they had a tradition of
compulsory education. In the 1850s nearly 95 percent
of Prussian adults had received at least eight years of
primary education; by the 1890s virtually 100 percent
of German children received a primary education.
Most of Europe did not copy the German principle
of compulsory education until the late nineteenth cen-
tury. In 1850 the combined elementary school enroll-
ments in Hungary, Portugal, and the Ottoman Empire
amounted to fewer than 100,000 pupils—fewer than
5,000 in all of the Turkish provinces, only 18,000 in
Portugal. The Ferry laws of the late 1870s and early
1880s in France gave Europe another model: manda-
tory, free, secular, universal education in state-run
schools. British education, shaped by the Forster ele-
mentary education reforms of Gladstone’s “great min-
istry” (1868–74), provided a competing model that
encouraged private, fee-paying schools. By 1914
schooling had replaced disease as the basic fact of
childhood. British primary school enrollments in-
creased twentyfold, from 278,000 in 1850 to 6.3 mil-
lion in 1910 (see table 23.7).
Compulsory education, like other social changes,
often conflicted with traditional values and behavior.
Just as conservatives opposed some of the new medical
practices, such as vaccination and anesthesia, and they
fought against birth control and abortion, many conser-
vatives opposed compulsory education (see document
23.3). They argued that state-run schools gave the gov-
ernment too much power or that the family would be
weakened. Religious leaders inveighed against the “god-
less school.” Such arguments slowed, or blocked, uni-
versal education in some countries. The Spanish
accepted only a minimum of universal education: The
Moyano Education Law of 1857, which remained the
basis of Spanish education until the 1960s, made
schooling obligatory only until age nine and provided
free schooling only for the poor.
The life of schoolchildren in the nineteenth cen-
tury consisted chiefly of the memorization of facts. As
Mr. Gradgrind, a teacher in Charles Dickens’s Hard
Times(1854), explained, “Now what I want is Facts....
Facts alone are wanted in life.” There remained some
variation about which facts pupils must memorize, but
little doubt existed about this form of education. Girls
and boys received different schooling, with boys being
groomed for higher education and girls usually deniedCountry Primary pupils University students
Number (year) Number (year) Number (year) Number (year)
Austria 1,450,000 (1850) 4,691,000 (1910) 11,439 (1850) 39,416 (1910)
Britain 278,000 (1850) 6,295,000 (1910) n.a. n.a.
France 3,322,000 (1850) 5,049,000 (1910) n.a. 41,190 (1910)
Germany n.a. n.a. 21,432 (1880) 70,183 (1910)
Hungary 18,000 (1850) 2,549,000 (1910) 838 (1850) 12,951 (1910)
Italy 1,025,000 (1861) 3,473,000 (1910) 6,504 (1861) 26,850 (1910)
Ottoman Empire 5,000 (1858) 2,000,000 (1895) n.a. n.a.
Russia n.a. 1,835,000 (1891) n.a. 13,033 (1891)
Spain 1,005,000 (1855) 1,526,000 (1908) 7,528 (1857) 20,497 (1914)
Source: Data drawn from B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970(London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 750–73; Chris Cook and John Paxton, Euro-
pean Political Facts, 1848–1918(London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 307–15, J. Scott Keltie, ed., Statesman’s Yearbook(London: Macmillan, 1891), pp. 855–56.
n.a. = Not available.TABLE 23.7The Rise of Universal Education in Europe, 1849–1914