Education and Social Integration
SECONDARY EDUCATION IN A CHANGING WORLD Series editors: Barry M. Franklin and Gary McCulloch Published by Palgrave Macmillan: The Comprehensive Public High School: Historical Perspectives By Geoffrey Sherington and Craig Campbell (2006) Cyril Norwood and the Ideal of Secondary Education By Gary McCulloch (2007) The Death of the Comprehensive High School?: Historical, Contemporary, and Comparative Perspectives Edited by Barry M. Franklin and Gary McCulloch (2007) The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools By Thomas D. Fallace (2008) The Standardization of American Schooling: Linking Secondary and Higher Education, 1870–1910 By Marc A. VanOverbeke (2008) Education and Social Integration: Comprehensive Schooling in Europe By Susanne Wiborg (2009)
Education and Social Integration Comprehensive Schooling in Europe
Susanne Wiborg
EDUCATION AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION
Copyright © Susanne Wiborg, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–4039–8371–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wiborg, Susanne. Education and social integration : comprehensive schooling in Europe / Susanne Wiborg. p. cm.—(Secondary education in a changing world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–8371–2 1. Education—Social aspects—Europe. 2. Comprehensive high schools—Europe. 3. Education and state—Europe. 4. Social integration—Europe. I. Title. LC191.6.E9W53 2009 306.43⬘2094—dc22
2008054701
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword Acknowledgment
vii x
1 The Uneven Development of Comprehensive Education in Scandinavia, Germany, and England 2 The Conglomerate Education System: The Integrative Role of the State 3 Social Class Formation and Educational Participation 4 Liberal Politics: The Early Beginnings of Comprehensive Education 5 Social Democratic Politics: The Advancement of Comprehensive Education 6 Comprehensive Education Consolidated 7 Conclusion
127 167 211
Bibliography
233
Author Index
243
Subject Index
245
1 19 49 75
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Series Editors’ Foreword
Among the educational issues affecting policy makers, public officials, and citizens in modern, democratic and industrial societies, none has been more contentious than the role of secondary schooling. In establishing the Secondary Education in a Changing World series with Palgrave Macmillan, our intent is to provide a venue for scholars in different national settings to explore critical and controversial issues surrounding secondary education. We envision our series as a place for the airing, and hopefully resolution, of these controversial issues. More than a century has elapsed since Emile Durkheim argued the importance of studying secondary education as a unity, rather than in relation to the wide range of subjects and the division of pedagogical labor of which it was composed. Only thus, he insisted, would it be possible to have the ends and aims of secondary education constantly in view. The failure to do so accounted for a great deal of the difficulty with which secondary education was faced. First, it meant that secondary education was “intellectually disorientated,” between “a past which is dying and a future which is still undecided,” and as a result “lacks the vigor and vitality which it once possessed” (Durkheim 1938/1977, 8). Second, the institutions of secondary education were not understood adequately in relation to their past, which was “the soil which nourished them and gave them their present meaning, and apart from which they cannot be examined without a great deal of impoverishment and distortion” (10). And third, it was difficult for secondary school teachers, who were responsible for putting policy reforms into practice, to understand the nature of the problems and issues that prompted them. In the early years of the twenty-first century, Durkheim’s strictures still have resonance. The intellectual disorientation of secondary education is more evident than ever as it is caught up in successive waves of policy changes. The connections between the present and the past have become increasingly hard to trace and untangle. Moreover, the distance
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between policy makers on the one hand and the practitioners on the other has rarely seemed as immense as it is today. The key mission of the current series of books is, in the spirit of Durkheim, to address these underlying dilemmas of secondary education and to play a part in resolving them. In Education and Social Integration: Comprehensive Education in Europe, Susanne Wiborg explores the emergence and development of comprehensive education in Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), England, and Germany from the eighteenth century to the present. Her intent is to develop a theory of what she sees as the uneven development of comprehensive education in these countries. As Wiborg sees it, different regions in Europe have developed very different systems of schooling with differing degrees of comprehensiveness. The Scandinavian countries, she argues, were able early on to develop an integrated and unified system of elementary and secondary education that involved all children notwithstanding their social class background. England and Germany were only able to do this on the elementary level. Both countries developed and continue to maintain selective systems of secondary education. There were, according to Wiborg, four factors that may explain this pattern of uneven development: (1) nineteenth-century state formation, (2) the type of class structure that evolved in these countries during the nineteenth century, (3) the nature of liberal politics and the partnerships that Liberals in these different countries established with other parties, and (4) the nature of social democracy and the alliances that Social Democrats established in these different countries. In the remainder of the volume, Wiborg develops and tests hypotheses involving these factors that may have promoted or prevented the development of comprehensive education. The key to understanding this uneven development, she concludes, is to be found in the strength of social democratic political parties and in the alliances that they were able to establish with liberal parties. The Scandinavian countries had developed strong democratic parties that were able to form alliances with liberal parties, and as a consequence they were able to develop comprehensive systems of schooling. In England and Germany the social democratic parties were weaker, and it proved difficult for Social Democrats to form partnerships with Liberals. The result, she maintains, was the failure of comprehensive schooling in Germany and its partial success in England. Education and Social Integration is the sixth volume to be published in our series. More so than earlier books, Wiborg’s work is decidedly comparative and illustrates how such a perspective enhances our
Series Editors’ Foreword
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understanding of the development of secondary education. As we see the trajectory of the series advancing during the next few years, our intent is to seek additional volumes that bring this comparative viewpoint to studies in secondary education. Barry Franklin and Gary McCulloch
Acknowledgment
For the writing of this book about divergent paths of comprehensive education in Europe, I wish to acknowledge the valuable support and critical comments given by many people. I would like to first thank the series editors of Secondary Education in a Changing World, Professor Gary McCulloch and Professor Barry Franklin, for allowing me to present this book here. I also thank the anonymous readers for suggesting ideas and improvements for my book. I am very grateful for the encouragement given by my colleagues from the Comparative Education group at the Institute of Education, University of London: Professor Andy Green, Professor Paul Morris, Dr. John Preston, Dr. Jan Germen Janmaat, Dr. Edward Vickers, Dr. Christine Hahn, Dr. Kaori Okumoto, and Gemma Pountney. I am especially indebted to Professor Andy Green for countless stimulating conversations, constructive suggestions, and constant encouragement. Without his dedicated support and deep-felt belief in the importance of the topic, this book could not have been written. In addition, I wish to express my sincerest gratitude to my friend Shauna Holiman, who generously spent time reading the manuscript and providing sound editorial advice. I am also grateful to her, and her husband Robert Hackney, for the generous hospitality I received at their country home at Lake Waramaug, Connecticut, where I wrote some parts of this book. Special thanks are due to Jesper Eckhardt Larsen from the Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, for keeping up my spirits during difficult times. I also owe many thanks to Ida Juul, the Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, for the inspiring conversations we had. I am also greatly indebted to my family and friends for their indispensable support: Elisabeth Schow, Vassiliki Papatsiba, Lars-Erik Malmberg, Lars Westerman, Rosa Labarca, Jean-Francois Lefebvre, Stefan Vollmer, Asbjørg Dunker, David Thomas, Isabelle Lauzeral, Berit Höglund, and Otto Strömfeldt, and many others. Finally, my warmest thanks to Giorgio Giancola for the pleasant company I had when I needed rest from the work on this book.
Chapter 1 The Uneven Development of Comprehensive Education in Scandinavia, Germany, and England
Introduction The comprehensive school has been proclaimed “dead” by many commentators and politicians, particularly in the English-speaking countries (Franklin and McCulloch, 2007). Where not officially discarded, the idea and the term have often been quietly forgotten. So, why return now to this relic of the past, which in many countries is no longer the cynosure of politicians and policy-makers? Why should we be concerned with this supposedly outmoded idea, with its unmistakable flavor of 1970s social idealism, instead of focussing on how education can increase aggregate national skills and promote economic competitiveness? This book argues that there are powerful reasons to look again at comprehensive education and its social benefits. As Mark Twain might have said, rumors of its death may have been widely exaggerated. Over the last twenty-five years, governments, especially in the UK and the United States, have increasingly argued that education must become responsive to the needs of the market. In the UK, a radical restructuring of the school system was initiated in the early 1980s in which major reforms ensured the infusion of market forces into public sector provision. Education was developed as a market commodity driven by consumer
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demands working through league tables, parental choice, and market competition between schools. Policies of school choice and school diversification have led to an increasingly fragmented school system. Beginning in 1988, the central government imposed a national curriculum with distinct barriers between academic, technical, and practical learning. Setting students according to academic ability was reinforced as a selective mechanism throughout the entire school system. These neoliberal initiatives, which are still being carried forward by the current government, have been taken in the belief that they would raise the national level of academic achievement and skill formation and so promote economic competitiveness. This has, not surprisingly, led to further social inequality and cultural fragmentation of society. When poor exam results from schools were published in a league table, it immediately created a negative reputation and led to the flight of the more resourceful parents. Vacancies were created and filled by pupils excluded from other schools. Hence, a widening gap was occurring between schools that increasingly performed better and schools that gradually did worse. An OECD study (2007), based on the PISA data for 2006, provided evidence for this when it concluded that greater social segregation in school intakes increases educational inequality; by contrast, increasing the heterogeneity of intakes and narrowing the gaps between schools reduces social inequality. It argued that many English-speaking and German-speaking countries had considerably higher segregation in school intakes, leading to higher levels of educational and social inequality. Conversely, the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, had a far more socially heterogeneous intake in schools and narrower gaps between the schools, resulting in lower inequality in educational outcomes. Green et al. (2006) have stressed, on the basis of this, that it is not a coincidence that the Nordic countries with higher levels of social and economic equality also have more egalitarian school systems than the Englishspeaking and German-speaking countries. In England, comprehensive education is incomplete and differentiated, and in the German-speaking countries comprehensive education has never been introduced, instead a selective secondary, tripartite school system is maintained. “In terms of education systems factors” they state, “what the more equal countries have in common, which is absent in the less equal countries, are structures and processes typically associated with radical versions of comprehensive education: non-selective schools, mixed ability classes, late subject specialization and measures to equalize resources between schools. That these features should work towards lowering educational inequality should be no mystery” (138).
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Since policy-makers have been increasingly concerned about raising academic standards and aggregate skills for economic competitiveness, the question of social equality has inevitably been placed on the periphery of the educational agenda. However, there is a need to return social inequality to the top of the agenda as societies have become increasingly unequal. Globalization has engendered forces that have dislocated traditional bonds, fragmented societies, and reinforced conflict and division. Antisocial behavior, xenophobia, racial intolerance, and community breakdown are some of the problems schools are facing as a result. To accommodate these problems, there is a need to look at egalitarian schooling as a kind of “glue” that can hold society together. Comprehensive education, which is the only egalitarian form of schooling, has proven to reduce social inequality and enhance cultural cohesion in society. Green et al. (2006) argue therefore that it is no longer just a desirable type of education but a necessary vehicle for creating social cohesion (18). It is for this very reason that comprehensive education must be brought back to our attention. Comprehensive education is not a panacea for all societal ills, but it is the only type of education at our disposal that can reduce the fragmentation of society and enhance social cohesion in the future. It is also important to stress that not only can comprehensive education enhance social cohesion, but also simultaneously uphold academic standards. There has been a widespread, unfounded belief that academic standards and social equality are incompatible. However, the PISA studies debunked this belief when they demonstrated empirically that many of the countries with the highest overall levels of academic achievement are also countries with relatively equal outcomes. Finland is the best example of this, but also are the other Nordic countries (185). The issue of reconciling academic standards and social equality is not a new phenomenon. Since the late nineteenth century, policy-makers in Europe have been grappling with the issue of creating a school system that would, on one hand, maintain academic standards, whilst, on the other, include all children regardless of social class. It began initially as an attempt to combine the elementary school and the secondary school into a coherent school system. The two schools had been established as completely separate entities. Children of the lower classes received only a rudimentary learning in the elementary schools, whilst the secondary school, based on a classical curriculum, was reserved for children of the upper strata of society. The task was to not only bring together two schools but also merge two very different worlds of social class and academic culture. It was at the very junction of elementary and secondary education that principal issues in national educational policy arose and which eventually sparked the comprehensive school movement. The result of joining these two school types into unified
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systems on egalitarian lines varies greatly from era to era and from country to country. It is the aim of this book to trace this divergent historical development of comprehensive education in Europe. Different regions in Europe have evolved quite different systems of education, some much more comprehensive and integrated than others. In Scandinavia, for example, different types of schools were integrated over time into a unified system in which nearly all children participated regardless of social background. By contrast, other European countries, such as England and Germany, failed to reach a similar level of integration in their school systems. In both countries, elementary schools became largely comprehensive and nonselective, but this was not the case for the secondary schools. In England the lower secondary school system is still officially comprehensive, but selective grammar schools still remain in many areas, in many cases the comprehensive schools themselves are now partially selective as well. In the major cities, comprehensive schooling in its true sense no longer exists. In Germany secondary schools are mostly selective, as a tripartite system has been retained. The aim of this book, therefore, is to understand through comparative historical analysis how and why these major variations have occurred.
The Different Outcomes Scandinavia Denmark, Norway, and Sweden share an unusually radical type of comprehensive school system, which can best be defined as an all-through, unselective, public school system with mixed-ability classes covering the entire compulsory school age. Also Finland and Iceland share a similar education structure with the Scandinavian countries. However, only Denmark, Norway, and Sweden will be dealt with in this book, since their histories are intimately interwoven with each other and therefore represent a unit of comparison based on strong similarities. In Scandinavia almost all children, irrespective of social background, attend this comprehensive school for common learning, and every kind of selection is postponed until the upper secondary stage at the age of fifteen to sixteen. Private schools, which in fact have been growing over the last few years, have historically always been a rather small sector. They are not fully independent as they are funded by the state for up to 85 percent of their costs and are subject to state regulation. More importantly, they don’t serve as an elitist bastion
Uneven Development of Education
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catering to a privileged class, but are egalitarian in nature, being denominational, pedagogical or political in orientation. The Scandinavian comprehensive school system is mainly a result of three historical events. The first and perhaps the most important event was the breakdown of the parallel school system at the turn of the twentieth century. As in other European countries, the Scandinavian countries developed a parallel system of education during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Secondary schools with roots back to the Middle Ages were established on the one side and catered mainly to children from the upper classes of the society. These schools, called the Cathedral-, Latin-, or Higher Schools, often in affiliation with the church and later the state, were located in the capitals of Copenhagen, Christiania (later Oslo), and Stockholm, and also in the market towns. On the other side were the elementary schools, which were established in parallel to the secondary schools. They enrolled children from the peasantry and later also from the growing urban working class. This parallel system of education met increasing opposition since it upheld social class differences and failed to prepare talented children from less privileged backgrounds for useful occupations. It was possible for the poor, but academically gifted, child to transfer from the elementary to the secondary school, but the almost insurmountable cleavage between the two school types, which were underpinned by their different aims of schooling, curriculum, and social intakes, made this very rare. The desire to break down this class-biased school system propelled the comprehensive school movement, which lasted well into the twentieth century. The widespread belief that each social class needed its own type of education to prepare for their occupational role in society was gradually phased out in favor of a desire to create common schooling for all based on pupils’ mental faculties and innate abilities. The “social mixing” this would create in the schools would lead to a more equitable society promoting talents from all walks of life. Common to Scandinavia was that a new school type, the middle school, was used as a means of breaking down the parallel school system. This was done by abolishing the lower part of the secondary school in order to place the middle school in between the elementary school and what was now the upper secondary school. This created a ladder system of education, in which the elementary school, the middle school, and the upper secondary school followed each other successively. The middle school, says the education historian Markussen (2003), created “unity in—and a straight way—through the entire school system.” In such a system the children no longer had to be “captured” in a school defined by social class, but could instead progress through it according to their academic ability and aptitudes (193).
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The timing of the introduction of the ladder system of education varied from country to country. In Norway, the middle school was introduced as early as 1869. It was to be of six years duration and based on the three-year elementary school. At the same time, the duration of the secondary school (gymnasium) was reduced to three years. In 1889, the middle school was reduced from six to four years in order to extend the duration of the elementary school from three to five years. This was done to strengthen further the ladder system of education. In Denmark, the middle school was introduced thirty-four years later, in 1903. The secondary school (gymnasium) was cut down from nine to three years in order to make room for a four-year middle school. Even though the middle school was considered an integral part of the secondary school, middle schools were, nevertheless, created in connection to the elementary school. This happened especially in rural areas where secondary schools did not exist. Sweden was the latest to introduce the middle school, in 1905. The secondary school (läroverk) was divided into a six-year middle school, named secondary technical school (realskola), and a four-year upper secondary school. Since there were many counties, especially in the sparsely populated rural areas, that did not have a secondary school, a School Act in 1909 ensured the establishment of middle schools also in connection to the elementary schools in these areas. Hence, by the early twentieth century the Scandinavian countries had transformed their parallel system of education into a ladder system of education. The second event in the introduction of comprehensive education in Scandinavia, which occurred mainly during the interwar period, was, surprisingly, the abolition of the middle school. In fact, the middle school had become rather popular as it allowed talented students from less privileged backgrounds to obtain secondary education. During the interwar period, around a quarter of the youth cohort went to the middle school. However, selection to the middle school creamed off the best-performing pupils, leaving the rest behind in the two top classes of the elementary school (grades six and seven). This came to be regarded as an obstacle for the further development of an egalitarian and cohesive school system. The middle school was therefore abolished in order to avoid the two years of parallel schooling—the top two classes in the elementary school ran next to the bottom two classes of the middle school—in favor of a seven-year comprehensive school. The middle school was abolished first in Norway, and this happened in two steps, one in 1920 and the next in 1936. It was decided in 1920 that middle schools would receive financial support by the state only if they enrolled pupils who had completed the seven-year comprehensive school. The consequence of this was a reduction of the middle school from
Uneven Development of Education
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four to two years in order to allow the seven-year comprehensive school to develop. In 1936, the last remnant of the middle school was finally abolished. The five-year secondary school now continued directly from the seven-year comprehensive school. The less academically gifted pupils were enrolled in a three-year secondary technical school (realskole), but the first two classes of the secondary technical school were integrated with the first two classes of the academic secondary school. The common curriculum in the core subjects ensured a strong link between elementary and secondary education. In Sweden, the middle school was almost abolished in 1927. A so-called “double attachment” was introduced, which implied that, on one hand, a six-year comprehensive school should be followed by a four-year middle school (mostly in small towns) and, on the other, a four-year comprehensive school should be followed by a five-year middle school (mostly in the cities). This upheld the parallel system to some extent, but it was anyway gradually broken down partly due to the abolition of state financial support to the private preparatory schools that fed into the middle schools. In Denmark, the middle school was not abolished until 1958. In fact, during the interwar period, the position of the middle school was strengthened through the creation of a parallel middle school (1937) to serve less academically able children. As such, the parallel system was maintained at the lower secondary stage, but, as in Norway and Sweden, a seven-year comprehensive school was eventually introduced. The striking fact about the abolition of the middle school in Scandinavia was that lower secondary education became fully integrated with elementary education, not secondary education—creating an all-through system of education for seven years. This was extended to nine/ten years during the period of 1962 until 1975. In Norway the nine/ ten-year comprehensive school was introduced in 1969, in Sweden a little earlier, in 1962, and latest in Denmark, in 1975. The third event in the development of comprehensive education in Scandinavia was the introduction of mixed-ability classes throughout the entire nine/ten-year comprehensive school. In all of the Scandinavian countries, both streaming and setting of pupils were, in various ways, implemented in the top two classes (grades eight and nine) in the comprehensive school. However, the concern was that this created a cleavage between the gifted children and the less academically able children. It became increasingly difficult for the children in the nonacademic streams who had enhanced their academic skills to transfer to the academic streams. To ameliorate this problem, mixed-ability classes were introduced throughout the nine/ten-year comprehensive school. In Norway, streaming and setting were abolished in 1974 and mixed-ability classes were implemented. In Sweden, streaming in the top classes of the comprehensive
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school was abolished in 1968 and setting was done away with in 1980. In Denmark, streaming was abolished in 1975 and setting in 1993. Today, all the Scandinavian countries have mixed-ability classes throughout their comprehensive school systems. The only way of organizing pupils according to ability is through the so-called “teaching differentiation,” which implies flexible organized ability groupings of restricted duration within the framework of mixed-ability classes (Wiborg, 2004).
England and Germany The development of education in Germany and England was in sharp contrast to that in the Scandinavian countries. In Germany and England the shift toward more egalitarian schooling only began well after the Second World War, and was also much more limited. There was almost nothing in these two countries prior to the war that was propitious for the development of comprehensive education. Whereas the Scandinavian countries already had embarked on restructuring the school system on egalitarian lines in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in Germany and England the divided education system was maintained. The traditional nine-year secondary school—in Germany the Gymnasium, and the grammar school in England—survived and was retained as a bastion for the middle and upper classes, thus excluding the bulk of the society, comprising the lower classes, who had only a rudimentary learning in elementary schools. As Leschinsky and Mayer (1999) have stated in regard to Germany, it is remarkable that radical transformations of the German society, such as the change from the Empire to a Republic in 1920, national socialism during the 1930s, or the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, have not had any impact on the structural development of the education system (14). In Germany, next to the Gymnasium was the six-year Realgymnasium, which later, in 1878, became the nine-year Oberrealschule and the more demanding nine-year Realgymnasium. But this school system was not made the subject for reform that would integrate them into an egalitarian system. In 1872, a middle school was in fact established in Germany, but, in contrast to the Scandinavian middle school, it was not developed as a link between elementary and secondary education but rather used as a term that embraced various kinds of higher elementary schools. These schools ran in parallel to the secondary schools. The Gymnasium took most of its pupils from private preparatory schools at the age of nine or ten, although it also drew to some extent on the lower classes in the elementary school, the Volkschulen. However, the elementary school was not seen to serve as the basis for further education.
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It was not until 1920 that the elementary school became the foundation of secondary education. Both public and private preparatory schools, Vorschulen feeding in to the Gymnasium, were to be abolished in order to ensure this, but many of these schools still continued to exist until the late 1930s. After the Second World War, the German education system was restored in concordance with the school system of the Weimar republic—a tripartite secondary education system comprising the Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule, each fed from the four-year elementary school. During the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s, major reform plans were launched that aimed at restructuring the German school system along egalitarian lines. However, none of these plans resulted in major changes to the school system. The only achievements were minor changes, such as the introduction of the so-called Orientierungstufe. This was a kind of “orientation stage” that was designed to link elementary and secondary schools together and to postpone selection by two years (at age twelve). The other achievement was the establishment of some comprehensive schools, Gesamtschulen, mainly in Northern Germany. However, these schools did not break down the tripartite education system, as they were established in parallel to it as a fourth educational option. Nor has the Gesamtschule ever been popular, certainly not when figures of the enrolment are taken into account. Only about 10 percent of the pupils of a cohort are today attending this type of school. After the unification of Germany, in 1990, the former East German states abandoned their polytechnic comprehensive schools that were introduced after the Second World War in order to adopt the former Western tripartite education system. Some Länder, though, managed to dilute the rigid selection by implementing just a two-type, bipartite system. Even though the elitist gleam to some degree has disappeared from the secondary education system, as more students are enrolled in the Gymnasium and Realschule and less in the traditional low achievers’ Hauptschule than in the past, it still remains a fact that the German system, at least in contrast to Scandinavia, is highly stratified. In contrast to Germany, in England the selective secondary tripartite system was transformed during the 1960s and 1970s into a comprehensive system. But unlike in Scandinavia, the transformation did not involve creating an all-through primary/lower secondary school. The transfer from elementary to secondary education was in fact initially made nonselective, although selection has, over the last few years, been made acceptable to some degree. But selective grammar schools survived in many areas. Comprehensive education was incomplete in other important ways as well. There was no national curriculum when comprehensive schools were introduced, and therefore no new comprehensive school curriculum was
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devised and adopted uniformly across all schools. In fact, until 1989, with the introduction of the GCSE exam, there was not even a common single examination for children to take at the end of their compulsory schooling. Comprehensive schools ran two types of examination, the “O” levels for the most able, and the Certificate of Secondary Education for the lower achievers. Having two different examinations effectively ensured that each school ran different curricula for different groups of children. Also, the nonselective comprehensive principle has not yet been fully implemented, as streaming and setting is still maintained to a large degree throughout the system. Prior to the 1960s, the English school system was, as in Germany, divided. During the nineteenth century, due to the lack of state intervention, the school system developed into a patchwork of schools controlled by voluntary bodies such as Anglican Church’s National School Society and the British and Foreign Schools Society allied to the nonconformist churches. When governments began to intervene in education toward the end of the century, they neither proposed to bring all education under the sole control of the state nor to link the different school types together into a coherent system. Secondary education was divided into three distinct types that corresponded closely with the stratification of the middle class and upper class. Apart from the secondary schools, which had their own private preparatory schools feeding into them, there were the elementary schools for the working-class children. Instead of integrating this classbased system of education, governments, advised by various statutory commissions during the last part of nineteenth century, allowed a parallel system to continue, even after the 1870 Forster Act finally created the beginning of a public system of elementary schools under the control of local School Boards. In line with widespread opinion at the time, governments still believed that children from different classes should be educated separately. The 1902 Balfour Act barely changed this, even though it created the first state secondary schools that were soon to allow a trickle of workingclass children access through scholarships. Both the state secondary schools and the old private grammar schools were kept as separate as possible from the elementary schools to discourage the notion that the majority of children could obtain a secondary education. The starting age of pupils to the grammar school was not synchronized with the completion of the elementary school, and the grammar schools adopted a very traditional, classically oriented curriculum that children in the elementary schools had hardly been prepared for in their prior learning. The consequence of this was that the parallel system of education was reinforced, in which an elite minority had secondary education while the majority of working-class children
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would receive only an elementary school education. In 1944 a major Act on education was passed in order to provide secondary education for all. However, secondary education for all did not imply that all children would go to the same kind of common school. A rigid, tripartite system of education—with grammar schools, secondary modern schools, and secondary technical schools—was organized after the war and developed in a similarly class-divided manner as the mid-nineteenth-century school system had emerged. The selection to secondary education was done on the basis of attainment tests and intelligence tests—the 11-Plus—which were believed to measure a given quota of intelligence that each child had inherited from birth and which would remain constant through out life. Only during the 1960s did a growing demand for egalitarian education emerge. In 1965, it was thus made possible for the local authorities to submit plans for the reorganization of secondary education on comprehensive lines. No just a single model but rather several models of comprehensive organization were adopted, even though the favored model became the allthrough 11–18 comprehensive school that had already been pioneered in London and elsewhere. The implementation of comprehensive education during the following years was a somewhat uneven process due to a range of patterns that was present and considered acceptable as comprehensive education. Even though an increasing number of pupils became enrolled in comprehensive schools (70 percent in 1975), the comprehensive education system as such resembled a patchwork of uneven types of organizations. Since 1979, comprehensive schooling has no longer been the key for the reorganization of education in Britain. Neoliberal policies are eroding comprehensive education by promoting a greater diversity of school types and by allowing greater use of selection, streaming, and setting.
A Note on Method Against this background of diverse paths of development, this book attempts to explain why the Scandinavian countries succeeded in introducing radical forms of comprehensive education—with their mixedability classes and all-through systems of education from grades 1 to 9/10—whilst comprehensive education failed completely in Germany and was only partially introduced in England. This major question will be explored by employing the so-called macro-causal comparative method (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, 2003; Ragin, 1987; Skocpol and Somers, 1980; Braembushe, 1989). This method originated in the field of comparative historical sociology: the field in which the most advanced discussions
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ever on comparative method have taken place. The method has also been widely used outside the field of historical sociology, for instance, in comparative sociology and comparative political science, but to a much lesser extent in education. The aim of the macro-causal method is to develop causal explanations of large-scale societal outcomes through systematic comparative analysis that tests theories or hypotheses on a set of juxtaposed empirical cases. The method has its roots in John Stuart Mill’s thoughts on experimental inquiry first set out in A System of Logic (1834). Here he described the “method of agreement,” the “method of difference,” and the “indirect method,” each of which utilizes a different comparative logic. The method of agreement involves identifying cases that share in common the outcome that is to be explained (positive cases). If, argued Mill, some instances of an outcome under investigation share in common only one of several possible causal circumstances, then the circumstance in which all the instances are in concordance is the cause of the outcome. An application of this method would, therefore, be to identify common instances of a historical outcome of a set of positive cases and then proceed to determine which circumstances invariably precede its emergence. The circumstance that satisfies this requirement can thus be regarded as the cause. Furthermore, this method can be applied jointly with the so-called indirect method of difference, which is a double application of the method of agreement. This method simultaneously identifies the common outcome and the circumstances in a set of positive cases and the absence of both in a set of contrasting cases (negative cases). The aim of this method is to use the negative cases to reinforce causal explanations drawn from the positive cases. As Mill himself was aware, neither method can be applied in its pure form to historical cases, where it is not possible to perform perfectly controlled comparisons as in the experimental sciences, or statistical manipulation of variables as in statistical analysis. Major societal phenomena cannot be easily broken apart into analytically separate variables that can be manipulated as in the natural sciences, because these are tightly interwoven with each other in a given historical context that cannot now be changed through experiment. All we can do in qualitative comparative analysis is to select the cases in a way that approximates to an experiment. This problem is not unknown to historical sociologists who are aware that the use of the methods in this way dilutes their efficacy. However, one reason they are in extensive use anyway is that they have, according to Skocpol and Somers (1980), the considerable “virtue of being the only way to attempt to validate and invalidate causal hypotheses about macrophenomena” (194).
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In this study these two methods will only be used as rough guidelines in order to accommodate at least some of the most apparent limitations by dealing with just a small set of interrelated causal circumstances whilst maintaining a few cases as contextualized, historical entities. The Scandinavian countries are constituted as the positive cases, as they share a common outcome—the radical comprehensive school system. Even though the countries differ from each other, as their school systems have indeed absorbed different national “colourings,” they have, nevertheless, developed their systems through strikingly similar paths as outlined above. The next step is to identify causal circumstances—in this context implied as conjunctions of events—that are constant across the positive cases and thereby contribute to the explanation of the common outcome. The outcome is, in other words, analyzed as a result of particular interrelations of circumstances. This is no doubt a tall order since the circumstances are numerous—there is rarely just a single cause—and can be combined in a variety of ways to produce a given outcome. Especially when an outcome results from several different interrelated circumstances, it is not always easy to unravel the decisive causal combinations. But because it is, as Charles C. Ragin (1987) states, the combined effect of various circumstances, their intersection in time and space, that produces a certain outcome, this problem is not solved by abandoning this type of research altogether but through seeking to overcome it to the extent it is possible (27). The very similar outcomes achieved in comprehensive schooling in the Scandinavian countries demand that we search for a set of interrelated common causes that may have had a decisive effect on these outcomes. The fact that the Scandinavian countries share many distinctive factors in common, which are absent in the negative cases, should make it easier to isolate relevant causes. However, it is clearly not possible to investigate fully all potentially relevant factors, since this will place the analysis out of control. So it has been necessary to proceed by elimination to identify only a smaller number of factors that may be relevant to the explanation. So, for instance, factors that are not present in some form in all the positive cases have been eliminated. Here, nationally oriented assumptions or explanations of comprehensive education have certainly aided the process of elimination. For example, some Danish historians argue that it was the diffusion of the national romantic ideas of the nineteenth-century Danish priest and philosopher N. F. S. Grundtvig that led to comprehensive education in Denmark, but this theory was rejected as a comparative explanation since his ideas did not have any substantive impact on comprehensive education in Norway and Sweden. In the end, having eliminated factors that are not shared by the positive cases, a number of key factors, common to the Scandinavian countries,
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have been identified, which relate to four key issues. These are: (1) the type of state formation undergone in the nineteenth century; (2) the nature of class structure that evolved in the nineteenth century; (3) the nature of liberal politics and of the alliances forged between Liberals and other parties; and (4) the nature of social democracy and its political alliances. Hypotheses relating to each of these phenomena are then developed and tested on each of the countries successively. Where they are found to be common to the positive cases and absent from the negative cases, we have grounds for arguing that they are causally related to the outcome we are investigating. It should be noted here that the reason it is hypotheses, not theories, which are tested on the historical data is that scholars of the history of education have not been engaged extensively in the development of comparative theories relating to the development of comprehensive education. Most studies of comprehensive education have been single-country studies shaped as historical detailed narratives with a tendency to overemphasize particular causes reserved to one country. Even though these studies have provided us with important detailed accounts, they are nevertheless so deeply entrenched in national history that generalization beyond the particular is almost impossible. To develop a theory of why the Scandinavian countries have introduced extensive comprehensive education, one simply requires to search beyond the particular for a single set of causal circumstances that determines this common outcome. Skocpol and Somers (1980) have stressed that it is often possible to demonstrate, using the comparative macro-causal method, that widely accepted explanations, usually derived from single national cases, simply cannot account for variations across time and place (194). On the other hand, the fact that the macro-causal method can do this makes it particularly powerful. One example to illustrate this point is the widely held belief that comprehensive education in Sweden was caused solely by powerful Social Democratic governments during the post–Second World War era. This is far from being untrue; however, it is a partial explanation and fails to take into account that the first step toward comprehensive education in all of the Scandinavian countries was taken by liberal parties long before social democracy even gained a political foothold. Even though the similarity between the countries is the key to developing a theory of comprehensive education in Scandinavia, it does not imply that vital contrasts between the countries are ignored; on the contrary, these are in particular helpful in explaining the different timings of the introduction of comprehensive education. As already mentioned above, comprehensive education was introduced earlier in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark, which can only be explained by national peculiarities.
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Since it is not uncommon to arrive at an “unbalanced” theory by investigating positive cases only, negative cases are also included as they can help develop a more valid causal explanation. The hypotheses tested on the Scandinavian countries will be simultaneously tested on the negative cases, Germany and England, in order to identify circumstances favorable and unfavorable to the development of comprehensive education. If the circumstances that provide a satisfactory explanation for the development of the Scandinavian comprehensive education were either absent or weak in Germany and England, then this will be of help in verifying a causal explanation of Scandinavian comprehensive education. It is important to stress, however, that the meaning of the presence and absence of circumstances in the positive and negative cases is not exactly the same as in the pure forms of Millian logic, since, in real history, phenomena are never identical across different contexts, nor can they be entirely isolated from an infinite number of contingent circumstances that may have also affected how history actually happened. In the analysis of historical processes, we simply cannot control for everything except what we hypothesize to be the key variables, since we can never find cases where everything is identical except the hypothesized causes and effects. Rather, this approach is used in a more flexible way, or, in the words of the famous comparative historian Barrington Moore (1966), as a “rough negative check” (xiii). The most valuable feature of including negative cases is that it engenders a dialogue between hypotheses and historical evidence of an intensity that is difficult to obtain by addressing positive cases only. The negative cases in this study will not be discussed as extensively as the positive cases, as they are mainly introduced for the purpose of reinforcing conclusions drawn from the Scandinavian countries. The overall purpose of this book is, however, to develop a causal theory of the uneven development of comprehensive education. Since each case will be analyzed as a combination of circumstances in a contextual unity, a generalization beyond the cases investigated is not pursued; it is only limited to the cases under investigation. By applying just a few essential hypotheses, instead of slicing the cases into numerous common circumstances, it is possible to respect the historical and cultural contexts in which comprehensive education is deeply embedded. Hence, in this study, systematic structure and historical chronology is integrated so that the hypotheses, which lay down the systematic structure, are tested successively in an historical chronology. The structure of this book is thus arranged on the basis of the four hypotheses. The following chapter, chapter 2, analyzes the impact of state formation on the early attempts of integrating various school types into a school system on egalitarian lines during the eighteenth-, but especially
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the nineteenth-, century. The Scandinavian states were amongst the earliest to initiate the process of establishing public elementary and secondary schools in Europe and were, at the same time, also amongst the first to link these schools together into a ladder system of education. This was an extremely important event since it was at this very junction of elementary and secondary education that the possibility of introducing comprehensive education occurred. The aim of this chapter is, therefore, to establish whether there existed differences in levels of integration of the education systems under investigation and whether this in turn was related to either strong or weak state involvement. Chapter 3 will analyze the assumption that the relatively egalitarian class structure of the nineteenth-century Scandinavian societies, in contrast to England and Germany, served as a precondition of the establishment of the ladder system of education. This will be analyzed on the basis of quantitative data on levels of enrolment in the secondary schools from the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The hypothesis is that if substantively more pupils from the peasantry and the working class were enrolled in the traditional bourgeois-dominated secondary schools in Scandinavia than in the contrasting cases, then it could have served as a vital precondition of abolishing the lower classes of the secondary school. This was necessary in order to establish a middle school that bridged between elementary and upper secondary education. In chapter 4 the hypothesis is based on the assumption that political liberalism made the ladder system of education possible. In all of the Scandinavian countries, it was the Liberal Party, formed in opposition to the Conservatives during the 1860s, that successfully introduced the middle school. This chapter seeks therefore to analyze the historical mobilization of political liberalism across the investigated countries on the basis of existing theories in order to establish whether this can explain the variations in educational development between the Scandinavian countries, on one hand, and England and Germany, on the other. Chapters 5 and 6 will proceed to discuss the subsequent development of education in Scandinavia during the twentieth century, where the ladder system of education was transformed into radical comprehensive school systems. This development will be analyzed on the basis of the assumption that social democracy played the most essential role. Common to the Scandinavian countries was the fact that the social democratic parties bypassed the liberal parties during the interwar period and became the most powerful parties from immediately after the postwar period until their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. In this capacity they left a strong mark on the policy on education. An analysis based on existing comparative theories of why social democracy became so powerful in societies
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that were largely agricultural until the 1950s will be performed in order to determine, in contrast to England and Germany, to what extent this had an effect on the extensive development of comprehensive education in Scandinavia. The aim of the final chapter is to offer a conclusion of the comparative theory based on the findings drawn from the testing of the four hypotheses. It is my hope that this first attempt to put forward a theory of the divergent paths of comprehensive education will prompt comparative scholars to test it on new sets of cases in order to gain a deeper understanding of the formation of this type of education. It is this process of continuously testing hypotheses and theories on sets of juxtaposed cases that is the core of comparative scholarship, and the only tool at our disposal, regardless of theoretical orientation and methodological design, to explain major differences in educational trajectories.
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Chapter 2 The Conglomerate Education System: The Integrative Role of the State
Introduction One of the results of centuries of state building in Europe was the establishment of national education systems in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These systems comprised various organizational forms of public primary and secondary schools that preconditioned the possibilities for the development of unified single structures in the late nineteenth century. Systems of primary schools were incrementally consolidated through, in most cases, substantial state intervention, and free tuition and compulsory attendance laws gradually ensured universal childhood participation. Secondary education expanded from its narrow elite base through enrolment of children not only from the bourgeoisie but also intellectually capable children from the lower classes. However, in spite of this major educational expansion, which occurred throughout Europe, primary and secondary schools were, during most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demarcated entities with no link between them. An educational ladder was yet to be created. Over time, and as the governments became increasingly involved in education through legal regulation, allocation of funds, inspection of schools, and so on, education did become more systematic in its organization. An age-graded, hierarchical system emerged in which institutions were systematically linked to each other, introducing, in varying degrees, measures of meritocracy. European countries that established national education systems through state intervention also sought to make their new systems
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more integrated as increased attention was paid to the social backlash that the old conglomerate systems had caused. Although the countries would eventually integrate their education systems into unified, single structures, they did so at different times and with significant variations. The Scandinavian countries, for example, were the earliest countries to embark upon educational integration (1869–1905). They employed a “three-step ladder” model in order to achieve a high level of vertical integration. By contrast, Germany accomplished only a low level of vertical integration by adopting a horizontal structure. England, where the integration process was slowest to occur, delayed until 1944 the introduction of a horizontal structure similar to that of Germany. The object of this chapter is to establish how far, in the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and England, the level of integration of the education system related to the process of state-building.
Education and State Formation In his seminal work, Andy Green (1990) posited a theory that the statebuilding process was intimately linked with the establishment of national education systems that eventually came to encompass entire populations of children. Previous historical research had been mainly conducted within the context of single countries, often within limited historical periods, and had not sought to explain cross-national differences systematically. Instead, comparisons were made ad hoc in a rather rudimentary fashion. Naturally, these studies (Kazamias, 1966; Eckstein and Noah, 1969; Mclean and Holmes, 1989; Winther-Jensen, 2002; Albisetti, 1983; Gildea, 1983) failed to produce a well-articulated comparative theory of the divergent paths taken in the establishment of education systems throughout Europe. Margaret Archer’s (1979) pioneering study of the social origins of educational systems had, of course, sought to provide a comparative explanation of uneven educational development for four countries and provided a comparative typology of organizational forms on which Green later built. However, her Weberian approach, emphasizing the interplay of competing interest groups, left the role of the state relatively un-theorized. Green took a different route in placing the role of the state at the heart of his explanation of the origins of national education systems. In investigating variations in the degree of control over education, Green sought to explain, on the basis of an inductive macro-causal approach, the different timing of the establishment of these systems. As he points out, it is peculiar that some countries, such as Prussia and France, were
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able to establish a national system of education much earlier than other countries, such as England, one of the last countries in Europe to set up such a system. This kind of question, as he rightly argues, can only be addressed by adopting a comparative method able to encompass a set of factors that simultaneously explain the occurrence of national education systems in one set of cases and the absence or delay of it in others. Not blind to the wealth of interwoven factors, Green stresses that the main explanation must be found in the manner and extent to which the state is involved in the establishment of the national education systems. Countries that underwent periods of intensive state building, usually caused by revolution, war, occupation (real or threatened), or by the desire to catch up with other more advanced states, were also the ones that most quickly established national education systems. By contrast, those countries that were more quiescent in state building during this period, either because of the precociousness of their early state formation (like England) or because of major barriers to state unification (as in Italy and the German Länder), established education systems at a later time. The origins of formal education are to be found in activities of the Church and religious societies during the medieval period. However, the transformation of religious education into formal systems of education serving national ends was, in fact, a result of state intervention. It was during the eighteenth century, the great period of absolutism and “enlightened despotism,” that monarchs included education in their efforts to strengthen the power of their states. The absolute monarchies not only developed such characteristic features of the modern state as a centralized bureaucracy, a professional military, and a tax system, they also paved the way for the establishment of a national education system by providing state funding, instituting mandatory school attendance, and setting a curriculum. The development of the national education systems, however, did not imply that the undergrowth of old private and religious schools was suddenly swept away. These continued to exist, even though they were in decline, alongside the public school system. Yet, there was a decisive break with the medieval way of schooling, which was closely linked to clerical, craft, and legal training and did not extend much beyond the interests of the local community. National education systems embodied the idea of universalism, embracing all citizens of the state. It was to serve the nation as a unified whole, as defined by the leading classes of the society. Thus, education became a state concern and, eventually, an institution of the state. “The fully-fledged nineteenthcentury education system,” says Green (1990), “thus became a species apart whose functions were relatively homogeneous and unique and which could not be equated, tout court, with those of earlier forms. It became an
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institution sui generis; an integral part of the state apparatus of the burgeoning nineteenth-century nation state and a vital pillar of the new social order” (79). With his theory, Green rejects accounts from the traditional frameworks of the history of education that locate the origin of mass education in the diffusion of enlightenment ideas and in industrial and urban change. He offers as evidence the fact that these systems were already being implemented by absolutist states well prior to the beginning of any of these movements. He does not deny that these had a role in shaping particular characteristics of the various national education systems, but he questions their power to explain comparatively the uneven development of these systems. By establishing a link between the education system and the state, the question arises why the state gradually took over from the Church the role of providing universal education for its citizens. The answer lies mainly in the nature of the absolutist state. According to Perry Anderson (1974), the nature of absolutism should be analyzed as a new form of feudal domination. Absolutism was a system of concentrated force for counteracting the prolonged crisis of the feudal society during the medieval period. Andersen succinctly formulates it as “a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination” that was capable of becoming the “new political carapace of a threatened nobility” (18). Feudalism, as a mode of production, was originally an organic unity of the economy and polity, distributed as sovereign parcels with the village as the center wherein serfdom merged with economic exploitation and political-legal coercion. The gradual disappearance of serfdom, though it did not mean the complete disappearance of feudal relations from the countryside, and the commutation of dues into money rents, weakened the political and economic oppression of the peasantry, threatening the power of the feudal lords. The absolutist states that broke with the parcelled sovereignty of the medieval social formation did so in response to this crisis. The consequence, according to Anderson (1974), was an upward displacement of political-legal coercion toward a centralized, militarized summit—the absolutist state. The permanence of war in quest of territory and trade is one of the distinctive characteristics of the era of absolutism, and absolute states were machines built expressly to promote victory on the battlefield. In the entire sixteenth century there were only twenty-five years without military operations in Europe, and in the following century there were as few as seven years without major wars between the states (33). Charles Tilly (1975) has perhaps contributed more than any other scholar to the argument that it was war that inspired the creation of states. Various other
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factors encouraged state building, such as economic backwardness and domestic political turmoil (revolution). The decisive force, however, was war. Military buildup required new taxes, and more efficient tax collecting methods went hand in hand with increased military levies. It was not unusual for half or three-quarters of a state’s revenue to be used for war, military buildup, and interest on war debt. The expansive growth of the army led to ever greater expenditures, requiring extraction of higher taxes from the peasants. To collect these monies, the state bureaucracy had to be expanded. This bureaucracy needed to be efficient with new administrative organs and better-educated officials and experts to respond to growing rivalries between states. Tilly characterized this state-building process as “an unbroken chain” that ultimately resulted in an enduring aggrandizement of state authority. The absolutist states thus pioneered many of the institutions of the modern state. Standing armies, civil bureaucracies, legal codes, and national taxation, among other national institutions, stood in stark contrast with the forest of particularistic organs that were associated with earlier periods. They also sparked the development of early capitalism in those towns that expanded into commercial markets and sites of preindustrial manufacture. According to German Cameralist ideas, it was the task of the state to increase its economic power through acquisition of a larger share of world trade and, simultaneously, to establish social institutions. According to Green (1990), education complemented the objectives and needs of the absolutist state, particularly when the importance of expert administration and technical knowledge in the military and industry became more vital (114). Secondary education was increasingly essential in providing the civil bureaucracy with trained staff, whilst technical and vocational schools supplied the state with manufacturers, public works departments with expert engineers, and the military with recruits. Elementary schooling was also increasingly important to provide disciplined and loyal military and naval cadets and to promote patriotic beliefs amongst people. “The attempt to create universal, state-controlled and bureaucratically administered national education systems,” says Green (1990), “can thus be seen as a typical product of state formation in the period of absolutism” (114). The countries that underwent an intensive state-building process, such as Prussia, France, and the United States, included education as an integral part of that process and were among the first to develop national systems of education. Conversely, countries such as England, where the stateformation impulse was less intensive during this period, were slow in the establishment of education systems.
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State Formation in Scandinavia Green did not consider the Scandinavian countries, but the establishment of education systems in these countries appears to support his theory, since the bureaucracies in these states were profoundly engaged in establishing, funding, and managing a system of education as part of an endeavor to create a unified state. As a result of state intervention, public education was making headway at the expense of private education and was finally consolidated as a nationwide system in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. The form of state building that took place in Scandinavia, as elsewhere in Europe, was caused by pressure from rival countries or military defeats that stimulated states to turn to education as a means of national revitalization. Absolutism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in these countries cannot, as Perry Anderson argued, be explained as a response to the crisis of serfdom. The structural composition of an indigenous free peasantry prevented Scandinavia from becoming completely feudalized, since there was, according to the Norwegian historian Øyvind Østerud (1981), a broad allodial sector that restricted feudalization of rural relations of production. Rather, the centralization of royal power was a reaction to threats from the outside— from potential overlordship, first by Denmark over Sweden and later by Sweden over Denmark (130–131). During the fifteenth century, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were united in the Scandinavian Union, the so-called Kalmar Union, under Danish rule, primarily as a counterbalance to the commercial dominance of the Hanseatic League. However, immediately after the dissolution of the Union, Sweden and Denmark fought ten wars in the period from 1520 until 1720 in their quest to establish dominance over the Nordic and Baltic countries. During these wars the balance of power shifted gradually back and forth between the two rival countries. Sweden was initially under pressure of potential Danish overlordship and had to fight for its very existence, but during the Thirty Years’ war, from 1618 to 1648, Sweden emerged more powerful than Denmark, and even became a great European power, which in turn forced Denmark into a situation where it had to fight for its own survival (Knudsen, 1995; Knudsen and Rothstein, 1994; Gustafsson, 2006). The power struggle between these two neighboring countries pursued by the means of war sparked a long process of state building in which strong military mobilization was a common feature. The centralization of state power, the buildup of a standing army, and the demand for greater taxes began when Sweden aspired to be a great European power (1611–1718) and when the Danish king, Frederick III,
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supported by the bourgeoisie, promulgated the so-called Monarchial Ordinance (Kongeloven), which made the monarchy hereditary and absolute (1660–1848). During the reign of Gustav II Adolf (1611–1632) a state bureaucracy was built up that was far more effective than what had developed under the previous ruler, Gustav Vasa, and his sons. Axel Oxenstierna played a decisive role in this—for example, through the reformation of parliament in 1634, which aimed at the centralization of state bureaucracy. Under Frederik III and his successors, the kingdom moved from a relatively decentralized society with an immensely influential nobility to a far more centralized society with an absolute monarchy. The centralization of the state bureaucracy resulted in the gradual disappearance of idiosyncratic regional laws, assemblies of nobles and merchants, and war chests. Generally speaking, it may be said that the increase of state power, of which the centralization of state bureaucracy is a conspicuous part, led to increased control over various parts of the country and initiated a process of harmonization (Paludan, 2000; Linton, 1994). In the Scandinavian historiography of state formation, it is Denmark and Sweden that feature most prominently. Less attention is given to Norway, which, for many centuries, was subordinated first to Danish rule, and thus Danish state building, from 1375 until 1905, and then later to Swedish state building from 1375 to 1905. Subsequently Norway attained its independence, abandoned its status as a “receiver country,” and embarked on its own independent process of state formation. This period, which coalesced with the heyday of cultural nation building throughout Europe, has received much attention from researchers. As Denmark and Sweden are the only two Scandinavian countries that have undergone an independent state-building process for many centuries, most attention is therefore paid to these two countries in comparison to the processes of state building of the great powers of Prussia and Britain. Sweden and Denmark were no different from the countries on the continent in being subject to threats of war, which sparked intensive internal state mobilizations. However, major differences in state building remained, as Denmark introduced strong absolutism, whereas Sweden, in spite of several attempts at doing the same, retained a system of governance based on estates. This difference had an immense impact on the role played by the nobility. In Sweden, the loyalty of the nobility was secured by means of mass ennoblement and creation of a close relationship between the nobility and the other estates. In Denmark, by contrast, the power of the nobility was deliberately restricted via the introduction of absolutism in 1660. The long-term historical impact of this was, according to Knudsen and Rothstein (1994), that in Sweden the nobility, in spite of its relatively small
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size, maintained power in military and civil administrations, enabling them to exert great influence over policymaking. The “denobilization” and “demilitarization” of Swedish society was a slow process and was not completed before 1920. Aristocratic culture and military norms remained powerful while modern bureaucratic practices and democratic values took a long time to emerge. In Denmark, the restriction of the power of the nobility meant that a strong emphasis in the civil administration was placed on meritocracy and nonpolitical appointments. Thus, the educated bourgeoisie was able to enter the civil service and military on equal footing with the nobility (205). These differences between Denmark and Sweden had a lasting impact not only on the state-building process but also on the nature of liberalism, democracy, and education. The following discussion will pay particular attention to this contrast seen in the light of different state-building traditions in Europe. In the historiography of state formation in Europe, a distinction exists between eastern and western paths to the modern state, which specifies more precisely the peculiarity of state building in Sweden and Denmark. Roughly speaking, western Europe developed urban, bourgeois bureaucracies based on capitalistic and monetarized economies, whereas in the East, agrarian bureaucracies, rooted in the rural and military aristocracy, emerged, ruling over enormous expanses of land. According to Perry Anderson (1974), the eastern absolutist state was a means of consolidating serfdom in a setting devoid of autonomous urban communities and urban resistance, which curbed any possibilities for a politically liberal movement (195). A complex machinery of repression of the peasants, much greater than the repressive powers found in the western absolutist states, was launched and the extreme militarization and political supremacy of the nobles created a large gap in power between the nobility and the weak, undeveloped towns. This gap was mainly caused by a great crisis that struck European economies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which required that a new order be established from above, mainly by force, or, in the words of Tilly (1992), in a “coercion-intensive” mode (30). The economic crisis, which eventually led to centralized, militaristic eastern states, such as the Habsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties, also influenced the western absolutist states. These political systems, based on a more advanced and powerful feudal aristocracy, forced the eastern nobility to adopt equivalent centralized state administration in order to survive. Sweden was amongst these threatening powers, despite its small population, weak towns, and rudimentary economic force, and Warsaw, Berlin, Dresden, and Prague all fell to the Swedish cavalry. Perry Andersen (1974) has called this threat or pressure the formative shock of eastern absolutism,
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which provoked The Great Elector to construct Prussian absolutism in the 1650s (196). In the West, state building took different forms, but the general tendency was toward monetization of the economy, capitalism, urbanization, and the rise of a strong bourgeoisie. The western absolutist state was, in Andersen’s words, “fundamentally determined by the feudal re-groupment against the peasantry after the dissolution of serfdom, but it was overdetermined by the rise of an urban bourgeoisie following a series of technical and commercial advances that were developing into pre-industrial manufacturing on a considerable scale” (23). The threat of peasant unrest was always conjoined with the pressure of mercantile or manufacturing capital within the western economies in shaping aristocratic power. And it was these two factors that, according to Andersen, shaped the peculiar form of the absolutist states in the West. As a result, parts of the bourgeoisie and nobility were integrated into the state administration. In the more densely populated West, with its profusion of autonomous towns, “civil society” was enriched by the emergence of liberal institutions and organizations. In the words of Antonio Gramsci, the difference between the East and West was that “in the East, the state was everything, civil society was primitive and unmoulded; in the West, there was a balanced relationship between the state and civil society and when the state trembled the robust structure of the civil society was visible” (quoted after Dyson, 1980, 105). The type of state formation that occurred in Denmark and Sweden cannot entirely be placed in either the eastern or the western tradition, as both characteristics were visible simultaneously in these countries. Perry Anderson (1974) argued that Sweden was in fact a “hybrid,” since both eastern and western patterns coexisted there: the weak towns represented the eastern antiliberal component, whereas the free peasantry constituted the western component. “Swedish absolutism,” he says, “. . . was built on a base that was unique, because . . . it combined free peasants and nugatory towns: in other words, a set of two ‘contradictory’ variables running across the master-division of the continent” (179ff). In the words of Charles Tilly (1992), these “[t]win facts . . . strongly affected the path of Swedish state formation: first the overwhelming presence of a peasantry that held plenty of land well into the eighteenth century; second, the relative inability of landlords either to form great estates or to coerce peasant labor on their lands. This exceptional rural class structure prevented the royal strategy of granting the nobility fiscal and judicial privileges in return for collaboration in extracting revenues and military service from the peasantry, and of offering assistance in bending peasants to their will even though such a strategy prevailed in nearby areas such as
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Prussia and Russia” (27). The result was the survival of an independent peasant Fourth Estate—a unique political construction in Europe—which was able to achieve some governmental power. Sweden’s “absolutism” was relatively short-lived because the Fourth Estate was based on popular opposition to the aristocracy; however, when this peasant estate had gained supremacy in parliament, this supremacy was transferred to the king. Nevertheless, the importance of the balance between estates in Sweden due to the unusual role played by the peasantry should not be underestimated. It was maintained for centuries, including the first forty years of the Vasa dynasty (although it was sometimes under pressure during this period) and even in the early part of the “Great Power” period (when the nobles acquired almost ultimate power). In no century in the past has either royal absolutism or noble constitutionalism claimed sole power. Andersen did not include Denmark as a case in his study, but Østerud (1978, 1981) pointed out that the characteristics from both eastern and western absolutism were also apparent in Denmark, although these were exactly opposite to those in Sweden. The western pattern is exemplified by the development of extensive trade and prosperous towns. During the sixteenth century, urbanization of the society began, and about an eighth of the population were urban dwellers by 1660. The commercial network was based in Copenhagen, which had an exceptionally strong economic position. The peasantry represented, in contrast to that of Sweden, the eastern component, as they were tied to the estate where they were born and had to pay heavy dues to the aristocratic landlord during the period of 1733 to 1788. The aristocracy, however, never acquired the economic and political power of their eastern counterparts, since it was the monarchy together with the clergy that held direct control over the peasantry. Denmark and Sweden are thus two countries that can be seen as “hybrids” between the two types of European absolutist states and also as representing two contrasting types. Swedish “absolutism” was never stable institutionally and was abandoned early. The country was characterized by a weak urban economy and thus a backward commercial capitalism. The landed aristocracy never constituted a powerful force over the peasantry, but rather they gained an influential role in the state bureaucracy. Substantial parts of Swedish lands were farmed by smallholding subsistence peasantry, and more importantly, the Swedish peasantry was the only social class of its kind in Europe that was represented in parliament. Denmark introduced a long-lasting, stable, and powerful absolutism (1660–1848) that curbed the political influence of the aristocracy and was able to maintain a powerful authority over the semi-servile peasantry on their landed
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estates. Denmark was more closely connected to the European commercial centers and had a more developed urban capitalism and a stronger bourgeoisie. “The differences between Sweden and Denmark,” according to Knudsen and Rothstein (1994), “[are] hardly explicable unless one takes into account the fact that the class base of the Danish state differed from that of the Swedish state and that the former faced much more serious external threats than the latter. Both its class base—with the important bourgeois element—and outside pressure produced a Danish state more autonomous from, but also more distant from, society than its Swedish counterpart” (211).
The State Institutions The ongoing wars between the two Scandinavian states resulted, as elsewhere in Europe, in an intensive process of building state institutions, the most important of these being the military and civil service. These were gradually established and reflected divergent paths in Danish and Swedish state formation. Because of its great aspirations for power, Sweden had, until the early eighteenth century, been at the forefront in Europe both militarily and administratively. It managed to become a Great Power during the seventeenth century, based on its mineral wealth, in spite of a low degree of monetization of the economy. Able to finance its wars by exporting copper and iron, it developed a large arms industry and extracted vast sums from the conquered territories. However, this period of Sweden as a Great Power was succeeded by the so-called Age of Liberty (1720–1772), during which governance alternated between rival factions of the nobility (The Hat and Cap Party). The consequence of this was that further professional development of the state bureaucracy slackened, but the military was able to maintain hegemony over Swedish governance. Comprising closely interwoven economic and political elites, the military rejected commoners who lacked sufficient economic means, social networks, or the prospect of military careers. Denmark, due to threats posed by Sweden, was also in a continuous process of creating a strong military. It was able to compete with Prussia in the mobilization of land forces, but the economic expenses involved were higher than in Sweden. Moreover, having the strongest army in proportion to its population, Denmark also boasted a larger navy than both Prussia and Sweden. At that time, its territories included Norway, Schleswig-Holstein, the Faeroe Islands, and Iceland, as well as the lands that now comprise Denmark. A considerable force of arms was needed to
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keep the scattered, vulnerable state unified. However, the Danish military was a much more isolated entity within the state and had to rely on royal prerogative. The social composition of the military in Denmark also differed from that of Sweden, as it had far fewer officers of aristocratic origin. Only 20 to 25 percent of the officers were noblemen, whereas in Sweden, and elsewhere in Europe, the nobility held a solid majority in the officer’s corps. The Danish nobility was not able to achieve similar hegemony because of the type of absolutism that was introduced in Denmark in 1660. At that time the nobility was excluded from top ranking military posts and denied specific legal and economic privileges. Danish officers were isolated from landed interests and their military service depended entirely upon the whim of the monarchy. There were only a small number of officers in the King’s Council during the entire period of absolutism (1660–1848), therefore they could not constitute a reactionary force in the government, as could be done in Sweden. Instead, the government was under civilian control. The strong emphasis in Danish public administration on nonpolitical appointments based solely on merit, and the corresponding small extent of sinecure office holding, is a liberal feature inherited from Denmark’s distinctive variant of absolutism (Knudsen and Rothstein, 1994, 209). In the civil service too, Sweden and Denmark took divergent paths. As mentioned above, Sweden’s development toward a modern bureaucratic state slowed during the Age of Liberty because the rival factions of the nobility made it difficult to establish a meritocracy-based civil administration. Despite a number of measures introduced in 1766 aimed at strengthening bureaucratic control over the administration, the aristocratic hegemony was not replaced by a bureaucratic one until the 1860s. The inefficient system of taxation and the continued dominance of the nobility ensured this outcome. Even when their class-related privileges were abolished in 1865, a very considerable number of upper-level state bureaucrats were drawn from the ranks of the Danish nobility as late as the early twentieth century. The sale of offices was also a much more prevalent occurrence in Sweden than in Denmark, where such practice occurred only rarely. Danish administration in the early nineteenth century was dominated by those in the legal profession to an unusual degree, and civil servants enjoyed high social status and played a “political role.” This occurred, in part, because, even though the king took personal charge of many routine matters, from 1730 onward a bureaucracy became necessary to handle the affairs of the expanding state. Jurists from the new law faculty at
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Copenhagen University dominated the state administration at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the following century, and thus they constituted the ruling estate of the country. Denmark, with its civil servants drawn equally from the nobility and the bourgeoisie, and Prussia, where the civil servants were drawn from the nobility, had the most modern administrations in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. Since merit was not enforced in the Swedish civil administration and examinations for bestowing degrees required for employment in the state administration were reduced to a mere formality, the law faculties there had become rather disorganized during this era. Denmark’s civil administration was organized as a meritocracy, but in Sweden, since seniority was the key factor in the competition for specific jobs, the nobility matriculated their sons at far too young an age for them to benefit from the education (Knudsen and Rothstein, 1994, 210; Knudsen, 1995).
The Scandinavian States as Driving Force in Education In Sweden and the dual monarchy of Denmark-Norway, education was heavily brought to bear in the formation of bureaucracies to serve the state. The historiography of education provides no comparative analysis of how the two contrasting paths of Scandinavian state formation impacted educational development. But there is considerable evidence that education received greater attention during those periods in which the state found itself in an intensive state-building phase. In the period prior to the introduction of absolute monarchy, both states were involved in education, but the renewed interest they showed in education followed a time lag in the introduction of the absolute monarchy. Sweden had established an absolute monarchy at an earlier point in time than Denmark had, and a number of education initiatives were taken in Sweden that had no parallel in Denmark at the time. Furthermore, education once again became of particular interest to the state, sparked by their involvement in the Napoleonic wars in the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Denmark, education became the focus of attention after the introduction of absolutism and during the Danish agricultural reform period at the end of the eighteenth century when feudalism was finally abolished, which paved the way for peasant emancipation. In Norway, initiatives to establish an education system were taken a few years after it had attained independence from Denmark.
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Denmark As elsewhere in Europe, in Denmark too the church originally provided education, but in Scandinavia the state, in collaboration with the church, soon took over. Unlike southern European countries in which the state and church were antagonists, the Scandinavian countries belonged to the small group that subsumed the church to the state. During the Reformation in 1536, when this merger took place, the Scandinavian monarchies were enriched by the transfer of ecclesiastical property to the state and strengthened by a close interplay between secular authority and spiritual authority. The church had been hitherto responsible for poverty relief, care for the sick, and teaching at hospitals and Latin schools, but after the Reformation the monarchy assumed these duties. For example, in Denmark just after 1537, Latin schools and a system of relief for the poor and sick, though meager, were established in a number of market towns. It was during the period of absolutism, when Denmark became a European power, that education became a central concern of the state. Absolute monarchy, as a new form of state, put different and more sophisticated demands on education—not the least of which was providing the state with elites. The university and the Latin school could no longer simply serve to pass on religious-humanistic culture. They now had to train civil servants to meet the needs of the state. At first the initiatives were limited. Just a few general reforms in public education were approved and academies were established during the early period of the absolute monarchy in Denmark. Notably, Christian V’s 1683 Danish Code (Danske Lov) contained sections on education that established regulations for schools in the cities (Glebe-Møller, 1988). The Danish government’s interest in elementary education did not result in a full education law during the early period of the absolute monarchy, but some provisions on education were incorporated into the Poverty Law of 1708. It restated the old requirement that children undergo catechism from the parish clerk. Failure to do so was punishable by a fine. However, the implementation of the Poverty Law was delayed because of wartime difficulties. At the return of peace (1720s), the Pietistic King Frederik IV built 240 schools on Crown estates, which he had divided into districts to support the cavalry units (rytterdistrikter). His efforts were continued by Christian VI, who acceded to the throne in 1730. Also inspired by German Pietism as well as the reformers around Francke in Halle, he initiated the further building of schools. Such efforts during these years did not only emanate from the monarchy but also from manorial squires, pastors, parish clerks, and, in certain instances, the peasants themselves (Nelleman, 1966, 40; Haue, 1986).
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An important milestone in state provision of education was reached with the Pietist-inspired Confirmation Decree of 1736. This rather substantial piece of legislation was the result of extensive work involving both central government and leading church figures. Confirmation was made a condition for acquiring copyhold on a farm or getting married, and children had to demonstrate that they had obtained satisfactory knowledge of the Lutheran catechism. In order to implement this decree, a Commission on elementary rural education was established in 1737. Part of its remit was to collate reports itemizing the number of schools that would be required in order to ensure acceptable travel distances for all children, the funds required to pay each teacher, and the kind of qualifications to be sought amongst newly recruited teachers. The work of the Commission, put forward in a report in 1738, became the basis of a detailed decree on rural schools issued the next year, in 1739, which the aristocratic landowners were required to observe. Due to the reluctance of both peasants and landowners to abide by the decree—an intended new school tax led to immediate resistance—its implementation was slow and difficult. Nevertheless, a sufficient number of schools were established subsequent to this decree, and it can be said that the first steps in the direction of a national school system were taken at this time. Secondary education was also reformed during this period. In 1736 Christian VI issued a regulation on Latin schools. In the towns, thirtyeight of the fifty-eight Latin schools were transformed into so-called Danish schools. The remaining Latin schools were provided with a larger pool of students, greater revenue, and improved conditions for teachers and students. It was also of significance that greater emphasis was laid on examinations. The state recommended that civil servants take over the most important functions in society and demanded guarantees that a certain level of proficiency be met. In order to be enrolled as a student at Copenhagen University after the mid-seventeenth century, the student had to take a final exam, “examen atrium,” and to be accepted as a civil servant the applicant was required to pass a final university exam (Markussen, 1988). The intensive building of a national system of education coincided with the Napoleonic wars. In 1807, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden became involved in the conflict, with Denmark-Norway on the side opposed to Sweden. After Denmark was attacked by Great Britain in 1801 and 1807, it entered into an alliance with Napoleon. After Denmark-Norway was defeated, Norway was ceded to the king of Sweden in 1814. However, the war did not in itself propel mass education, but it certainly hastened it. In fact, the School Act of 1814, which made education obligatory for all, was in preparation for more than twenty-five years by the Great School
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Commission established in 1789. The work of the Commission should be seen as a part of the major agricultural reform movement initiated by governments from 1788, which modernized farm production and led to an independent and politically articulate class of peasants (Feldbæk, 1988). In the wake of the political coup of 1784 that brought to power a group of dedicated reformers under the leadership of the Cameralist minister, Andreas Peter Bernstorff, major initiatives continued during the following ten years, including substantive reviews of all the main education institutions: the rural and urban elementary schools, the Latin schools, and Copenhagen University. However, rural education, or education for the masses, was considered in close connection with the agricultural reforms, which shifted agriculture from organic to commercially based production and tried to accommodate the requirements of the market, eventually transforming Danish agriculture to a modern, liberal business. The government established an agricultural commission of civil servants and landowners to ensure that the reforms were carried out. These reforms were largely implemented before the Napoleonic wars, which brought the reform work to a halt. In relation to elementary schooling, a new scheme was launched in connection with the land reforms on crown and private estates in northern Zealand in 1784–1786. The scheme was based on the assumption that long-term consolidation of innovative land usage and tenure systems would benefit from an elementary schooling that focused on a comprehensive and functional curriculum. A major school commission, consisting mainly of nobles and priests and established in 1789, carefully considered all aspects of rural education across the entire kingdom. The work was greatly inspired by French enlightenment ideas on education, but it was to some extent toned down due partly to fears of the possible spread of French revolutionary radicalism and also partly due to the influence of the priest, Balle, who was in favor of the more traditionalist virtues of piety, loyalty, and basic practical knowledge (Markussen, 1988). In spite of mutual disagreements, the Commission succeeded in making proposals for a national school ordinance, The School Act of 1814, which was the first of its kind in Europe—a national system of education was subsequently established. It provided for learning either at school or at home for all children, regardless of social background, between the ages of seven and fourteen. The result was that widespread illiteracy was eradicated in Denmark long before it was done in other European countries. Also, the Latin schools were, in 1774 and 1785, subjected to reforms, albeit with limited success.
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A national system of education was thus consolidated in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, and by the end of the century almost everyone went to an elementary school in rural as well as urban areas. Only a few private schools existed at this point, such as the rural nationalromantic schools inspired by the priest, N. F. S Grundtvig, and his follower, Christian Kold. However, only around 4 percent of the children were enrolled in these schools (Nelleman, 1966, 118). In the cities, private elementary schools were more prominent. In 1884, about 32.7 percent of the children were enrolled in private schools, but the percentage gradually fell. By 1899, this proportion had dropped to just 10.1 percent (SkovgaardPetersen, 1975, 58). Children transferred gradually from private schools to state schools as the quality of the latter had improved to such an extent that they could compete with the former. The Latin school, in parallel with the elementary school, underwent reformation throughout the nineteenth century. With the laws of 1809, 1850, and 1971, the curriculum and examination in these schools were further expanded and developed. A number of private Latin schools existed, but these were not entirely independent as they were under the aegis of the state, received state grants, and were subject to inspection. In 1899, out of a total of 4,144 students, 1,588 were enrolled in state Latin schools and 2,556 in private ones (82). As with the elementary schools, the secondary schools also became increasingly public due to centuries of state involvement in education.
Norway The Danish rule over Norway until 1814 ensured that education in Norway until then was regulated by Danish law. A university was therefore not established, since the Norwegian state administration drew mainly on Danish officials. In 1811, Oslo University was founded, which produced its own candidates for positions in the civil service. Schools of higher learning did exist in Norway, although only a very few, which developed during the medieval period in association with the cathedral. At the time of the Reformation the cathedral schools were merged into Latin schools, which had their own preparatory schools feeding into them. The clientele of these schools changed over time to include not only those preparing to enter the church but also those destined for occupations in the civil service (Høigård and Ruge, 1971, 30 ff). The Danish church ordinances of 1537, 1539, and 1629 had supported educational provision to the poor in Norway, but it was mostly after the
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mid-1730s that the first substantial move toward universal education began. Confirmation was introduced to Norway in 1734, and in 1739 a royal decree replicated a document that had been passed by the Danish parliament the same year, which required all children, of whatever social origin, to attend schools for the purpose of acquiring a foundation in the Christian faith. All children in Norway, as in Denmark, were required to attend school from the age of seven years to age ten or twelve. In 1741 it was agreed that each local parish should become responsible for setting up its own school, and thus schools were gradually established across the entire country. Norway did not pursue a national system of education until well after it attained its independence from Denmark in 1814. When Norway and Denmark found themselves to be on the losing side in the Napoleonic wars and had to abide with the Treaty of Kiel, Norway was ceded to the Kingdom of Sweden. Norway, however, took this opportunity to declare its independence. Sweden rejected their attempt by undertaking a military campaign against them. This forced Norway to concede to a personal union with Sweden, which was not dissolved until 1905. However, as Dokka (1967) and Myhre (1992) have noted, Norway did not immediately move to adopt a school system as a means of national revitalization in the wake of the military defeat of 1814. In fact the first half-century was a period of stagnation in educational provision in Norway, as its military defeat was neither associated with the same level of trauma as in Prussia nor with the revolutionary turmoil as in France. In these two countries the events of social upheaval immediately led to educational “rearmament.” By contrast, in Norway the social condition in the country was rather stable. The Scottish Liberal, Samuel Laing, encapsulated this when, in the 1830s, he claimed that “there is probably not in the history of mankind another instance of a free constitution, not erected amidst ruins and revolutions, not cemented in blood, but taken from the closet of the philosopher and quietly reared and set to work, and found suitable without alteration to all the ends of good government” (quoted after Rust, 1989, 32). Instead of initiating new reform plans for education, the governments were committed to maintaining the provision of education as it was, based on the Danish law of 1739. As a result, even after its personal union with Sweden, the Danish 1814 Act on Education was never effective in Norway. Fuelled by the rise of the Norwegian cultural-romantic movement, in which Norwegians sought to define and express their distinct national character as a counterbalance to that of the Danes, the notion of using education as a tool in nation building gradually took root. But it was not until the School Act of 1827 that the older ordinances were replaced with
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comprehensive national regulations that ensured the more centralized development of a national system of education. Local churches were given the task of establishing, financing, and running schools. Because of the rather dispersed rural population, this had to be organized, increasingly, in a peripatetic fashion in the countryside. In the 1830s, most children in both rural and urban areas were already attending school. For example, the proportion of school-age children attending elementary school was 94 percent in 1837, and it increased thereafter to almost 100 percent (Dokka, 1967, 278). In the towns, the situation was somewhat different. For children of the lower ranks, there was no obligatory education until 1848, even though the town schools had a longer history than schools in the country. The socalled “Free schools” were established in the towns, including schools for the poor financed by poverty relief funds, as well as schools that were free of charge. Alongside these were the fee-paying schools. Municipal primary and secondary technical schools, responding to the needs of the growing class of tradesmen and craftsmen, burgeoned in the last part of the eighteenth century. As in Denmark, it was not until the close of the nineteenth century that most children attended payment-free public schools in the towns. By 1890, only 3.5 percent went to a private school (281). Since 1809 the Latin schools have been formally detached from the church and transformed into public state schools, which are now called the Learned school (lærde skole).
Sweden During the Great Power period in Sweden, major initiatives in education were taken under Gustav II Adolf, especially in relation to higher learning. The university at Uppsala was reestablished along with new universities in Dorpat (1632) and Lund (1668). A new school ordinance in 1649 created a unified system of higher education. The first secondary (gymnasium) schools were established by bishops during the 1620s, the most important ones being located in Vesterås (1623), Strängnäs (1626), and Linköping (1627), and by the end of the century each diocese had at least one gymnasium. In 1649, the Riksdag reorganized the gymnasium and it remained unaltered for exactly 200 years. It prepared its students for careers in the clergy and the state administration and functioned as the base school for the universities (Wenneås, 1966). Since the early fifteenth century the children of the peasantry had been receiving little schooling. However, with the Reformation, Lutheran priests served not only as spiritual leaders but also as educators; they annually
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conducted the so-called house examination in which everyone in the parish was required to demonstrate before the priest that he could read and write beyond what had been learned the previous year. The ecclesiastical law passed in 1686 made this examination compulsory. Truancy would be punished by fines. Although the clergy remained preeminent in education after the Reformation, the state retained control and only delegated responsibility for public instruction to the church (Rolland, 1968, 15). Even though it cannot be said that a general duty to attend school was introduced by this law, it still implied that each citizen was obligated to participate in the annual examination. This was emphasized in a school law of 1723, which prescribed that parents and guardians should teach children to “read from a book” and to remember his/her Christian tenets. If they could not manage the task themselves, they were obliged to send their children to a schoolmaster or the sexton in the parish (Richardson, 1999, 26, 39–42). At the end of its Great Power period, Sweden entered an era of peace that lasted from 1719 to 1772. During this period, the state was far more reticent to engage in educational reforms. The near lack of state intervention during this period resulted in a growth of private schools that was quite extensive. During the 1760s, mass schooling was pushed forward by Pietist movements. In 1762, the piestically inclined Caps gained control of the Riksdag, and in the royal resolutions of 1762 and 1768, parish priests were urged to employ a church clerk or hire a schoolmaster to instruct children whose parents were not teaching their children satisfactory. Subsequently, schools were established either by clergymen in their parish councils or by noblemen on their estates. Again, however, the results were meager. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, schooling for the peasantry outside the towns witnessed only marginal expansion. It appears that fewer than fifty schools were established between 1768 and 1800. It was not before the Swedish became involved in the Napoleonic wars that mass education was quickened. The wars resulted in the loss of Finland, but the acquisition of Norway from Denmark was a consolation. A new constitution was introduced in the wake of the war, and Jean Bernadotte, one of Napoleon’s generals, took the throne in 1810. The crisis brought about by the wars was acute, and numerous proposals for a state-controlled, universal school system came to the fore during this politically tumultuous period, which resulted in extensive legislation throughout the nineteenth century. However, the universal school system was not immediately implemented. Bourgeois Liberals, who led a movement to develop mass education to create national unity, were opposed by the reactionary politics of the aristocracy, clergy, and the new king. Moreover, the peasantry themselves was unwilling to accept a bill. It was
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this resistance by the relatively powerful independent peasantry, together with the clergy and the aristocracy, that slowed the movement toward state-controlled education. A period of liberal reform swept Sweden in the 1830s and 1840s, largely inspired by the French revolution and fuelled by the rising power of the bourgeoisie. The Liberals were motivated by the desire to uplift Sweden and to promote the skills required by the capitalist economy that Sweden had just begun to develop. Backed by the work of two committees— respectively, uppfostringskommitéen (upbringing committee), established in 1812, and snillekommitéen (expert committee), established in 1825— the Liberals pushed through in 1842 a Statute on Common Schools that founded a state system of elementary schools throughout the country. More than 800 new schools were founded between 1800 and 1840 covering nearly half of all parishes. With this statute, which required the establishment of at least one school in every parish within five years, schooling soon became universal. The Normal Plan of 1878 and the School Act of 1882, which made education truly universal, mark the close of the buildup phase of a national system of education. By that time, approximately 84 percent of school-age children went to the elementary school (Rohde, 1994). Like the Danish and Norwegian cities, some Swedish cities also had both a public and a private school system. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the private school system had waned significantly in favor of the state-controlled schools. Secondary education also received the close attention of reformers in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. With the 1807 School Ordinance that replaced the 1724 Act, Latin schools adopted a more modern curriculum and began to serve a broader range of needs than merely those of the clergy and civil service. In 1849, the practice-oriented secondary school (apologistskolan) was merged with the gymnasium (general secondary school) and the Latin school to form a unified upper public school (högre allmänna läroverk). In 1856 and 1859, small improvements were introduced into läroverket and, in 1878, a new law for läroverket was passed that reformed the examination system. The state accepted private secondary schools, which mushroomed in Stockholm and other large cities. Students were approximately equally divided between state and private läroverk (Sjöstrand, 1965, 348; Wenneås, 1966). *
*
*
Common to the Scandinavian countries was that the state intervention in education, especially since absolutism, culminated in a universal school system by the end of the nineteenth century. As state building intensified
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under absolute monarchies, education increasingly became a matter of the state. To begin with, the state vested interest in education, particularly in higher and secondary education, as there was a growing need to educate civil servants for the state administration. Gradually, elementary schooling was also included. At the end of the nineteenth century, over half the secondary schools had been subsumed by the state. The other schools remained, with a few exceptions, under the aegis of the state legislation and were provided with financial support by the state. By this time, most of the elementary schools were also public, as private schools had been gradually phased out. The state, through the promulgation of education laws, enhanced the quality of the schools to such an extent that they were able to compete with private schools. The end result was a public education system comprising of elementary and secondary schools in both rural and urban areas. This was an essential precondition of linking them together into a single, unified system of education. Had most of the schools been maintained as private, for example, it is not difficult to imagine that this would have caused a major obstacle in the political effort of creating such a system. This assumption is supported by the fact that the English state was not involved in education until late in the nineteenth century, with the result that a single structure of education was long in the making and was not completed until after 1944.
England In England, for the greater part of the nineteenth century, governments rejected the development of state education; the result was that an education system emerged in England much later than in Scandinavia and on the continent. The dominant tradition that remained was a voluntary system characterized by great diversity of schools and a lack of integration between them. The foundation of a national system of education was not laid until 1870, and even then the system was only a compromise with the past practice of voluntary education, since the role of the state was just to “fill up the gaps” not covered by the existing system. This implied that the state would step in where the voluntary efforts did not reach. Moreover, the state did not establish a public system of secondary schools until 1902; prior to this, only private grammar schools serving mainly the middle classes existed throughout the country. It is, as Green (1990) points out, strange that this could occur in a nation that pioneered the industrial revolution, and which, by 1869—at the high point of Victorian capitalism— experienced as yet unchallenged economic supremacy.
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Green rejects explanations based on nationally oriented histories for this late development, which lay the blame on religious antagonisms and the mutual suspicion of the various religious societies, whose unwillingness to cooperate in government-initiated reforms stymied most legislative programmes. State education systems did, after all, emerge on the Continent in spite of similar religious rivalry. The explanation for the English peculiarity is, according to Green, again linked to the nature of state formation and, in particular, to the form of the liberal state that dominated in Britain during the nineteenth century. Britain already had gone through its era of nation building and the educational advances that went with it. The central administration was expanded and modernized during the Tudor period (1485–1658) and later under Cromwell (1599–1658), but a large bureaucracy, as in the continent, never emerged. The Stuarts failed to sustain an absolute monarchy that was sufficiently powerful to impose its will over the gentry, who later formed the bedrock of Britain’s relatively advanced civil society, not least in their role in county administration as justices of the peace. They remained jealous of their freedoms and averse to overweening central powers and inflated bureaucracies. “As compared with its continental neighbors,” says Tilly (1992), “the British state governed by means of a relative small apparatus, supplemented by a vast system of patronage and local power holding in which Lords Lieutenant, sheriffs, mayors, constables and justices of the peace did the crown’s work without serving as its full-time employees; before the Napoleonic wars, only customs and excise had substantial numbers of regularly appointed officials” (157). Until then, Britain did not have a standing army, and relied on naval power for its armed might when mobilizing for war. Britain continued to be involved in wars in Europe and was striving for expanding its empire in the rest of the world. By the end of the Seven Years’ War against France in 1763, Britain had become the world’s greatest colonial power. Repeated mobilizations for war with France, especially between 1793 and 1815, greatly expanded taxation, national debt, and state intervention in the economy while causing a shift in influence from the king and his ministers in Parliament. By the early nineteenth century Britain had become a parliamentary monarchy dominated by landlords, financiers, and merchants. Yet, the state bureaucracy remained small and there was no need seen for its expansion (158). British historians have intensely debated why this was the case. Eric Hobsbawn (1968), along with Andrew Gamble (1981) and David Marquand (1988), who are major figures in explaining the economic decline in Britain toward the end of nineteenth century, argue that
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the reasons for the limited state-building process in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must be found in the country’s early success as an industrial nation. The early industrialization was made possible by a significant accumulation of capital based on overseas commerce and advanced agricultural techniques, as well as minimum state interference in business life. State restriction and regulation of business in England was a far cry from what existed in Germany, which made England Europe’s largest free-trade zone. They saw England’s industrial success, in part, as the result of the relative freedoms of the eighteenth-century society and also a primary cause of the absence of any major incentive— until at least the last half of the nineteenth century—for any significant expansion and modernization of the state. In particular, for Marquand (1988), liberalism was not only a political ideology but also a way of life that permeated the entire Victorian society. During the nineteenth century, liberalism was “more deeply embedded in her culture than in other European culture.” What worked in the early phase of industrialization did not necessarily work later. By the late nineteenth century the absence of a state that was capable of directing an overall modernization process within the society became a hindrance to development, according to Marquand. With a social formation divided by interest groups and lacking corporate structures linking government, banking, industry, and unions together, Britain was unable to develop a coordinated approach to economic development during the second phase of its industrial development, whereas the presence of such a capability with the state was the very essence in creating successful modernization in the state-building nations such as Germany, France, and Scandinavia. In other words, the liberal principles that proved successful during industrialization were not abandoned but continued to serve the basis of societal development. By supporting itself through foreign commerce, economic strength could be established without the state undergoing a modernization process. Marquand (1988) says in this connection that “imperialism thus allowed Edwardian capitalism to survive into the new world without ever quite abandoning the old, because she made the passage to industrialize early, at a time when technology was still primitive, when skills required were still rudimentary and when it could be managed efficiently by the small scale, fragmented structures of liberal capitalism” (7). During the late nineteenth century it was this very liberal ideology that became the major hindrance to the modernization of the state. It was the “permissive orientation of the state to the market order . . . [and] . . . the tradition of suspicion towards the government and its initiatives . . . [that] . . . have
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constantly hampered the development of an interventionist state in the last hundred years” (Gamble, 1981, 84). The fact that industrialization occurred first in England implies that there was never a similar level of that intensely nationalistic and unified drive toward development through the means of the state, which was the case in Scandinavia and on the continent. According to Green (1990), England did not need to use education to pursue national development because it had occurred anyway without any great assistance from the state. That industrialization occurred at a time when science and technology was relatively unimportant for its success explains why it took so long before it became apparent to most people that education was essential for economic development (238). A small state did not have the same need for a public system of education to provide a large number of educated civil servants and military men, as was needed by the state-building nations on the Continent. It was sufficient to recruit aristocrats from private “Public schools.” “In England,” says historian James Albisetti (1983), “the lack of state regulation of secondary education and the survival of a small civil service based on patronage until after the middle of the nineteenth century meant that there was not the close meritocratic linkage between the schools and the state service that existed in Prussia” (35). The principle of voluntarism that had shaped the private, religious, and elitist schools were not to be easily abandoned for state control, since these were believed to have contributed to the global success of education. Though these sectarian, mostly Anglican, schools were nominally under the authority of the Crown, there was virtually no state involvement in education until 1833. It was not until the end of the century that major state initiatives really commenced. With the passing of the 1902 Act a national education system had finally been established. But unification of the education system had only been partially achieved, without making any serious attempt to integrate the different parts into a single structure. The limited number of scholarships provided for secondary schools implies that the exclusion of the working class from secondary education was almost total. The independent secondary schools remained more elitist than any other of their continental and Scandinavian counterparts, underpinning the class structure in the society. “This underdevelopment of state education” says Green (1994), “. . . was the result of the failure to develop a national system until late in the day; this in turn was the result of the specific nature of state formation in Britain, where laissez-faire liberalism continued to provide powerful arguments against the use of the state in education” (15).
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Prussia Seen in contrast to England, it makes sense to stress that intensive state building in Scandinavia, involving education at all levels, eventually resulted in a single, unified system of education. However, the case of Prussia poses a challenge to the kind of comparative explanation based on state formation, because here the establishment of a state education system—which happened at an even earlier point than in Scandinavia— did not lead to a similar system as in Scandinavia. Instead a divided, tripartite system was maintained. Prussian absolutism was introduced in 1648, and this propelled a long period of intensive state building. The Elector Frederik Wilhelm I laid the foundation of Prussian absolutism, building up the military, centralizing the state administration, and increasing state revenues. The establishment of the so-called Kriegskommissariat was at first intended as a sort of support organization for the army, but it gradually assumed more comprehensive duties of obtaining finances and collecting taxes for the administration. Other administrative organs such as Amtskammer and Geheimer Staatsrat were also important instruments for an ever-increasing centralization of the state. This gave Prussia the character of a militarized civil service state, which later made the French revolutionary, Gabriel Mirabeau, speak of Prussia not as a state that has an army but as an army that has a state. When King Frederik and Frederik Wilhelm I occupied the throne, the authority over state administration and the military was centralized further and industry was promoted in a mercantilist spirit. During this buildup phase, the state was actively involved in education. A close relationship was forged between the state and higher education, since the secondary schools were to supply educated civil servants for the growing state bureaucracy and technical expertise for state manufacturing projects. In 1787, the Abitur was introduced, which was an examination that had to be passed to advance from the upper secondary school to the university. The absolute monarchy also intervened in elementary school education through a series of laws. Obligatory school attendance was introduced in 1717 and, in 1736, it was determined in the Principia Regulativa that the state had the ultimate responsibility for establishing schools. In 1787, a supervisory board, the Oberschulkollegium, was established, which was a huge step in the direction of state control over education. Moreover, all the previous laws were assembled into a single act in 1794, the General Landschule Reglement, by which obligatory school attendance was increased by one year, from twelve to thirteen years. These reforms were not fully realized, but during the first part of the
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nineteenth century, a national system of education was eventually consolidated (Schleunes, 1989). The next period of reform was kindled by Prussia’s defeat to Napoleon in Jena in 1806, which was seen as a great national humiliation. This French siege resulted in the loss of a great amount of territory, and the demand for military revitalization created an acute need for state building. The state needed a more effective administration, greater sources of income, and a better organized army. The comprehensive reform laws that led to a more centralized state were implemented first under the leadership of K. Freiherr von Stein, and later by Prince C. A. Hardenberg. State administration was modernized, the judicial and executive branches were separated, and a thorough reform of the army was approved. In 1813/1814, Prussia introduced general compulsory military service, the tax system was modernized, comprehensive agricultural reforms were implemented, free trade introduced, and education reforms passed. “[I]t was the very scale of defeat and the sharpness of national humiliation,” says Green (1990), “which propelled the intense programme of national reconstruction that followed and through which the ruling Junker class managed to restore its power in the post-feudal conditions that Napoleon had imposed” (121). It was during this reform period that a public school system was truly established. A ministry for schools and poverty relief was established in 1808 and placed under the Provinzialministerium for domestic affairs. Stein chose a major intellectual force under William von Humboldt to head the division on secondary education, which at the time had played a large role in connection with the development of the neo-humanist secondary school (Gymnasium) and the foundation of the university in Berlin. However, Humboldt resigned in 1810 and therefore had almost no influence on elementary education (Jeismann, 1974). Consequently, the neo-humanist Süvern, Humboldt’s successor, became the primary person behind the development of the Prussian school system. When his bill was proposed in 1819—delayed because of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia—consideration had to be paid to the opposition of conservative powers that had grown in the meantime. Despite this, the bill maintained that elementary schools, secondary schools, and the university were to be linked together in a coherent educational structure. Special Landschulen for peasant children and Stadtschulen for the children of city dwellers were still allowed to help talented students through the school system. The goal of a school, wrote Süvern, was to create an Organismus in all parts of the society, from nobility to vassals, so that they develop their own lives and, at the same time, merge into a common whole. Stein’s successor, Hardenberg, established a Church and Education Department in 1817 by merging the two departments that previously
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formed part of the Ministry of the Interior. He designated Karl von Altenstein, a moderate reformer, as head of the ministry. During the time Altenstein held that post, from 1817–1840, a series of laws on the school system were passed. Of particular significance was the fact that compulsory school attendance was extended by a year, from thirteen to fourteen years, and that in 1826 it became incumbent upon every parish to have a primary school with trained teachers. The professional standards for the corps of teachers were also improved by the establishment of a series of seminaries from the years between 1800 and 1820. “By the 1830s there was thus a full national system of public elementary and secondary schools, which provided universal, compulsory schooling up to 14 years, and secondary education for the elite thereafter. Schools were public institutions, controlled by a complete state educational bureaucracy and financed largely through taxation” (Green, 1990, 4). Private schools were already numerically few in number. In 1861, the ratio was 34 to 1. *
*
*
Prussia had the same—perhaps, even better—preconditions than the Scandinavian countries for creating a ladder system of education. Moreover, there was a political desire expressed to create an interlinked school system, which was not the case in Scandinavia at this point in history. Yet, in Prussia, and later Germany, the public system of education remained divided. The nine-year Gymnasium was retained in its full length and other types of secondary schools, mainly technically oriented schools such as the Realschule, were established in parallel to it, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The elementary school was not made the foundation of the Gymnasium, as the secondary school had its own public and private feeder preparatory schools, which required more advanced learning than the elementary schools were able to provide. The entire system was underpinned by the social class structure in the society. A middle school was introduced in the late nineteenth century, but it did not function as a bridge between elementary and secondary schools, but was an “umbrella” concept for various types of higher elementary schools. Since the middle school in Germany did not have the same function as in Scandinavia—as a link between elementary and secondary schools—a corresponding verticality (a three-ladder system of education) could not be created. Even though state involvement in the establishment of public primary and secondary schools seems to have been an important precondition for the creation of a ladder system of education in Scandinavia, the state formation thesis fails to explain why Prussia/Germany did not reach a
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similar level of integration. Also, why the Scandinavian secondary schools were so vigorously pruned in order to create a ladder system of education still remains to be explained. The state formation argument correctly identifies the development of state education as a necessary and contributory condition for the linking of different schools into a coherent system of education, but it fails to explain the different levels of vertical integration achieved in the different state education systems.
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Chapter 3 Social Class Formation and Educational Participation
Introduction By using the middle school as a link between elementary and secondary education, Scandinavian countries were able to develop ladders of opportunity much more rapidly than the other countries in this study. As we saw in the previous chapter, the considerable degree of state involvement in education in these countries certainly acted as a necessary condition for this development. However, state intervention in schooling cannot be seen as a sufficient condition, since the German states had achieved the essentials of state education systems by the mid-nineteenth century and yet did not develop integrated educational ladders. This chapter seeks to take the analysis further by investigating the nature of the class structures in the different countries to see how far they contributed to the differential development of educational ladders. Prominent Scandinavian historians of education, such as SkovgaardPetersen (1976), Sjöstrand (1965), and Dokka (1967), have argued that it was possible to establish a ladder system of education in Scandinavia because of the absence of strong class differences in these societies. These relatively homogenous societies, they argue, consisting mainly of a dispersed, rural peasantry, and a small and socially weak, urban bourgeoisie, did not have the kind of social structure that could sustain a class-divided and elitist education system, such as existed in England. Scandinavian societies were not entirely homogenous of course, as there existed a number of social cleavages as elsewhere in Europe. But sizable ethnic, religious, and
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cultural minorities, with an inherent vigor capable of fragmenting these societies from within, did not exist. The majority of the population belonged to the peasantry, and although class differences existed within these societies, they were not as pronounced as, for example, in Germany, France, and England, since a full-fledged feudal society never developed in Scandinavia. The feudal system, such as it was in Scandinavia, did not lead to the large-scale operation of estates based on serfdoms, like those in the areas east of the Elbe in Germany and in Eastern Europe. The Swedish agricultural historian, Bonsdorff (1954), states that Scandinavian countries never experienced a sharp class polarization between small, elite classes of landed aristocrats and the peasant masses, because of the existence everywhere of substantial agrarian middle classes that were estranged from both a feudal, as well as a proletarian, way of life (25). The majority of Scandinavian peasants constituted a rural middle class during the first part of the nineteenth century due to land reforms in the previous century that allowed them to become independent of the landed aristocracy and large estate owners through purchase of arable land. As a result of this, the social and political importance of the landed aristocracy diminished drastically, whereas the social and economical position of the peasantry was enhanced, enabling them to play a significant political role in their respective Scandinavian societies, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In Norway, since the nobility was almost absent, the bourgeoisie constituted the top of the social class structure. This peculiarity made the Norwegian society exceptionally homogeneous even in comparison to Denmark and Sweden. The relative homogeneity of Scandinavian societies does seem to have acted as a favorable factor in the introduction of a ladder system of education. There were less serious hindrances to the emergence of such systems where strong class cleavages were absent. This chapter investigates this assumption in a concrete way by comparing social recruitment to the public elementary school and the secondary school in the latter part of the nineteenth century across Scandinavia, Prussia, and England. The hypotheses is that if the relatively homogenous class structure in Scandinavia was expressed in the social recruitment to education, meaning that the public elementary school increasingly enrolled children from the bourgeoisie and the secondary school gradually admitted children from the peasantry, then this would reduce social resistance to integration and operate as a contributory factor in allowing the creation a vertical structure of education. In societies where a substantial percentage of children from the peasantry were enrolled in the nine-year secondary school, as argued by leading educators of the day, “class circulation” or, using the modern term, social cohesion, would have presumably been met with a more favorable
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reception. Alternatively, if the secondary school was dominated exclusively by the children of the bourgeoisie, it would more than likely be a much more difficult task to intervene in the structure of the secondary school, as there would be a sufficiently strong class base to protect this school and keep its structure intact. The creation of the secondary school was a part of the ladder system of education that was open to all regardless of social class, albeit, depending on academic abilities; this will be investigated on the assumption that the egalitarian social class structure constituted an advantageous circumstance. Prior to this investigation, an outline of the class structure in Scandinavia in contrast to Prussia and England will be presented.
The Scandinavian Social Class Structure Denmark In order to portray the social class structure of the Scandinavian societies, it is necessary to look at the agrarian production system, since the class structure was intimately organized around it. This system, which was fundamental in the countries’ economies, was almost exclusively based on the landed estates of the Crown and the nobility. The landed estates were, as they had been for centuries, large cooperative field systems organized around villages as the basic unit of production and following a basic pattern of tenancy. The estate owners gave the peasants the right to use the tenant farm located on the manor estate on payment of an annual rent. The type of manorial system of land tenure and peasant production, which was common in eastern and central Europe, only existed in Denmark and southern Sweden, but these peasants never suffered legal and social oppression to the same extent as their counterparts in these parts of Europe. The Danish and Swedish systems remained virtually unaltered until the period of the great agrarian reforms at the end of eighteenth century, and formed the basis of the formation of a class of independent farmers with roughly equal holdings of land who became politically articulate in the following century. The manorial system was absent in Norway since very few noble families existed there. Prior to the agricultural reforms, outlined in greater detail later, the Danish and Swedish nobility enjoyed almost unchallenged control over vital agricultural production as they not only owned the land but also enjoyed an advantageous position in their respective bureaucracies granted them by the state. The possession of the two bastions of power—the manorial
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estate and the state bureaucracy—enabled the numerically small Danish nobility of only 250 families to maintain its leading position long after its monopoly over the military had ceased. They owned about 80 percent of the land, with the remainder owned by the Crown (20 percent), including benevolent institutions and the University (18 percent) and peasants (2 percent) (Jensen, 1954). During the period from the start of the Lutheran Reformation in 1536 to the introduction of absolutism in 1660, the nobility succeeded in obtaining an effective monopoly on all of the most powerful and profitable appointments both within the state bureaucracy and local administration. Through the Council of the Realm, which together with the monarchy was the fulcrum of power in the country, the nobility obtained such a level of political influence that it brought them into constant political competition with the monarchy. After the introduction of absolutism in 1660, this influence of the nobility was undermined by the absolutist kings who launched an attack on the nobility through curtailing their economic, legal, and political privileges. The nobility, almost without resistance, acceded to a constitutional reconstruction that deprived it of most of its traditional power and privileges. The Council of the Realm, the bastion of noble power, was dissolved in 1661 and the king abolished most of the privileges the nobility enjoyed. Hitherto exempted from taxation, the nobility was now taxed on its properties on equal terms with other members of the society, and the duty of the nobility to perform military service was abolished. This reduction of noble power, the Danish historian Jespersen (1995) asserts, “. . . erased from the constitutional map the traditional concept of nobility, which comprised exemption from taxation in return for the liability to defend the realm” (55). The nobility, however, still maintained some privileges, such as the right to exact dues and services from the peasantry, but the rise of an absolute monarchy had considerably reduced their extensive political power, or, in the words of Jespersen (1995), it “. . . had dealt a paralysing blow against the old elite” (56). They lost their monopoly on offices within the state bureaucracy as well as influential political posts, and now they had to compete for these on equal terms with foreign nobles, especially German aristocrats, and well-educated men from the rising bourgeoisie and clergy. Furthermore, their material wealth was reduced when the monopoly of the nobles on estate ownership was broken down. By 1688, ownership of land by the nobles had decreased to below 30 percent, and it continued to decline thereafter. By the eighteenth century, nobles owned only around 400 of the country’s 700 manorial estates, with non-noble proprietors owning the rest. The consequences of this radical transformation were felt more by the economically weakened ordinary noblemen, whose sons had
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great difficulties competing with the numerous sons of the bourgeois families who aimed for positions in the state bureaucracy. The absolute monarchy thus succeeded in undermining the position of the nobility to such a degree that it could never thereafter pose a serious threat to the regime. Yet the estate system became increasingly aristocratic during the first century of absolutist rule as the noble landowners succeeded in strengthening their power over the peasants, whose social and legal position was considerably enervated. When the national military system was renewed in 1733, the landowners became responsible for the conscription of recruits from the peasantry on their own estates for the compulsory military system, thereby gaining tighter control over them. This compulsory system— bearing faint resemblances to the serfdom in Holstein—implied that male peasants between four and forty years of age were tied to the manor to which they were born. The bond of conscription was the state’s reward to the landowners for their role as recruiting officers. The exploitation of the peasants helped the landed aristocracy to enjoy a prosperous period, which reached its peak around the mid-eighteenth century. At this time the landed nobility was still reasonably represented in the government, but this was to change after the Seven Years War (1756–1763) when a new military system was introduced, eroding the need for conscription. In 1788, as a part of the great agrarian reforms, the bond of conscription was abolished and the landed aristocracy had to give up the means through which it had extracted its prosperity from the peasantry for many years. The power of the classic aristocratic estate system was from then on in sharp decline, as the official and judicial role of the aristocracy diminished and the influence of the bourgeoisie increased. The bourgeois “revolution” in Denmark in 1848 finally abolished the absolute monarchy, and with it also the nobility as a distinct social class. The provisions of the democratic constitution of 1849 abolished all privileges and advantages associated with the nobility completely (Jespersen, 1995; Jespersen, 2004, 55–57). The great agrarian land reforms had an immense importance for the creation of an independent rural class. These reforms were mainly an attempt to increase agricultural productivity by shifting agriculture from the organic, subsistence production based on the village manor to a liberal business that sought to accommodate the needs of the market. The European wars from 1792 to 1815 created demand for a wider market of exported agricultural goods, which the old production system could not meet. Moreover, the agricultural system was under pressure to be reorganized, since the Danish industry was so underdeveloped that it could not absorb the rural population driven off the land by the enclosure movement, as, for example, the advanced English industry was able to do after 1760 (Bjørn, 1988).
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The reforms were launched in 1784 by a select group of royal advisers to the sixteen-year-old Crown Prince Frederick. Foreign, mainly German, aristocrats who were imbued with the ideology of enlightenment, and eager to promote agrarian reform, surrounded the young king. By this time the native nobility had been crushed and the foreign aristocrats, spearheaded by Andreas Bernstorff, were able to wrench control from the conservative faction at Court, who had been dominant since the demise of Struensee in 1772. Within a few years this select group rationalized agriculture by breaking down the open field system. The result was that the cooperative system gradually was replaced with a market system of production, and the compulsory duties of peasants to work on the estate, as well as their legal and economic dependence on the landed aristocracy, were phased out. The most significant land reforms that made this possible were, as mentioned above, the abolishment of conscription in 1788 and the establishment of the peasantry’s right to acquire land. It was this right to posses their own land and a newly established (in 1786) credit bank, which lent as much as three quarters of the purchase price of land, that made it possible for the peasantry to become a new class of independent farmers, freeing them from their feudal ties to the estate (Bjørn, 1988; Feldbæk, 1988). By about 1810, when the reform movement had begun to wane, the landowners had sold half of their land to the peasantry. By around 1835 the peasantry owned between them 60 percent of the total land (Christensen, 1983, 39). The reforms had, in other words, an immense effect on the rural class structure, because they disrupted the balance of power between the estate owners and the peasantry. Compared to their European counterparts, who also were subject to agrarian reform, Danish landowners lost much more land, ending up owning only a few percent of the total landholdings. The peasantry acquired land on such a scale that they rose to a level socially, economically, and even politically that far surpassed the level reached by their counterparts on the continent. As the population began to increase at the end of the seventeenth century, the number of farms could not correspondingly increase through division, except in the most sparsely populated areas in Jutland. Thus, the pressure of growth saw a huge increase in the number of smallholders with either no land or just a tiny holding. Although their actual social conditions varied greatly, from prosperous artisans to poor land laborers, they constituted a rural underclass, having lost their mutual safety net in the form of the village collectives. After the agricultural reforms the smallholders were forced out of the villages and ended up as an impoverished proletariat, and not until the nascent industrialization movement, into which they were absorbed, took hold did they rise as a class with potential political impact. Thus, it was mostly the middle ranking farmers that benefited socially
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and economically from the reforms, eventually giving rise to a defined, self-reliant, and independent rural middle class who would play an essential political role for a large part of the twentieth century. According to Christensen (1983), their strength and impact were due to the high level of solidarity and cohesion they managed to maintain, precisely because their material circumstances and lifestyles were so similar. This gave them a powerful sense of equality when they met in the old village communities, for as long as these existed, and they had the necessary basis to continue to act collectively, pulling together when the open field system vanished in the wake of the agrarian reforms (127). This was helped by the farmers’ ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Originally concentrating on grain production, they were quick to shift to animal husbandry and dairy farming with aid from the state, which had stronger export markets when American grain exports began to dominate the international market. The viability of farmers, including small-scale farmers, was influenced by their ability to form cooperative associations such as dairies and slaughterhouses, which ensured continued prosperity and helped avert the onslaught of proletarianization. Thus, a large population of relatively prosperous farmers persisted and eventually came to dominate Danish political life.
Norway Norway had only a minimal number of large estates, few nobles with landholdings, and comparatively little exploitation of the peasants, including those who were farming as tenants under even middle-class landowners, which was in sharp contrast with the situation in Denmark and even Sweden. Since nobility was more or less absent in Norway, a manorial system of agricultural productions did not develop. Only a few public measures were undertaken to promote new agricultural production, including certain relaxations of the restrictions on the right to subdivide family farms (odel ). A royal decree in 1774 declared that the king would view subdivision favorably, because it would mean better cultivation and a larger population. Consequently, large farms were maintained in the regions of the southeast and Trondheim at the expense of the rapidly growing class of “petit farmers.” In the western mountain districts, however, the odel system broke down almost completely. Meanwhile, the sale of public land continued, and the Norwegian peasantry followed the proprietors and officials in the adaptation of better agricultural methods. Because of the absence of a landed aristocracy, land came under the ownership of the peasants much earlier than in Denmark. In 1625 the extremely small aristocracy owned only 13 percent of the total landholdings, whereas
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the Crown owned 45 percent and the independent peasants 25 percent. The bourgeoisie, including the professionals and other groups in the society, owned the rest of the land. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Crown began to sell its land, with first refusal given to the peasantry. It has been estimated that by about 1750 more than half of the total land was owned by the peasantry. By 1816 this increased to 66 percent and, by 1875, to 95 percent. The process of urbanization and immigration relaxed the acerbity of opposition in the society. In the period of 1855 to 1900, the petit peasantry was reduced to at least 60 percent. And, in contrast to Denmark, it was the petit peasantry, not the middle peasantry, that constituted, along with the fishermen, the backbone of the Norwegian social structure (Seip, 1981). Until the late nineteenth century, fishing and forestry comprised the backbone of the economy and the main source of income from export. However, these were not as economically viable in Norway, as agriculture was in Denmark. The social structure that sprang up in Norway around the triumvirate of weak agriculture, fishing, and forestry was different from that in Denmark. In the occupations of both fishing and forestry a large quasi proletariat developed in the remote regions of the country. In agriculture a cleavage existed between the more prosperous commercial farmers in the south and near the cities and the subsistence-based peasantry in the east and northern parts. Being chronically weak, Norwegian agriculture could not fully supply the domestic market and was extremely vulnerable to price fluctuations and adverse market conditions. To some extent the peasant problem was resolved by heavy emigration to the United States (Øjen, 1968; Rokkan, 1970). The result was a rather homogenous population that remained, with the bourgeoisie forming the top of the hierarchy and small-scale farmers and fishermen the bottom.
Sweden Sweden presented a remarkable exception to the prevalent pattern of serfdom found throughout central and Eastern Europe, since such a form was never established here, not even in the mild form found in Denmark between 1733 and 1788. Swedish peasants had always been free men and, although the nobility exploited them, they were never reduced to a state of serfdom. In contrast to their Danish counterparts, the Swedish nobility was able to achieve stronger power because absolutism was never sustained by the Swedes as a viable form of state. The nobles, or frälse, had attained a unique social position and with it certain privileges that were recognized by the King’s Council and later by the estates. But their
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superior social and political position was not reflected economically, since they only owned a tenth of the land. The free holding peasants already owned around half of the land in the fifteenth century (Carlson (1949) (1979); Tilton, 1974, 565). The peasantry has played a unique political role in Sweden for long; because of the recognition of the peasant’s military and economic contribution, they were allowed to form a separate estate within the Riksdag and were able to gain sufficient power to play a decisive balancing role in the constitutional struggle between monarchy and nobility. According to the Swedish historian Tilton (1974), the size and strength of the Swedish peasantry could not be overemphasized as they often functioned in the role that the bourgeoisie played elsewhere, as an agency for preserving the balance between the monarchy and nobility. In the early sixteenth century, Gustav Vasa, who seized church lands and exploited the degradation of the noble ranks, strongly asserted the right of the monarchy, but in the following decades the nobility used their position in the Riksdag to reestablish their social and political influence. During the Thirty Years War, the leading noble families enhanced their social standing as they more than doubled their landholdings and, influenced by German agricultural production, could threaten to impose a serfdom on the independent peasants. The peasantry, however, found allies in the monarchy and among the lower nobility and, using its own position in the Estates, succeeded in avoiding the danger of aristocratic “absolutism.” This defeat of the high nobility is, according to Tilton (1974), a decisive event in Swedish history (565). It took the form of a massive reversion of land from the nobility to the crown and, most importantly, to the peasantry, which was known as the reduktion (reduction). Beginning in 1680, Charles XI, in exchange for recognition of his absolute power, reduced the landholdings of the nobility from about 72 percent of the kingdom to about 33 percent, dividing the land so acquired between the crown and the peasantry. Despite this policy of reduction of noble land, the position of the nobility in the state bureaucracy was maintained, as was the position of the monarchy itself. Charles X1 and his successor, Charles XII, then moved to create an absolute monarchy. But, as shown in the previous chapter, there could be no durable absolutism. Charles XII’s defeat in the Great Northern War caused a return to aristocratic constitutionalism during the Age of Liberty (1718–1772), an epoch characterized by the rule of bureaucratic nobility in conjunction with the estates. Despite the decline of their fortunes as a result of the reduction and the Great Northern War, the nobility had, together with the estates, achieved a powerful position politically. It is because of this that the Swedish society was more stratified than the Norwegian society and even the Danish society, and contained
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a powerful bureaucratic state and landed elite committed to the authority and status of the bureaucracy and monarchy. The power of the nobility was later diminished by pressure imposed by the emerging bourgeoisie—a small but increasingly important class of wealthy merchants, shippers, and manufacturers such as the ironmasters. Although Gustav supported the nobility, he could not offer them privileges without antagonizing the bourgeoisie. Unable to obtain backing from the nobles, he was forced to rely on their support and, in 1789, carried out a further sharp reduction in the privileges of the nobility. Without revolutionary violence the Swedish nobility was thus deprived of its privileged status and had to concede a greater share of its political and social power to the professionals and civil servants. Still, in contrast to their counterparts in Denmark, the nobles maintained a strong foothold in the civil service despite the fact that it had to be shared with the bourgeoisie. Even as late as the interwar period, the nobility was strongly represented in the first chamber and the civil service (Carlson, 1954; Upton, 1995). The transformation of the peasants into a rural middle class was a somewhat different process in Sweden than in Denmark, since in the former the feudal ties did not have to be severed first. A distinct class developed here as the Swedish peasants were able to acquire land, giving them a sound economic and independent base. The government of Gustav III, from 1772–1792, in which Liljencrantz promoted physiocratic economic policies, had a clear conception for the reorganization of Swedish agriculture. In 1774 the kammarkollegium proposed a programme that, had it been carried out, would have advanced Swedish agriculture to the stage reached by Denmark after 1784. But the only result achieved was the continued promotion of partial consolidation of properties. In 1803 the Swedish government issued a decree authorizing any village in Scania province to complete the consolidation of property. The following year the decree was extended to Skaraborg province, and in 1807 to all of Sweden except Dalarne, Norrland, and Finland. In Sweden, as in Denmark, the enclosure movement destroyed the peasant village and its old communal way of living with compact, efficient individual farming units. However, a process of selling land to the peasants had already begun in the eighteenth century. The share of the land that belonged to the aristocracy was reduced to 15 percent through this movement, at the same time most of the land was transferred to the peasantry. In 1720, the peasantry owned altogether 30 percent of the land, and by 1845 this had risen to 59 percent (Bonsdorff, 1954, 27; Carlsson (1949) (1973), 113). Even though the living conditions of the landowning peasantry as a whole had improved, land redistribution had actually aggravated class
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differences in the rural areas, as a growing class of landless peasants that included crofters, cotters, paupers, and itinerant laborers emerged. Far from all peasants were able to buy land, and those that could not buy land either emigrated to America or were absorbed by industry. As in Denmark, the number of small landholders, which had increased during the eighteenth century, was radically reduced in the following century due to urbanization and emigration. In 1805, 14 percent of the agricultural class comprised small landholders and 26 percent agricultural laborers. These proportions increased toward the end of the century, but by 1910 had fallen well below the 1805 figures (Bonsdorff, 1954, 29). According to Tilton (1974), it is reasonable to argue that in Sweden emigration largely eliminated or at least greatly eased the problem of coalescing the peasants into some kind of social formation (567). Between 1860 and 1910 emigration to the United States alleviated the problem of rural poverty and diminished the possibility of peasant unrest. The result was a homogenizing effect on the social structure, and, as in Denmark, it was the middlesized holdings that dominated the landscape. A comparison between the three Scandinavian countries suggests that significant differences existed in their agrarian structures. The agrarian upper class was larger and more powerful in Denmark and Sweden whereas in Norway it was almost absent and had hardly any significance at all. The middle peasantry dominated in Sweden and in Denmark (mainly concentrated in Jutland) whereas it was the petit peasantry along with the fishermen that was most pronounced in Norway. Only a few large farms existed here and these were located in the eastern and southeastern part of the country. Throughout Scandinavia the material position of the peasantry gradually ameliorated. Their position, although it did not approach affluence, was nevertheless relatively high when seen in comparison to their continental counterparts. The redistribution of land that eventually subverted the feudal system meant that the peasantry became subject to economic market forces and conjunctures. The period of 1830 to 1875 was marked by considerable increases in the price of agricultural products, in both the world and the home markets, and increased exports, which resulted in a sharp rise in incomes for the peasantry as well as for the landed aristocracy. This provided the essential basis for the creation of a peasant class, both economically and socially. Christensen (1983) suggests that by about 1830 the peasants constituted a social class with identical economic, social, and political interests (73). Common interests, expressed through a large number of various organizations that strengthened their internal and external class-consciousness, made the peasantry a rather homogenous group. In fact the landed aristocracy or other large-scale farmers established many of
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these organizations, but thanks to basic schooling acquired in the elementary school, folk high schools, and other types of peasant-oriented adult education, the peasants were gradually able to take over their leadership. At the socioeconomic level, they organized themselves into farmers’ unions, agricultural schools, savings banks, credit associations, and so on. At the political level, the peasants organized their own party instead of becoming the major electorate of an estranged party and gained indispensable political experience through self-representation in various political and legislative bodies. The formation of an independent class of peasants, constituting the backbone of the social class structure in Scandinavia, made these societies appear on the whole as rather homogenous. The size and strength of the independent peasantry can hardly be overemphasized, because in Scandinavia the peasants became the group that often played the role that the bourgeoisie had played elsewhere, but that is going ahead of the story.
Germany The Prussian landed elite, the Junkers, was, like its counterparts in Denmark and Sweden, a centuries-old ruling class. However, the Junkers were able to maintain their power without serious opposition well into the interwar period, whereas the Danish and Swedish noble’s puissance deteriorated especially after the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to the nineteenth century, the influence of the Junkers was based on, among other things, the commercialization of east Elbian grain-based agriculture, which, after the economic differentiation between Eastern and Western Europe, had propelled the expansion of the noble’s enterprise since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The feudal system (Gutwirtschaft) was another great base that underpinned the supremacy of the Junkers. Under this system, which dominated the Prussian provinces east of the Elbe, the Junker could exercise his right to control the peasant labor force that worked on his estates. During the rise of commercialization, when estate owners sought profits in the export markets, the peasants became increasingly tied to the estates, gradually lost their rights, and became bound to the soil and burdened with labor service and dues. The Junkers’ estates expanded until well into the eighteenth century, a development that was approved and accommodated by the state through the provision of privileges (Schissler, 1986). During the eighteenth century the power of the Junkers and the Gutwirtschaft entered, according to the German historian Schissler (1986), “their true classical age.” Not even absolutism was able to curtail their
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power, as it did in Denmark and Sweden, although Frederick William I in fact declared that he intended to ruin their authority and establish his own sovereignty like a “rock of bronze” (27). He issued a decree proclaiming that no peasant could be evicted from his holding without good cause. His successor repeated the injunction against peasant expropriation in 1749. However, Frederick the Great, in the face of the Seven Years’ War, could not afford to antagonize the Junkers, whose support was essential for victory. Instead, under the reign of Friedrich II, the power of the Junkers was reinforced through a compromise. This implied that the Junkers agreed to concessions on estate-based taxation, which allowed for the financing of the Prussian army, in return for expanded noble power. Hence, the Junkers received through the state a prominent position in the state bureaucracy and military, and they were guaranteed monopoly over estate ownership. The state transformed their land into entailed estates, provided them with exclusive credit institutions backed by state subsidies, and last, but not least, allowed them to further expand the Gutwirtschaft. The peasants were reduced to a life in serfdom, but in the north and south they were victims of exploitation less harsh than in the east. The power of the Junkers, with their high revenues and profits from the favorable agricultural production in the last third of the eighteenth century, amounted to a “military agrarian complex” that lasted well into the following century (Hamerow, 1958, 44). Conscription, which in Germany had been enforced since the Middle Ages, was abolished, but at a later time than in Scandinavia and with significantly different consequences. During the period of 1804 and 1811, the German Länder adopted a program of rural emancipation that would finally transfer the noble-serf relationship into a landlord-tenant system. Prussia was the last state to embark on a peasant emancipation programme. Between 1799 and 1806, Frederick William III pursued rural reform by manumitting many of the serfs on the royal domains and commuting their servile obligations into rents. The Stein ministry issued an edict that ended hereditary servitude and declared land a free commodity that all citizens regardless of class could purchase. But not until Hardenberg became head of the Prussian ministry did the government approach the task of dividing the land between the former landlords and peasants. A law was passed in 1811 that dealt with property relationship, but it was in fact conservative in measure. As the open field system was disappearing, the peasants’ scattered parcels of land were transformed into compact farms and progressive landowners adopted new agricultural methods and crop specialization. However, the laws of 1807 and 1811 that allowed non-nobles to own noble estates widened the social basis and consolidated the economic power of the Junkers. Despite a period of crises during the 1820s resulting from
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forced property transfer, during which only the most viable and economically successful estates survived, the Junkers attained, during the 1850s and 1860s, the historical peak of their economic power. They retained their domination almost intact throughout the century. The state employed protective tariffs in an effort to shield them from sharp conjunctures and changes, starting in the mid-1870s and during the agrarian depression of 1893–1894. The Junkers abetted this through the acquisition, between 1820 and 1860, of peasant farms that were absorbed into their large estates and which were cultivated by an increasingly property-less proletariat. The social cohesion of the peasantry began to weaken as a widening chasm developed between the wealthier peasants who were able to survive the reform and those who were absorbed into the rural proletariat. In the north and east the small farmer succumbed first to the pressure exerted by the large estates, since his share in the division of land was not sufficient to survive. Unable to cultivate his land profitably, he was eventually forced to sell out and become a laborer on the land of the Junker. Large peasant holdings were also swallowed up, particularly in Prussia. This is in stark contrast to the developments in Denmark, where peasants operating in a tenure system made family cultivation both feasible and profitable. The consequence of the German situation was that peasant ownership of land diminished and a large, landless, agricultural proletariat grew. This preempted any movement by the peasants toward organizing their own political party and, when they received voting rights, they supported the parties in which the Junkers played a prominent role (Puhle, 1986; Mygind, 1988; Olsen, 1988). According to Hamerow (1958), the rulers dealt with land reform by legislation, ignoring its political and social consequences (55). Had the state protected the freedom of the rural population, agrarian class differences would not have assumed such a deep schism.
England The English aristocracy was able to sustain its power throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in the mid-Victorian period from 1850 to 1868, as the greatest noble power in Europe. As Arno Mayer (1981) has noted, “on the whole, the aristocracy remained landed and accounted for England’s most substantial fortunes. Intensively loyal to the Crown, Church and Empire, it occupied important political and bureaucratic posts and constituted the backbone of die hard conservatism” (89). The aristocracy dominated both the House of Lords and the Commons as well as the civil administration, and it was only in the interwar period that men from the upper middle class were able to penetrate these institutions of power,
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except for the House of Lords, which continued to be the domain of the aristocracy. The significant British tradition of nonprofessional administration, referred to by Max Weber as Honoratiorenverwaltung, accounts for the fact that an absolutist-bureaucratic state was never established in Great Britain (Perkin, 1969). The material wealth supporting the political power of the aristocracy was enormous. In 1873, less than 7000 aristocrats out of a population of nearly 32 million owned 80 percent of the land in the British Isles. Even after the sale of land owned by the aristocracy in the period of about 1869 to 1914, half of the land was still in aristocratic hands, which, seen in a European context, was still a proportionally large share (Mayer, 1981, 25–26). Furthermore, a good part of the aristocracy achieved, through close connections to the urban business elite, substantial incomes from properties and mineral reserves. They also gained economic advantages from the government through tariff protection, transport support, cheap credit, and reduced tax. Intertwinement with business made the aristocracy exceptionally wealthy. In contrast to the Junkers, the English ruling class was not solely “agrarians”; they were just as much entrepreneurs as they were landowners. The wealth the ruling class created in industry depended on the laborers, of which they were hardly lacking. The class of laborers expanded as a consequence of the enclosure movement. During the sixteenth century, aristocratic landlords encroached upon the land over which the manorial peasants had common rights. The peasants were thus deprived of their rights of cultivation in the open field as well as the use of common land. The enclosure movement had gathered considerable force by around 1760, peaking during the Napoleonic wars, to fade out after 1832. The civil war itself had eliminated the king as the protector of the peasantry against the encroachment of the landed upper classes. The Tudor and Stuart bureaucracies were not particularly effective, and subsequently, after the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, England was governed through Parliament, on a firm basis of landowner power. However, this did not imply that the king was without power, but that he did not attempt to interfere with the advance of enclosures. Thus the fate of the peasants was left to the local government, which was even more firmly in the hands of the gentry and titled aristocracy than it was before. The great landlords absorbed the common lands of the villages, to which the peasants had lost rights through enclosure. Thus, the large estates became even larger and were operated increasingly on commercial principles and rationalized cultivation. “The enclosures,” says Barrington Moore (1966), “were the final blow that destroyed the whole structure of English peasant society embodied in the traditional village” (21). Moore argues that
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the intrusion of commerce into a peasant community generally set in motion the concentration of land in fewer hands (26). This tendency was noticeable in England, he claims, at least as early as the sixteenth century, and is certainly also true in the case of Germany, as demonstrated above. However, this assumption seems to contradict the experiences in Denmark and Sweden, as the commercialization there appears to have been a boon for peasants to acquire land. For them this was so economically profitable that it allowed an independent class of farmers with political potential to rise. In England, the enclosure movement resulted in a class of propertyless, poor rural laborers that increased in size rapidly during the nineteenth century. “Looking back over the enclosure movement as a whole . . .” Moore (1966) states “. . . together with the rise of industry, the enclosures greatly strengthened the larger landlords and broke the back of the English peasantry, eliminating them as a factor from British political life” (28). In contrast to Scandinavia, in England the rural underclass could be absorbed by industry, which started to grow in the eighteenth century. Industrialization expanded in response to overseas exploration and conquests, which had produced significant capital. Expansive markets and trading networks were organized that could supply raw materials to the new industries. The enclosing of the common land did not force an exodus of labor from the land, Andrew Gamble (1994) argues, but it did mean that in many areas the choice of employment came to be between wage labor on the land or wage labor in the new industries. “The scope for economic independence, whether as smallholder or artisan, steadily narrowed as capital accumulation got under way. A class of labourers began to be created who where free to sell their labour power on the market, but were also free from ownership of means of production that alone could ensure their independence” (75–76). This transformation quickly made the industrial working class a majority in British society, and consequently, no class of peasants or smallholders could provide the social basis for a political party against the interest of the working class. The superiority of British industry over all competitors in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the huge wealth it created for the propertied class on the basis of the vast labor force available to them, made the social class differences in the British society enormous.
Social Class and Education In contrast to the English and German social class structure, the Scandinavian class structure can be seen as relatively homogenous,
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especially vis-à-vis the decline of aristocratic power, the rise of an independent class of farmers, and a weak bourgeois class. Even though class differences certainly existed in these countries between these groups, they were not as pronounced as in Germany and England. The assumption set at the beginning of this chapter was that the relatively egalitarian social class structure in Scandinavia was propitious for the development of a three-ladder system of education. In the case that the children of the peasantry were rather well represented in the bourgeoisie-dominated secondary school, then arguments for creating a school system based on social class would have been more difficult to maintain. On the contrary, it would presumably have contributed to the notion that secondary education should be open to all in spite of social class background. This assumption will be investigated on the basis of mainly nineteenth-century statistics concerning the social intake mix in secondary schools. There is variation from country to country regarding how much statistics are available on social recruitment to the secondary school. In Denmark there are two statistics compiled by Adolph Jensen and Nina Rasmussen. Jensen and Rasmussen mapped the social background of the children from 1885 to 1899 in the Karaktererne ved Afgangseksamen ved de Lærde Skoler, which was later published in the section called “Meddelelser” in Nationaløkonomisk Tidsskrift (1900). Bang, who continued the work after Jensen and who has a slightly different categorization of the social groups than Jensen, concentrated on five-year periods from 1855 to 1884, and this work is published in Nationaløkonomisk Tidsskrift (1901). Together they give a good picture of the social recruitment from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of it. In Sweden, statistics exist for the years 1885 and 1887 in Studier rörande den studerande ungdommens geografiske och sociale herkomst by P. Dahn (1936). A survey of the social background of Norwegian secondary students starting from 1813 and presented in twelve-year periods is to be found in Om en befolkningsgruppes utvikling gjennem de siste 100 år by Henrik Palmstrøm (1936). Statistics on the social recruitment to the Prussian secondary school, the Gymnasium, and the English grammar school are from Fritz Ringer (1979) Education and Society in Modern Europe. The statistics covering the English grammar school, which were originally taken from the Robins Committee of 1963, are more unreliable than the rest of the statistics used. It is common to all of the statistics that they have to be dealt with rather carefully, partly because of their superannuated status and lack of scientific rigor, and partly because bringing together, at a comparative level, the statistics from different countries using different sample years and classification of social groups can render them somewhat tendentious. With regard to the sample year, in the cases of Denmark and Norway, statistics
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exist on the social recruitment to secondary school starting much earlier, from about 1850, than in Sweden, where they begin as of 1875. In Prussia the first sample year is 1875 as well, and regarding the English grammar school it is stated that the sample had been collected prior to 1890, but without specifying the starting year. Moreover, in regard to the categorization of the social groups, there are uncertainties because of fluid borders between the different social groups. It appears partly as different numbers of social groups and partly as different occupations allocated to the individual social groups. The most valid result will therefore be reached if the comparison is done on the basis of the top social group and the bottom social group. The middle group is more difficult to compare, as the statistics use different subcategories. For the sake of clarity the statistics have been divided into just three social groups and their subcategories, including the surplus social groups, which have been adjusted to this categorization. The top social group consists of the large-scale farmers, professionals with a background in law, theology, or medicine, the higher ranks of the civil administration and the education sector for the secondary schools, and higher education including the university. The middle group consists of categories such as tradesmen and teachers, and the bottom group consists of the peasantry, rural laborers, and urban workers. Even though the peasantry by 1830s was already regarded as a rural middle class, this was not shown in the statistics of the recruitment to the secondary school, where they were categorized instead as the lower classes. However, in this case the statistics do provide a relatively clear picture of the social makeup of the secondary schools in all of the investigated countries in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The statistics covering Scandinavia do not show the representation of the rural upper class, comprising the landed nobility and large estate owners, as a single social group, since these are included with the bourgeoisie. However, it should be noted that children of the aristocracy and the large-scale farmers were sent off to the very few elite private schools that did exist—in Denmark there was only one such school—or they received private tutoring at home. The wealthier, higher nobility had the economic means to provide their sons with lengthy periods of study at reputable foreign universities—usually in Germany, but also in England, France, and Italy—in preparation for their future as statesmen. Some of them did the costly, infamous Grand Tour, a quest for education that explored the Renaissance humanist ideal of the cultivated gentleman. The sons of ordinary Danish nobles were far from having the means to acquire such a cosmopolitan education and were consequently enrolled in the local secondary school, the Latin school, and perhaps, in due course, the University of Copenhagen. Since the numerical size of the landed nobility was very
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small, it can therefore be assumed that their representation in the Latin school would presumably have been rather weak. The statistics reveal, not unsurprisingly, that the children of the bourgeoisie, including the top professionals and large-scale farmers, were relatively well represented in the secondary school, although the numbers kept fluctuating. The proportion of secondary students from the bourgeois families declined in Denmark, for instance, in the period between 1855 and 1889, but it increased again after 1889, though not to the same level as in 1855. From 1855 to 1889, about 43.2 percent of the students in secondary school were children of the bourgeois families. In the following period, from 1885 to 1889, that figure had fallen by more than half, to only 20.4 percent. Subsequently, during the period from 1895 to 1899, the proportion increased again to 26 percent. In Sweden and Norway exactly the same pattern was apparent. In 1885 in Sweden, 24.7 percent of the students in secondary schools came from professional class families, and that percentage increased to 28.1 in 1897. In Norway between 1856 and 1860, about 42.5 percent of secondary students came from professional class families. This proportion decreased to 19.8 percent in 1881–1885 and then increased slightly to 21.8 percent in 1901–1905. The statistics reveal that the representation of the children of the professional classes was stronger in Denmark than in Sweden, and it was especially stronger than in Norway (Bang, 1901; Dahn, 1936; Palmström, 1933). Regarding the representation of children of the middle class, which consisted of, among others, lower ranking civil servants, tradesmen, and teachers, the figures show the following. Between 1855 and 1859 in Denmark 54.7 percent of secondary students came from middle-class families. During the period from 1885 until 1889 their representation had increased to 62 percent, but from 1895 until 1899 it had fallen again slightly to 61.5 percent. In Sweden, a similar pattern appeared: in 1885, of the secondary students, 51.4 percent were from this class, a proportion that rose by 1 percent to 52.2 percent by 1897. The children of the Norwegian middle class were represented by 44.8 percent of those enrolled in secondary schools in the period 1856–1860, and this proportion increased to 56.6 percent during 1881–1885 and yet again to 58.6 percent during 1901–1905. From these figures, the middle class appears slightly better represented in Denmark than in Sweden and Norway, but taking the possible inaccuracy of the statistics into account, it is safer to say that middle classes were probably similarly well represented in all the countries (Bang, 1901; Dahn, 1936; Palmström, 1933). The lowest group in the social class structure, consisting of children of the peasantry and workers, were, of course, much less well represented. The proportion of secondary students coming from peasant families began
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to increase during 1855–1859 until 1875–1879, but from a low base line. In the first period only 2.1 percent of secondary students came from this class, and the proportion went up to 3.3 percent by the latter period. However, enrolment increased substantially by the period 1885–1890, by which time 16.5 percent of secondary school students came from the peasantry. Thereafter the proportion decreased to 10.6 percent by the period 1895–1899. The proportion of secondary students coming from the working class was much lower than that of the peasants. During the period from 1885 to 1899 just 1.4 percent of the secondary school students came from this class. In Sweden children from the peasantry comprised 16.5 percent of all secondary students in 1885. This proportion decreased, as in Denmark, to 10.7 percent in 1897. The representation of the workers was not mentioned in the statistics for Sweden, but there is no indication that it would be any higher than that of Denmark. In Norway, children of the peasantry made up 7.1 percent of all secondary students between 1856 and 1860. This proportion also increased substantially to 17.8 percent by the period 1881–1885, but it decreased again to 14.3 percent by 1901–1905. Children of Norwegian workers, who were better represented than those in Denmark made up 3.1 percent, 2.7 percent, and 3.3 percent, respectively, of the secondary school population in the same periods (Bang, 1901; Dahn, 1936; Palmström, 1933). These numbers show that the children of professionals were most strongly represented in the secondary schools throughout Scandinavia, but that their numbers fluctuated over different periods, declining for a time and followed by increases. The statistics do not have a special category for the children of the large-scale landowners, but since this group was rather small, their representation presumably was somewhat weak. Children of the middle class experienced, on the contrary, an increased representation during the last part of the century. Especially children whose fathers were occupied in the trades made a strong showing. For example, this group made up 22 percent of the secondary school population in Denmark in the period 1895–1899, and this proportion later increased to 23.6 percent. This may have to do with the fact that at this time the secondary technical school, which by now was firmly established as an alternative to the academic secondary school, attracted an increasing number of pupils from the tradesmen class. The children of tradesmen were also very well represented in Norway and Sweden. In 1886–1890 in Norway, children from this class made up 29 percent of the secondary school population, but, as in Denmark, this proportion fell to 26 percent by the period 1901–1905. In 1885 in Sweden, 17.8 percent of secondary school students came from this class. This proportion fell to 16.1 percent by 1897. Furthermore, children of schoolteachers became better represented in secondary schools
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toward the end of the century. In Denmark their proportion increased from 4.9 percent in 1885 to 5.5 percent by 1889. In Norway their representation was even better: 7.8 percent of all secondary students in 1856–1860, and 8.1 percent in 1901–1905. The figures for Sweden are not known. To sum up, great fluctuations did not exist in the representation of the middle class in secondary education, but during the period covered by the statistics, its proportionate representation amongst secondary school populations was found to increase, although we do not know if this happened at the same rate as the increase in the size of the social class. The children of the peasantry were, of course, much less well represented, but their proportionate representation improved considerably toward the end of the century, by which time there were in some countries as many children from this class in secondary schools as children from tradesmen’s families. However, since the size of the peasant social group was much larger than the size of other groups, we can see that their real level of representation in secondary education was still very low indeed, despite the fact that they would have been a quite visible group in the schools. The statistics do not differentiate between large-scale farmers and farmers with more humble land holdings, but presumably it was the most affluent farmers who sent their children to secondary school. Common to all the Scandinavian countries is the fact that the enrolment of farmer’s children appears to have risen, and their proportion amongst all secondary students reached a peak in the 1880s, from which point it began to decline, especially just before the turn of the century. This may have to do with the fact that the technical secondary school, which was better connected to real-life studies, was seen as a better option than the secondary school, which emphasized humanistic learning. The proportion of secondary students coming from working-class families was very low indeed, and was considerably lower than for the peasant class, but without knowing the relative sizes of these classes in the population, we are unable to say whether the proportion of children from working-class families going to secondary school, negligible as it would have been, was higher or lower than that for peasant children. It is notable that working-class children made up a larger share of the secondary school population in Norway than in Denmark, but, again, without knowing the relative size of the class groups in each country we cannot say whether a higher proportion of those children from their social class was more likely to have gone to secondary school. We cannot produce a reliable picture of how the chances evolved for children from different classes going to secondary school, and also of the chances relative to each other social class, because we do not have accurate data on the number of children in the relevant age groups for each class at different times. However, on a rough estimate it can be said that
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the representation of the children of the professionals, seen in relation to the size of their social class (one of the smallest in the society, at about 4 percent in Denmark), was particularly strong. In contrast, the representation of the children of the peasantry appears much weaker than the statistics reveal, since the peasantry was the largest social group in the society. If the statistics on social recruitment are analyzed in relation to the total number of children historically in the secondary school, it can be concluded that recruitment was relatively progressive, since the middle class, in particular the tradesmen and peasants, did have quite a good showing. On the contrary, it would be difficult to conclude, on the basis of these figures, that the secondary school was merely an elite school meant only for the upper class, since the professional class alone did not dominate it. This relatively progressive recruitment is highlighted by studying the statistics of the social background of students recruited to the various types of English secondary schools. The Public school, which cannot be compared with the secondary school in Scandinavia as it constituted an extra top layer in the school hierarchy, was an elite school in the true sense of the word, since children from the aristocracy and the gentry primarily dominated it. In the period from 1801 to 1850, half of the students were of aristocratic origin. Except for 3 percent who came from the middle class, the rest were children from the trades and peasantry, children whose fathers were in the top positions within the civil service, such as clergymen, officers and professional men, and “gentlemen and ladies living on income” (Ringer, 1979, 231–232). Middle-class representation, already small, decreased even further from 7 percent to 2 percent in this period. Unfortunately, their numbers during the period 1850–1900 are almost unknown, but there is nothing in Victorian society to indicate that this would have been much different from the already available figures. It is the data concerning social recruitment to the so-called endowed and proprietary grammar schools that can be best compared to the Scandinavian secondary schools, even though these schools were private. However, these data are very inadequate, although it is known from other historical sources that these schools were mainly used by the middle class. Although the data cannot provide us with exact information on social recruitment, it can, nevertheless, be assumed that during the period 1870–1930 these schools began increasingly to enroll children from the lowest classes, but probably still in very small numbers. The more prestigious grammar schools, however, enrolled mainly children from the upper middle class. Since the English school system corresponded much more rigidly to the social class divisions than in Scandinavia, it is likely that children from small and medium sized farming families would have been virtually invisible in these prestigious English schools, at least in the better secondary
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schools. This was unlike in Scandinavian schools, where they were quite prominent, although even here their proportion was not as prominent as they should have been if they had been enrolled in proportion to their numbers in the overall population. But the sheer presence of a substantial number of farming children in the secondary schools may provide a plausible explanation of how it was possible to introduce a ladder system of education in Scandinavia. Whereas in England, with its elitist, classbased private secondary school system and accompanying deep cleavages between the classes, which the very school system helped to maintain, it is not hard to see how, in contrast to Scandinavia, it was not easy for a ladder system to develop. The upper classes and middle classes here overwhelmingly dominated the secondary schools, and they had thus no strong reason for increasing the social access to these schools, which they could easily continue to run with their own numbers. England is a good example of how the almost total absence of state intervention in education and large class differences resulted in a highly diversified and stratified school “system,” one that was difficult to tie together into a coherent system. In the beginning of the twentieth century an attempt at such a system was made by making the grammar school part of the state school sector, but the result was only a “loose” connection that entailed the provisioning of a small number of scholarships to the grammar school for academically gifted children from the lower classes. The social intake mix therefore remained largely untouched. In Scandinavia there was no such deep class divisions to hinder the introduction of the ladder system of education. On the contrary, it seems possible that the very idea of allowing children, regardless of social origin, to obtain secondary education, provided that they possessed the requisite academic ability, brought about the conditions that allowed the system to take root. In other words, since there already was a strong presence of children from the peasantry in the secondary school in Scandinavia, the idea of an egalitarian school system had advantageous conditions in which to unfold there. This idea might have gained further momentum as the elementary school was increasingly used by the bourgeoisie. State involvement in elementary schooling, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, which aimed at enhancing the quality of the curriculum and increasing the funding of the schools, resulted in rendering the elementary schools attractive to parents from not solely the class of peasants and workers. A consequence of this was that the private schools, which traditionally enrolled children of the bourgeoisie, were unable to compete with the state-funded public schools, and thus these schools gradually disappeared. Bourgeois parents began to use the public elementary school instead, which eventually formed the basis of the ladder system of education. Hence, the relatively
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strong showing of children of the peasantry in the secondary school and the children of the bourgeoisie in the elementary school appears to have been a precondition for creating an egalitarian school system. However, this assumption runs into a problem when the recruitment based on social class in Prussia is taken into account. Even though Prussian society, in contrast to Scandinavia, had a stronger class differentiation, this aspect does not figure in the social recruitment to the Gymnasium. The children from the professional class did dominate the secondary school: in 1875–1899 they comprised one-fifth of the total student cohort, but the children of the Junkers only represented 2 percent, and the middle class, overall, was very well represented indeed. The children of the industrial bourgeoisie accounted for 35 percent of the enrolled population. In comparison to the case in Scandinavia, this proportion was quite high, but still this group of bourgeois students was not large enough to dominate the secondary school. This larger proportion was mainly because industrialization was more advanced in Prussia than in Scandinavia, with the result that a larger industrial bourgeoisie emerged in the former. Moreover, there was an increase in the representation of students whose fathers were occupied in less prestigious sections of the state administration, including in schools. The sons of the peasantry made up one-eight of the total student cohort, a similar proportion as in Scandinavia. On the basis of these figures, Fritz Ringer (1979) concludes that “late nineteenth century German secondary education was really rather progressive for its time (74).” This statement was probably based on comparing his investigation with that of the social recruitment to the French lycée, where both the landed aristocracy and the professional class were more strongly represented. These figures imply that the Scandinavian countries were not the only ones that had good class conditions for creating egalitarian school systems. It can be said that the Scandinavian societies are unique in having relatively homogenous societies in the nineteenth century, especially when these are seen in relation to Prussia and England. However, it cannot be claimed that they were also unique in having this trend expressed in their secondary school, as it appears that it was more or less the same in the schools of Prussia. The peasantry were perhaps slightly better represented in the Scandinavian secondary schools than in the Prussian ones, but this difference in their representation is not large enough to claim that the Scandinavian countries in this respect shared a unique circumstance. Were this the case, the class argument, as investigated in relation to social recruitment, would have constituted a more prominent factor in the comparative theory of comprehensive education. This is not to conclude that the nature of the class structure does not matter for the development of education systems, but rather that it does not
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provide a sufficient comparative explanation. Class structures was indeed essential, but most importantly, for our purposes, it mattered in terms of their political representation and thus policy effects. For it is the political will, as will be demonstrated in the following chapter, that determines what is possible to achieve regarding the level of integration in school systems and that ultimately can explain the divergent paths of comprehensive education.
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Chapter 4 Liberal Politics: The Early Beginnings of Comprehensive Education
Introduction The introduction of the middle school, as we have seen, represented an important milestone in the development of the ladder system of education in Scandinavia. A powerful explanation for the origins of this development may be found in the role that the liberal parties played in its introduction. The liberal parties sought to use education as a means for creating “class circulation” or, in modern terminology, social cohesion. This, they believed, could be achieved through the creation of a new type of school that linked different schools together to form an educational ladder. Such a system would allow the enhancement of meritocracy as all the pupils could progress upward in the system according to their academic ability. What was common, then, to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden was that it was the liberal parties that fought for the middle school and were successful in introducing it. The Scandinavian liberal parties, which were formed in opposition to the Conservatives during the period from the 1860s to the 1880s, achieved governmental power by the turn of the twentieth century. The Danish Liberal Party (Venstre) came to power in 1901, and two years later, in 1903, the education minister, I. C. Christensen, introduced the middle school. The same type of school had already been introduced in Norway in 1869 by Johan Sverdrup, who led the Liberal Party (Venstre) there. In Sweden, where the Liberal Party (Folkpartiet) was latest to gain political power, the middle school was introduced in 1905 by the education minister, Fridtjuv Berg.
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Since it was the key role of the liberal parties that seems to have constituted a common factor in Scandinavia, this chapter analyzes the nature and forms of mobilization of these liberal parties and the significance of these aspects on educational reform. The analysis of liberalism is then extended to England and Germany to see how the phenomenon differed there and whether this may account for the different forms of educational development in these countries. If a stark contrast is evident in the nature of liberalism in the different cases, this may assist in providing a comparative explanation of the divergent development of comprehensive education in Europe.
Political Liberalism A fundamental change in European political development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the emergence of liberalism as a movement for political reform. Liberalism heavily influenced the transition from absolutist state power to constitutional forms of government. Under the political influence of Liberals, the aristocratic and monarchial power faded and gave way to new forms of political representation. However, in no country, according to Gould (1999), were urban elites sufficiently strong to provide the liberal parties with long-term control over national governments. The level of mass support achieved by the liberal parties, from the urban middle classes, the working class, and the peasantry, determined the extent of their political power. The success of liberal movements thus ranged between nearly complete supremacy in mid-Victorian Britain and almost complete defeat in Germany (5). Within this range lies Scandinavia, where the liberal parties were able to mobilize successfully into rather powerful parties. Even though the liberal ideology upon which these parties were based varied somewhat from country to country, they shared a common belief that society could be held together by secular values and common interests. They believed in private property and free markets, constitutionalism, civic rights, and religious freedom. They also maintained the separation of church and state, yet quite a few Liberals still saw a role for the church in education until the 1870s. Once the liberal parties achieved power, they fought for and were successful in introducing parliamentary sovereignty, extending the suffrage to include women, and laying the foundations of the modern welfare system. Education, through public and free common schooling, was seen as an important vehicle to enhance meritocracy and to raise educational
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standards for the entire population, and the liberal parties were also successful in achieving substantial reforms in this area. However, the liberal parties in Scandinavia have never been particularly powerful in comparison with those in some other countries, such as Britain. Moreover, they came rather late to governmental power and held it only for a rather short period, as the nascent social democratic parties were quick to bypass them. However, they were unique in having their mass support amongst the peasantry and in being able to crush the Right almost completely. As a result, the conservative parties were never able to rise again—even to this day—to the level of power they once held. Why the Scandinavian liberal parties were relatively weak has been the subject of extensive debate among political scientists. The dominant argument suggests that the parties were debilitated by various preindustrial conflicts to such an extent that they were unable to become unified parties, which is essential in exercising extensive power. A proponent of this argument is the comparative political historian Gregeory Luebbert (1991), who has sought to explain the variation of liberal power in European countries on the basis of the parties’ ability to stand united. The strength of his theory lies in the juxtaposition of a large number of cases, yielding a powerful analysis assessing rival explanations of political liberalism. Taking into account that findings are shaped by the frame of comparison, he points to various forms of conflict that weakened the liberal parties as a way of explaining the various levels of political power the parties were able to achieve. The conflicts that debilitated the liberal parties varied from country to country, but Luebbert maintains that it was usually the cleavage between town and country, and conflicts between religious communities, that tended to do most damage. Hence in countries where such conflicts were most intense, as in Germany, the political liberal movement almost failed, and, on the contrary, where such conflicts were accommodated rather successfully, as in Britain, the liberal parties were able to grow powerful. In Scandinavia, the liberal movement was subject to the conflicting relationship between the urban and rural middle classes. The rural and urban conflict was strongest in Norway, where centuries of Danish and Swedish domination, exercised through the urban elite, provided the historical backdrop for the Liberal Party’s struggles. Essentially the same development occurred in Sweden and Denmark, but in neither of these countries—least of all in Denmark—did the rural-urban conflict receive the same level of intensification from cultural and religious forces as it did in Norway. Moreover, all over Scandinavia the liberal parties began to disintegrate as soon as parliamentary sovereignty was obtained, and, as a result of this, their governmental power waned.
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Denmark Political liberalism in Denmark was more powerful than in Norway and Sweden, mainly because the Liberal Party (Venstre) was better able to appear united, even though divisive rural-urban conflicts hampered its success for more than half a century. The successive advances and relapses of political liberalism in fact coincided with the level of intensification of rural-urban conflicts. During the period from 1848, when absolutism was abolished, until 1864, when Denmark was defeated by Bismarck in the Dano-Prussian war, liberalism was epitomized by the National Liberal Party. The backbone of this party was the rural upper class, composed of the landed aristocracy and the great landowners, and also the urban elites who achieved considerable power after the change of the political system in 1848. In cooperation with the peasants, who were organized in the Liberal Party, the National Liberals established a new Constitution, the so-called June Constitution, based on the principle of democracy. The Liberal Party, whose electoral base consisted mainly of middlesized farmers, was established prior to the change of the system, in 1846, and was subsequently to become the most powerful of the liberal parties. They achieved a near majority in every government from 1848 until the revision of the Constitution in 1866. The party was rooted in a peasant organization called the “Friends of the Peasant Society” (Bondevennernes Selskab). The political program of this society sought the enhancement of social and political equality for the peasant class through the reform of military obligations, the commutation of leaseholds into freeholds, the end of villeinage, and better education in rural areas. From 1841—when the National Liberals became closely involved in the establishment of the “Friends of the Peasant Society”—a growing cooperation between the peasants and the National Liberals developed, and together they implemented most of the Society’s political programs by 1851. This cooperation was also visible in educational policy, where they worked together on the advancement of the elementary schools in the rural areas (Bjørn, 1988; Markussen, 1988; Luebbert, 1991). Because of their early and superior organization, the peasant society, in alliance with the National Liberals, was able to exert great influence in changing the political system and restricting monarchial power. The unrest that followed in the wake of the new Constitution, which resembled the revolutions that swept over Europe that year, was more effective in Denmark than in almost any other European society, as it brought a genuine change in the political order. The king was to share his previously unlimited power with a parliament elected by universal suffrage. The parliament was composed of two chambers, the Landsting and the Folketing.
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The Landsting, which was the Upper House, was envisaged as a conservative control on the political decision-making process, to which end its members were chosen on more conservative principles than the members of the Folketing, the Lower House. Compared to the constitutions of other European countries, the Danish Constitution was highly democratic, not only in the extent of the franchise but also in the safeguards it provided for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to practice religion. The suffrage was extended even to landless agricultural laborers, though not to those who were receiving poverty relief (Jørgensen, 1968; Salomonsson, 1968; Jespersen, 2004). Education, and the issue of linking the elementary and secondary school, was not a major concern at this time. It was only discussed on a couple of minor occasions in connection with the Constitution. The education minister, Madvig, said in a speech in parliament in 1850 that he felt both “love for higher scientific education and common education”; but his declared love for both secondary schools and elementary schools did not lead to any attempt to link them together in an integrated system. On the contrary, he stated, on a later occasion, that in his time as a minister no one had tried to warp the education system by artificial links and relaxation of academic standards. In his opinion, which was not unusual at the time, a sharp distinction should be upheld between the elementary school, which every child in the nation should attend, and the secondary school, which was only for the select few (Skovgaard-Petersen, 1967, 88). The coalition between the Liberal Party and the National Liberals, based on the alliance of peasants and urban elites, lasted until 1866, and it would have lasted longer had the class alliance been maintained. Were it not for the fact that this alliance broke down, Luebbert (1991) asserts “liberalism in Denmark would have had a long run of political dominance” (73). However, this was not to be the case. It is clear that the liberal success the peasants achieved was extraordinary, but it also isolated them. The political agitation for universal suffrage planted the seeds of a split between the Liberal Party and the National Liberals. The National Liberals had supported a free Constitution in Denmark in the late 1830s and 1840s, at a time when the peasants still remained loyal to the absolutist state. When the peasants campaigned for universal suffrage in 1848 and 1849, the National Liberals were not enthusiastic about it, but they chose to support the peasants anyway since they had common enemies—the aristocratic landowners and the elite bureaucrats who were organized in the Conservative Party and dominated the state administration. During the revision of the Constitution in 1866, which resulted in a conservative Upper House, the conflict between rural and urban interests resulted in a serious setback for political liberalism. The conservative
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landowners were able to achieve power after Denmark’s defeat to Bismarck, in which the two Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were lost to Prussia. This marked the end of National Liberalism, whose leaders were blamed for unsuccessfully leading the country into war with the militarily superior Prussia. The peace treaty annihilated the National Liberals as a political party, and in 1865 the king appointed a new government made up mostly of landowners. Government was dominated during the following three decades by a combination of landed aristocrats, bureaucratic elites, and the remnants of the increasingly conservative National Liberals. The period was marked by increased political animosity and a long and bitter constitutional struggle between the large and small farmers, which began in 1865. Immediately following the appointment of the new government, a political dialogue began between it and the leader of the Liberal Party, I. A. Hansen. He had a majority in the Lower House and sought to forge a cross-party alliance to unite the population behind the government’s efforts to find a way out of the bankruptcy caused by the war. Part of the discussion was about how to enforce a constitutional change that would erect a conservative bastion against any repetition of the military disaster. Offering promises of increased political influence, the head of the government, Count C. E. Frijsenborg, persuaded I. A. Hansen to support the revision of the Constitution of 1849, which transformed the Upper House into a genuinely conservative political force. The landowners that now dominated the Upper House were in a position to block any progressive proposals from the Lower House. However, in return for their acceptance of the new constitution, the farmers expected increased political power, which they did not receive. Because they were denied political influence through concession, they adopted a strategy of confrontation. In 1870 they reformed the Liberal Party and then won a majority in the Lower House in 1872. At the same time, the landowners and the remnants of the National Liberals established a new right-wing party. Even though the Liberals won a majority of the votes by the electorate for the Lower House—as they continued to do after 1872—they were not allowed to form a government, as the king and Conservatives did not believe that common peasants, with lesser education, would be capable of leading a government. Instead, in 1875, the large estate owner, J. B. S. Estrup, who was leader of the Conservatives, was appointed by the king as the leader of the government, notwithstanding the wishes of the majority of farmers. For the next nineteen years Estrup was an immense adversary to the Liberal Party. Consequently, their strategy became one of exhausting Estrup’s government through obstruction. They simply voted out every governmental proposal in the Lower House. Thus Estrup was forced to govern on the
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basis of provisional budgets from 1885 to 1894. He also sought to foster a division within the Liberal Party by deciding to increase the armed forces as protection against Germany, which most politicians on the Right also thought to be essential. Under the provisional budgets, the government received large tax revenues, but these remained largely unused because of the Liberal Party’s obstruction of the legislation that permitted activities that would have incurred new public expenditure (Salomonsson, 1955; Jørgensen, 1968; Luebbert, 1991). More fundamentally, according to Luebbert (1991), this struggle can be seen as a long march to rebuild the urban-rural alliance that had been shattered in the 1850s. The rightist governments survived for so long because they could manipulate divisions within the Liberal Party (77). The political deadlock was broken only after 1894, when a compromise was reached between the Right and the Left. The Liberal Party had to accept the fortifications around Copenhagen and, in return, the government would cease its provisional measures. Estrup made way for a more moderate conservative leader whom the Liberal Party could accept. The compromise was supported by the moderate wing of the Liberal Party but opposed by the conservative wing. However, the Liberal Party was able to act more coherently, not because the moderate wing and conservative wing of the Liberal Party came to an accord, but because a growing faction of urban radicals, who came to be known in the early 1890s as the Reform Liberals (Reform Venstre), made the conservative wing superfluous. The Reform Liberals and their Social Democratic allies were able to win a majority of the Folketing seats in the election of 1895, despite the fact that the Moderates and the Right collaborated during the election. This process of realignment between rural and urban interests allowed the Reform Liberals to bridge the gap between town and country. It was not until the 1880s that the Liberal Party was able to break through the urban barrier, because the Right, hitherto, completely controlled the cities. Their power over the cities was sufficiently strong to uphold the urban-rural divide. Even workers living in the cities voted overwhelmingly for the Right. For example, in Copenhagen, 40 percent of the right-wing votes came from the working class (Luebbert, 1991, 78). However, this changed completely with the establishment of the Social Democratic Party in the 1880s, when workers shifted their alliance from the Right to the Social Democrats. They did not pause to support the Liberals unless it was endorsed by the workers party. The Liberal Party did not win a single seat in Copenhagen until it began to make inroads into the middle-class radical vote and, in the 1880s, made electoral agreements with the Social Democrats. In 1884, a new coalition of the Liberal Party, Social Democrats, and the middle-class radicals, led by Viggo
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Hørup, finally won four Folketing seats, with two of them won by the Social Democrats. This new urban presence in the Reform Liberal Party was joined to a faction of the rural Liberal Party led by I. C. Christensen (Haue, 1979; Luebbert, 1991). The consequence of this was that the Liberal Party was reorganized to include antimilitary social reformers, including many journalists and academics. Hørup, who was a sharply speaking journalist and became the leader of this new wing of the party in the 1880s, was conscious that the old Liberal Party’s main weakness had been its lack of appeal to urban intellectuals, and its constant inability to gain a mass base in the cities. This more radical group of intellectuals sparked new life into the party and pushed it to take a more coherent line toward the government, but at the same time it also rekindled the old urban-rural divide tensions within the liberal coalition, tensions that ultimately would lead to a new split. However, this renewed coalition of urban and rural interests finally provided the margin necessary to crush the Right in the Folketing elections. From 1885 the new leader of the Liberal Party, I. C. Christensen, succeeded in uniting these party members with a zest for reform, and this would allow the party to appear united both in election campaigns and parliamentary politics. Christensen then began the process of wearing down the Right, which was already racked by internal conflicts. In 1901 the Right won just 8 of 114 seats in the Folketing. The Liberal Party was, for the first time in the political history of Denmark, able to form a government and, according to Jespersen (2004), “The long hard battle of the Danish farmers to convert the economic and legal freedoms they had won through agrarian reform 100 years before into real political influence was finally victorious” (69). With the 1901 election, which was called the “system change,” a new era of political liberalism began. The Liberal Party and its offshoot, the Radical Liberals (Radikale Venstre), governed until 1920, almost always with the support of the Social Democrats. The establishment of the Radical Liberals was a consequence of the old rural-urban cleavage. The Radicals broke out of the Liberal Party partly because it now supported having a professional standing army and partly because, according to the Radicals, it showed less enthusiasm for social reform in the years between 1901 and 1905. The Radicals believed that the Liberal Party was supporting the interests of the middle-class farmers, the backbone of the party, at the expense of the small holders, while they themselves sought to represent the rural small holders as well as the middle-class urban radicals. The Radical Liberals provided an essential bridge between the middle classes and the Social Democrats. With the support of the Social Democratic Party, it was able to govern from 1909 to 1910 and again from 1913 to 1920 (Rasmussen, 1955).
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The first Liberal government, between 1901 and 1905, carried out many important legislations. It established a progressive income tax, reformed the education system with the introduction of the middle school, extended the franchise, and established new labor laws that, with trade union approval, provided for mediation and binding arbitration services. It also introduced a system of unemployment insurance that encouraged trade union enrollment by fixing a lower tax on union members. In sum, although political liberalism came late to Denmark, and was made unstable by the division of the Liberal Party in 1905, it was finally able to achieve governmental power and carry out major reforms.
Norway In Norway, political liberalism made a weaker showing than in Denmark mainly because the rural-urban split was far stronger. The Liberal Party had made a successful attempt to take over Parliament from the king of Sweden-Norway in 1884. This attempt was led by Johan Sverdrup, who was also the leader of the urban radicals who provided the political vanguard of a party and whose mass base lay with the rural population. The liberal movement was united, at least temporarily, by an essentially antiurban, antielite, and anti-Swedish attitude. Given more vigorous expression since 1869, when annual meetings were introduced into the Storting on the model of the Swedish Riksdag, this attitude provided Sverdrup with a platform for building an alliance between the urban radicals and the far more numerous, nationally minded farmers, whose support would be essential when parliamentary sovereignty was successfully introduced in 1884, seventeen years earlier than in Denmark. Since Sverdrup’s support came mainly from the wealthier farmers, his franchise policy was rather cautious. The income requirement for a vote was reduced in 1885 to an extent that added about onehalf to the strength of the electorate in the towns and only one-quarter to the larger rural electorate (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967; Rokkan, 1987; Luebbert, 1991, 66). As soon as parliamentary sovereignty was achieved in 1884, these forces, which bridged rural and urban interests, started to weaken, and conflicts arose. The Liberal Party split into two groups: the Moderates and the Radicals. Despite the fact that both sought confrontation with Sweden, the Moderate wing of the party declined to cooperate with the more free-spirited, urban Radicals. It was only when this confrontation ended in temporary failure that the Radicals committed themselves to demand universal suffrage—which had long figured on their programme.
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This was successfully introduced in 1898, with the exclusion of people receiving poverty relief. The Moderate wing of the Liberal Party broke out to establish their own party, the so-called Moderate Liberals, and this move gained sufficient support to deprive the Liberal Party of a majority in the election in 1889. As a consequence of this defeat, a Conservative government came to power for the next couple of years. However, already prior to this change of government, the Liberal Party had practically ceased to govern. The Liberal Party had become so fractionalized between rural and urban interests, on one hand, and religious and secular interests, on the other, that it hampered Sverdrup’s ability to unite the party and to govern. Incapable of overcoming these fractions within the party, he was forced to govern during the following three years through shifting majority coalitions that often depended on conservative support (Mjeldheim, 1984). Due to these insurmountable conflicts, the party, in effect, had to be refounded in 1889. During the following two decades, the Liberal Party, even during periods when it had the majority, was continuously torn apart by conflicts. These included, in particular, conflicts over national language policy, church governance, and the economic conflicts over farming and industry. National language policy was riven by the competing claims of Riksmål and Landsmål. Riksmål was the Dano-Norwegian language that for centuries had been the lingua franca of the urban elite. Landsmål, on the other hand, was the traditional vernacular of the isolated rural areas, and had the support of the Liberal community in Bergen and the towns of the southwest. The linguistic divisions accentuated the regional divisions, as Landsmål was in use in some of the inner valleys of the East and along the fjords and the coast of the West and the South, but was in less use in the central rural areas and the cities of the East and the North (Seip, 1945; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967; Rokkan, 1987). The conflicts over education were, in fact, not as deep as in the above-mentioned policy areas. But even here, as will be demonstrated later, the cooperation between the fractions fell apart. The conflict over church governance, which eventually destroyed Sverdrup’s government, implied that the conservative Moderates, who offered Sverdrup the main support in the party, sought Storting approval of a law that would have provided the fundamentalists with greater control over local churches. The Radicals first opposed the government in the vote and later demanded its dissolution. Another major conflict that racked the Liberal Party concerned the economic interests of agriculture and industry (Mjeldheim, 1984, 181–204). The consequence of these internal conflicts, which could be as intense as the conflicts between the Liberal Party and the Right, was that the
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Liberal Party was not able to gain power until the last decade of the nineteenth century. By then the party was dominated by conservative farmers from the western part of the country whose main political agenda was to cut their tax burden. The Urban Radicals, who were committed to social reform, were, as a consequence of this, forced to subordinate themselves to the farmers’ narrow politics. The party did break the urban barrier to some extent, especially in Bergen, but the effect was minimal since there were very few middle-class votes to gain. The middle classes in Oslo and Trondheim, for example, were voting for the Right. In other words, the Liberal Party only fared well in Bergen. In Oslo, in the elections of 1882, 1888, 1897, and 1903, the Right averaged 62.4 percent of the votes whereas in the same elections the Liberal Party averaged 29.8 percent of the votes (Luebbert, 1991, 68). Even though the Liberal Party had majority in the government throughout the 1890s, it was only able to govern for about half this period. Between 1893 and 1895 a Conservative government was in power, and between 1895 and 1898 a coalition of the center-left and Right was in power. Because the Liberal Party was not able to overcome the rural and urban conflict, nor the religious ones, it had, according to Luebbert, failed to make a viable coalition that could sustain it in power (68).
Sweden In Sweden the Liberal Party was debilitated by similar urban-rural conflicts, albeit to a lesser extent. Sweden did not, in contrast to Norway, have to face the challenge of opposing a foreign monarch. The Swedish state had already made the country into a great European power with centuries of accrued legitimacy behind it, containing a powerful bureaucratic state administration and an influential landed elite. In Norway there was no legacy of great power. The state bureaucracy had been subject to first Danish and then Swedish power for 400 years, and the nobility, never a major force, was disestablished in 1815, the year after Norway gained independence from Denmark. The great power legacy in Sweden, along with its comparatively late industrialization, in some way explains the enfeeblement of Swedish liberalism. However, according to Luebbert (1991), Swedish liberalism, in contrast to that of Norway and Denmark, “was due less to amorphous historical traditions than to the greater ability of the monarch to deploy practical power in Sweden in the face of an ineffective liberal challenge” (69). In Norway, the Liberal Party succeeded in 1884 in establishing parliamentary sovereignty because it faced a weak conservative opponent. In Sweden, the similarly divided liberal movement faced a
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powerful conservative opponent, the First Chamber (upper house) of the Riksdag, in which the aristocrats, large landowners, and the bureaucratic elite dominated. The result was that the Swedish Liberals were slow to achieve parliamentary sovereignty, succeeding only in the period of 1906– 1917. The conflicts that debilitated the Liberals in Sweden from the abolition of the estates in 1866 until the 1880s were, in particular, those between the farmers, who dominated the Second Chamber (lower house), and the Conservatives, who dominated the First Chamber. The middle-sized farmers were organized in the Agricultural Party (Lantmannapartiet), which was established in 1867 and dominated the Second Chamber until the 1890s. They sought above all to enhance their material and social standing through a more equal distribution of tax. They endeavored to curtail public spending on the civil service, the military, and secondary and higher education. However, in contrast to their fellow farmers in Denmark and Norway, they were not committed to the fight for parliamentary sovereignty nor for the chance to govern. “We will walk together to the council door,” the leader of the Agricultural Party, Carl Ifvarsson, claimed, “but not any longer” (Nordborg, 1993, 104). The conservative imprint with which the party was marked was due to the strong influence of the aristocratic landowners such as Arvid Posse and Emil Key. Only in the final decade of the nineteenth century did a modern liberal movement committed to parliamentary suffrage and reform appear. It had its roots in the newly established Liberal Party lead by Adolf Hedin, though this party was small and insignificant at the time. The party was unsuccessful and thus disestablished. The political program of this party was later taken up by another Liberal Party, the Folk Party (Folkpartiet), which soon became the second largest party in the Second Chamber. The liberal Folk Party absorbed more radically inclined members from the Agricultural party and representatives from the urban areas—especially lower civil servants, teachers, and workers. The party, in spite of achieving political influence, was hampered to a great extend by both the opposition of the First Chamber and internal conflicts (Carlsson and Rosén, 1980). The failure of Swedish liberalism, according to Luebbert (1991), had to do with the urban-rural divide, as exemplified by the liberal’s attempt to establish the Second Chamber parliament and reform the franchise system. In fact, only in Prussia did a franchise as restrictive as in Sweden. As late as 1896, only 6 percent of the Swedish population had the right to vote. Reform of the franchise system thus became a key policy for the liberal Folk Party in the Second Chamber for almost two decades. The party continuously forwarded petitions to extend and reform the suffrage system, but these attempts were turned down by the First Chamber.
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However, mass support for universal suffrage had been growing since the early 1890s. This came to a head in 1903 when the Social Democrats and the trade unions organized a three-day, nationwide strike for universal suffrage, in which 85 percent of the industrial workers participated. Reform was finally carried out by a Conservative government headed by Arvid Lindman and received approval by the Riksdag in 1907. It was not the agenda of the Conservative government at any time to reform the franchise system, but because of the immense popular pressure garnered by the Liberals, the government could simply not avoid it. However, it was the 1906 defeat of the Liberal government, lead by Karl Staff, that seriously set back liberal influence in Sweden. In the historiography of Swedish politics it has been Karl Staff’s difficult personality— being inept, mercurial, and stubborn—that has been identified as the main reason for the liberal defeat. But, according to Luebbert (1991), Staff failed mainly because he was not able to overcome the divide between his rural and urban supporters (71). The Conservative government was, in fact, able to obtain victory exactly because it could utilize this split for its own benefit. The fight for parliamentary sovereignty by the Liberals was mainly concentrated around the Second Chamber, because Staff assumed that once the Second Chamber was given a broad popular base, then the power of the First Chamber would simply wither away. However, his strategy was hampered in the First Chamber by an influential, conservative farmer, Alfred Peterson. The so-called Påboda fraction, which was a group of Peterson’s supporters (named after his birth place), was able to maintain the power of the First Chamber, and even reduce the impact of the newly enfranchised working-class voters, by demanding the use of proportional representation in the First Chamber, and the use of communal representation and manhood suffrage in the elections to the Second Chamber. Within the Liberal Party there also was a rural-urban divide that made reform difficult to pursue. As previously mentioned, the peasantry had for some time been reluctant about the extension of suffrage, but from the 1870s onward the Agricultural Party was favorably disposed to an extension of the franchise. This change of attitude came to the fore as soon as the political implications of franchise reform in a rapidly industrializing society became more visible. Staff’s government was caught in the split between the party’s rural wing and the urban radicals as well as threatened by the ascendant Social Democrats, and it thus failed to overcome any of the conflicts. This came to a head when the First Chamber approved a bill that followed closely the Påboda fraction, while a just majority of the Second Chamber passed it. Neither able to resolve the conflict nor to persuade the king to dissolve the Second Chamber, Staff was forced to resign in defeat. The Conservative Party that succeeded to power thereafter was
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able to build a coalition for franchise reform in both chambers, which included the support of the moderate liberal farmers. The Conservative Party remained in power until 1911, when Staff again formed another government. This, too, proved to be unsuccessful because yet again it was split along the rural-urban lines. This time the split occurred in a debate on military spending, which the urban radicals sought to curtail in favor of social reforms. The military spending sparked a constitutional crisis and impeded the party—especially the fraction of urban radicals—until the outbreak of the First World War. The two elections that followed, both in 1914, were thus a further setback for the urban radicals in the party. The result was that the Liberal Party lost seats across the country, especially in the cities, where workers voted for the upcoming Social Democratic Party, and a fraction of the urban middle class shifted its support to the Conservative Party (Thulstrup, 1968). The final blow to Swedish liberalism, though it had never really been powerful, was the fast growing Social Democratic Party. After the 1911 election, the party had sixty-four seats in the Second Chamber whereas the Liberals had 102. The liberal era, according to Luebbert (1991), did not come to an end because industrialization came late to Sweden. Just as late industrialization implied a late start for political liberalism, it also meant the comparatively late development of the urban middle classes and thus also the late appearance of the industrial workers. In principle, the formation of the workers into a class could have happened more slowly than was actually the case, for example, as in England and France. It was precisely because this formation of the working class occurred so quickly that Swedish liberalism passed so quickly. But the main explanation for the failure of the Liberals, according to Luebbert’s comparative analysis, was to do with “the divisions within liberalism itself” (77).
Germany In Germany, political liberalism was almost a complete failure. For most of the nineteenth century the Liberal Party was only able to muster weak electoral support. They had some occasional successful periods when they received the levels of popular support seen in other countries. One period of success was in 1848 when the elections to the Frankfurt Constitutional Assembly and to parliaments in several German states revealed substantial popular support. Another period was from 1858 to 1863 when the Liberals possessed around two-thirds of the seats in the Prussian parliament. For the rest of the nineteenth century the liberal electoral support was much weaker. From 1867 to 1876 the Liberals occupied just about half of the
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seats in the German parliament; from 1877 to 1890 the Liberals could gain just a little over a third of the votes in elections to parliament. In subsequent elections, until 1912, Liberals won less than 29 percent of the votes (Gould, 1999, 22). In contrast to Scandinavia, the conservative German monarchs prevailed in spite of the liberal’s fight for constitutionalism and parliamentary sovereignty in the German states in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and during the constitutional crisis in the 1860s. The failure to muster a sufficiently large mass support deprived German Liberals of successes similar to those achieved by the Scandinavians. The Scandinavian Liberals were able to gain mass support from the peasants who supported the democratization of society, but in Germany the Liberals were only able to achieve support from the urban, protestant middle class. According to Gerschenkron (1943), the German peasants, who were unable to adjust to the rapid socioeconomic changes, sought protection in the form of an alliance with the Junkers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Junkers’ connection to the civil service, the military, and the court granted them an influence on government policy far out of proportion to their class size and economic significance. Unable and unwilling to form their own political beliefs, the peasants retreated behind the political leadership of the Junkers. The peasants thus achieved protection for their outdated modes of production, while the Junkers won crucial recruits for their proto-fascistic, antidemocratic, and antisocialistic campaign. The result of this was, according to Gerschenkron, that this alliance between the peasants and the Junkers permanently blocked any potential movement by the peasants toward the political left. According to Moeller (1986), “the continued political influence of the Junkers, of course, had regrettable consequences for the chances of true democratization in Germany. Their position of dominance shaped the ‘feudalization’ of the bourgeoisie and constituted a major bulwark against parliamentary reform” (7). The Liberals did try to ally themselves with the peasants, but with no success. In fact, the German peasants, as with the Scandinavian peasants, were actively involved in the early activities of the liberal movement (pre1848). The peasants expected that a new constitution would meet their material interests, and as soon as the Frankfurt Assembly was convened they sought to plead their cause by putting forward petitions from even the most remote villages. There is, as Luebbert (1991) notes, no reason to believe that the German peasants were less interested than their Danish fellow peasants in advancing their material interests through the political system (84). In this respect the German peasants were making themselves available to both the Liberals and the Conservatives, because both were petitioning the state governments across the country. In fact, Danish peasants
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had unsuccessfully sought the assistance of the Conservatives during the 1830s and early 1840s, and instead they received support from the National Liberals, with whom they established a political alliance. A similar alliance was not established in Germany. Instead, peasants were successful in gaining the support of the Conservatives, who in turn received peasant support because they were able to implement the liberal’s own political program of agrarian capitalism. Measures for commuting manorial dues, abolishing feudal privileges, eliminating tax exemptions, terminating uncompensated servile obligations, and abolishing private jurisdiction where thus effectively enacted by Conservative governments in the various German states. The consequence of this was that the liberal ties to the peasants were broken down (Hamerow, 1972, 156–172; Puhle, 1986). In spite of the liberal victory throughout the elections in 1848, which gave the Liberals overwhelming control of the Frankfurt assembly, the Liberals did not implement their own agrarian program, although they could have done so. This happened because their attention was focused on the disagreement over the unification of Germany, delaying any agreement on a new constitution of the Frankfurt assembly. The main question was whether the constitution should be based on a klein-deutsch model or on a gross-deutsch model. The first model, which implied a unified Germany excluding Austria, would, in effect, lead to a country under a predominantly Prussian rule with Protestant religion. The other model, which envisioned the inclusion of the Catholic Austria, implied a country where Prussia would be counterweighted by the smaller, liberal, and agrarian Catholic states in the south and west of the country. “It was this problem more than any other,” Luebbert (1991) asserts “that defeated the Liberals at the Frankfurt Assembly by prolonging their deliberations until long after the revolutionary moment had passed in the country at large and after the Conservatives had had an opportunity to regroup and implement their agrarian reform programme.” Furthermore, “the importance of the two competing formulas was in their forcing to the forefront lines of cleavage on which Liberals could not agree: they pitted Prussians against Austrians, Prussians against southwest particularists, Catholics against Protestants. The more tractable and negotiable issues of balance between the crown and parliament were now subordinated or, worse, recast in terms of the regional conflicts” (82). Negotiations over the unification model broke down the old left-right alignment and forced, in its place, a reorganization of the delegates according to their regional backgrounds and religious beliefs. The most fundamental divide, though, appeared between those who wished to exclude Austria, comprising the Prussians and Protestants, and those who wished to include the Austrians, consisting of the particularists and Catholics (Eyck, 1968, 366–369).
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This conflict continued into the Bismarck era, in which the Liberals shared a common cause to establish a Protestant-dominated Germany unified by a ruling Prussia. Bismarck, who fought the Liberals, was, because of his ability to manipulate the internal divisions among them, able to defeat them and to appropriate their political program—establishing the kleindeutsh unification model—effectively depriving them of the ultimate rationale for enhanced parliamentary authority. Indeed, according to Luebbert (1991), even in 1867 and 1871 in the writing of the constitutions of the North German Confederation and then the Empire, the ability to manipulate the cleavages among the Liberals was critical to Bismarck’s success. The tension between Bismarck and the Liberals grew in 1871, especially over the military budget, which again left the Liberals defeated. Thus at the beginning of the Empire the liberal movement found itself completely divided. In the era of Empire, during which Germany was unified, universal suffrage was in place and mass political mobilization began to develop; however, the Liberals faced many obstacles of competing political parties and in creating a mass electoral base. They were not really threatened by the lower classes in as much as they voted for either the Socialists or the Catholics. The socialist share of the votes remained modest (3.1 percent). If incipient socialism has been the only threat to the Liberals, parliamentary sovereignty would not have been incompatible with the antisocialist laws. Rather, universal suffrage was incompatible with liberal dominance because religious and regional cleavages, most important among the middle classes, prevented Liberals from establishing an adequate mass base (87). The most acute problem for the Liberals, and the real threat of universal suffrage in these years, was derived from the old conflicts, especially between Catholics and particularists, and anticlerical Protestants. The 1870s and 1880s saw a surge in support for the Catholics who, in 1871, established the Catholic Center Party. The party immediately gained fifty-seven seats in the Reichtag election the same year, which represented the considerable proportion of 18.6 percent of the electorate. The Liberals were largely drawn, with few exceptions, from the Catholic electorate who were urban, elite, anticlerical, and German nationalists. In the Prussian House, Catholic mandates received more than 20 percent of all seats with the election of 1873 and continued to remain high thereafter. From 1870 onward, the deepening of the religious revival and the formation of a political party on religious grounds contributed to the durability of the authoritarian regime and the continuing inability by the Liberals to win constitutional concessions (90). The problem for the Liberals was that from 1860 to 1900 they increasingly won support almost exclusively from the Protestant middle class. However, considering that the predominantly Catholic states of the south and west were also the most tolerant and, in many ways, the most progressive,
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the potential for an alliance of the Liberals was apparent. In principle, it might have been possible that an alliance of Liberals and Catholics could develop. But the state-led attack, advocated by the Liberals, on the privilege of the Catholic Church, also called the Kulturkampf, made this impossible. The Liberals sought through this campaign to both consolidate unification and to weaken their primary organized enemies. However, the Kulturkampf, as Blackbourn (1987) puts it, “left a political legacy that was opposite of what Liberals wanted. It made them beholden to Bismarck; and it helped to consolidate political Catholicism” (160). The loss of Catholic votes had devastating consequences for the possibility of the Liberals to extend their mass base at just that critical time when German politics entered a period of mass mobilization. It was thus inevitable that the Liberals, National Liberals, and the Progressives, once the largest parties in the Reichtag, where of only marginal importance after 1881. According to Luebbert (1991), it is possible that the German Liberals would have failed to establish their dominance even if they had been able to avoid the pitfalls of nationalist and religious conflicts. It is quite possible in accounting for the Liberals’ failure, as he continues to argue, to adduce other explanations, such as the powerful role of the Junkers, the skill of Bismarck, and the prestige of the monarchy, all of which have added to the understanding of the course of political liberalism. However, the experiences of other European societies suggest, argues Luebbert, that the balance of probabilities would have been very much more in the Liberals’ favor if they had been able to tie the Catholics and Protestants Mittelstände together in a coalition (90). The only way for Liberals all over Europe to gain power in the late nineteenth century was through mass support. Without it, they were never able to succeed, and with it, they could even encounter obstacles and overcome them. According to Dahrendorf (1967), a greater level of modernization would presumably have produced a larger middle strata and a more integrated society, but Luebbert argues that this would not have produced a stronger liberal movement in any event. An absence of national unification would have produced more homogenous societies. The Prussian middle classes and the Prussian liberal community were distinctly more coherent than the German middle classes and liberal community. If Germany had remained divided, Liberals in Prussia would have been much more likely to impose their hegemony on Prussia. The same can be said of Liberals in other German states. Sweden and Denmark had longer national histories and higher levels of political integration than did Germany, yet Liberals in Sweden and Denmark suffered from the sort of debilitating inherited divisions that crippled Liberals in Germany. Ultimately, the way in which the cleavage became politically
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important is the issue. That is to say, whether they mainly divided the middle classes from within or divided them from the Conservatives. When the latter was the case, the cleavage actually served to reinforce the relationship between the middle classes and aided the liberal movement and hegemony. The preindustrial cleavages divided liberal communities and the middle classes and debilitated Liberals in their pursuit of parliamentary sovereignty and an adequate mass base. They thereby undermined the liberal quest for dominance (Luebbert, 1991, 108).
England In contrast to Germany, liberalism was very powerful in Britain. Facing the same challenge of achieving mass support, the British Liberals had to look to the urban working class, since the peasantry, which formed the backbone of the continental social structure, had long since largely disappeared in Britain due to the enclosure movement during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The result was an increasingly landless peasantry who was transformed into rural waged laborers or sought occupation in the industrial towns of England. This ultimately led to the formation of a distinctive and large urban working class from which both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party sought support. In Britain, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party alternated in power from the passage of the Second Reform Act in 1867 until the First World War. Unlike liberal parties elsewhere, in Britain the Liberal Party was able to develop an alliance with the emerging, independent workingclass parties. Liberals made concessions in order to cooperate with the working class and had little to fear from this since their natural supporters, the middle classes, were not politically divided by antagonisms rooted in religious, regional, linguistic, and urban-rural conflicts. “Indeed,” says Luebbert (1991), “these pre-industrial cleavages, to the extent that they had any importance, served to reinforce the liberal appeal to the middle classes and helped to rally a majority, or effective majority, of the middle classes to liberalism” (7). The liberal hegemony that existed in Britain created an interclass coalition that both validated the liberal order and working-class participation in it. The failure of Liberals in Germany and Scandinavia to establish their prewar hegemony was caused by their inability to overcome preindustrial cleavages within the middle classes. Having failed to establish hegemony, they found the mobilization of the working class, rooted in socialist ideology, threatening—so threatening, in fact, that they refused to ally themselves with socialist movements at all. This was particularly true in Germany.
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In Britain, an alliance between Liberals and sections of the working class went back to the 1830s. However, the critical years were those after 1867 when the Second Reform Act, which enfranchised about two-thirds of the urban male working class, was introduced. Both the Liberals and Conservatives were keen to gain working-class votes. Workers participated in electoral matters for the first time in 1874, which was essential for the Conservatives in winning the election. However, it was only in the years between 1871 and 1875 that the majority of workers supported the Conservatives, who appeared to be most responsive to trade union demands, but thereafter they supported the Liberals. Workers were, in effect, welding an alliance with radicalism that was based on temperance, nonconformity, secular education, and Gladstone’s early advocacy of franchise reform. Still a substantial minority of workers would continue to vote for the Conservatives after the party had renewed itself. Often they would vote in deference to the political views of their employer, as did workers voting for the Liberals (Luebbert, 1991, 15). The Third Reform Act of 1884 enfranchised a substantial number of rural laborers and brought more competition for working-class support between the Conservatives, advocating trade protection from foreign competition, and the Liberals, arguing for free trade and lower food prices. In other words, both parties courted the working-class vote and allowed workers some influence in selecting candidates for the elections and gave them the right to express their views publicly. The effort of the Tories, forming the Conservative Party, to solicit the worker vote was not matched by that of the conservative parties elsewhere in Europe, probably due to the fact that working-class integration was more advanced in Britain than in any other society. However, the success of the Liberal Party was to be found in the support it achieved amongst key sections of the working class. The alliance that the Liberals formed with both workers and trade unions worked so effectively until the end of the nineteenth century that advocates for a separate working-class party fought an almost futile battle. The electoral coalition between the Liberals and the workers was made entirely at the local level, and in these trade union branches and councils the organization of trade unions played a significant role. The workers agreed to endorse and campaign for liberal candidates, but the number of their candidates who ran for Parliament grew very slowly. For example, in 1880, only eight members of Parliament were from the working class (17). Liberal trade unionists, generally satisfied with having their labor interests represented by Liberals, often rejected working-class candidates. Nor did workers always show keen interest in being represented in Parliament. Many workers, in fact, remained either apolitical or
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reformists, since they remained deferent to the classes above them. They were not seriously dissatisfied with the advancement of material wealth and political influence. According to Luebbert (1991), the electorate, especially just prior to the end of the century, did not define the political world much in terms of class. Rather it saw its local and particular interest and the religious preferences between the Tories and the Liberals as more important than those between the working classes and other classes. Religious affiliation and the particular interests of a trade union or industry were better indicators of how a worker would vote than was a worker’s class background (17). The durability of the alliance between the Liberals and the workers were maintained due to an increasingly assertive working class and the competing Tory appeal to the middle classes. This caused a debate among the Liberals as to how the alliance could be maintained. Two conflicting solutions were discussed, which either directed attention toward or away from the material needs of the working class. Joseph Chamberlain, the leader of the Birmingham Radicals, proposed that the material wealth of the workers would ensure their support in the future, while Gladstone maintained that politics should steer away from the needs of the working class, because state interventional social reform would abolish the foundations of self-help and independence in the British society. Instead Gladstone appealed to the tradition of democratic internationalism that was common to both middle-class and working-class liberalism. This viewpoint provided a unifying force for the Liberals, enabling them to evade any resolution of the problems of domestic policy. But the result of this evasion was the alienation, rather than accommodation, of the working classes. Democratic internationalism did have an appeal, but it was an insufficient “glue” to bind Liberals and workers together for long. Gladstone’s final attempt to keep the Liberals and workers together came with his Newcastle Program of 1892, which included measures of social reform, but this attempt was too late and weak. With the departure of Gladstone in 1894, a third effort to attach the workers to the Liberals, which was also unsuccessful, was attempted. In this attempt, the so-called “New Liberals,” mainly professional people, journalists, and civil servants, produced an alternative to socialism based on social harmony that would be more acceptable to the growing number of working-class activists who renounced Gladstone’s ideology of self-help. The New Liberals grounded their solutions to the problems of poverty in exhaustive attempts through great scientific surveys to develop an ideology of “social science” that would provide scientific remedies for all the social ills. After the Liberal landslide of 1906, reforms were derived from New Liberalism’s collectivist
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ideology. Thus, school meals for children, medical inspection in schools, old age pensions, and industrial accident insurance schemes were introduced (Sykes, 1997; Gamble, 1984). According to Luebbert (1991), the importance of New Liberalism for working-class politics lay not in its success but in its ability to introduce social reforms that ensured state action against poverty. From the 1890s onward, the New Liberalism had a profound impact on working-class politics, helping to persuade working-class activists that their interests continued to lie in cooperation with the Liberals. These reforms were only made possible by the interclass alliance that subtended them. The Liberal Party thus served as a critical bridge between the working class and the modern liberal order. *
*
*
The development of political liberalism as outlined above shows that it fared differently from country to country. Liberals in Britain were unthreatened by preindustrial conflicts before World War One, whereas Liberals elsewhere found themselves threatened mainly by preindustrial conflicts. If Germany had remained divided, Liberals in Prussia would have been much more likely to impose their hegemony on Prussia. The same can be said about Liberals in the other German states. Sweden and Denmark had longer national histories and higher levels of political integration, yet Liberals there suffered from the same kind of debilitating inherited divisions that crippled the Liberals in Germany. Is it possible to explain the various levels of educational integration on the basis of liberal success? Why is it that England, with the most powerful Liberal Party, was the last to introduce democratic measures into the education system? Why was Norway, which had immense struggles in the Liberal Party, the first country to introduce the middle school? Why did this not happen in Denmark where the Liberals, in contrast to those in Norway, were far more united?
Liberal Education Politics: The Middle School Denmark Considering the relatively weak political liberal movement in Scandinavia, it is striking that the liberal parties were able to introduce radical school
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reforms that reorganized the school system completely. However, as the following discussion will demonstrate, the question about the ladder system of education was in fact caught in the battle between rural and urban interests, which in effect delayed its introduction. In the case of Denmark, the middle school could presumably have been introduced much earlier than in 1903. In the election of 1876 the Liberal Party won a sufficient number of seats in the government to force such a reform through. But the debilitating conflicts within the party hindered this. As stated above, during the time after the Constitution, in 1848, the Friends of the Peasants, which later became the Liberal Party, and the National Liberals cooperated on the enhancement of elementary education. The Friends of the Peasants, however, wished to increase local control over educational provision and emancipate the school from the church faster than did the National Liberals. On the development of the elementary school, the Friends of the Peasants and the National Liberals agreed on the whole, but this was not at all the case regarding the secondary school, also known as the “Latin school.” In the political negotiations regarding the Latin school, the National Liberals and the Conservatives wanted to maintain the Latin school as a state responsibility. They held that the state should ensure culture and science in society through the provision of these schools. Moreover, they argued that it was undemocratic if economic support by the state, in the form of increased budgetary allocations and the provision of free places, was reduced, since this would inevitably hinder children from less advantaged homes in gaining secondary education. The Friends of the Peasants, on the contrary, maintained that the National Liberals overestimated the value of the Latin school. Tscherning, who was one of the fiercest critics of the Latin school, claimed vehemently that all of the Latin schools should simply be abolished! The Friends of the Peasants were either indifferent toward them or were deeply hostile toward classical learning and the strong focus on exams in the Latin school. Generally, they manifested a liberal reluctance toward state involvement in secondary education and fought against the notion that an increasing number of pupils should be entering the Latin schools. The realization of a ladder system of education thus ran into a serious obstacle as the Friends of the Peasants barely accepted the very existence of the Latin school (Skovgaard-Petersen, 1967). The issue of linking the elementary school and the Latin school received political attention for the first time in 1870. The occasion was a suggestion by the conservative or national wing of the Liberal Party (mainly comprising former friends of the peasants and followers of the national-romantic priest N. F. S. Grundtvig) that the bottom four classes in the eight-year Latin school be abolished in order to restrict university entrance. However,
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according to the Danish historian Skovgaard-Petersen (1967), the restriction of university entrance was not what dominated the subsequent debate surrounding this suggestion. Rather, it was the idea, advocated particularly by the liberal Sofus Høgsbro, that the abolishment of the lower phase of the Latin school would make room for a common elementary school (until the age of fourteen years) with the explicit aim of creating a common cultural community across social classes (90). When the suggestion of abolishing the four bottom classes of the Latin school was put forward as a bill to the government on January 21, 1870, this was the reason that was given. Hence the government appointed a commission to consider the bill. The commission was set up under the leadership of the liberal, Frede Bojsen, and comprised members from all the political parties, except the National Liberals. Under Bojsen’s leadership, the commission planned a thorough reorganization of the secondary school, in which the reduction of its duration was a key part. However, this plan, which would have created a three-ladder system of education had it been implemented, was not tabled due to the change of government in May 1870. The National Liberal education minister in the new government, Hall, thus inherited the task of reorganizing secondary education. Hall’s bill on the Latin school, which was supported by the National Liberals and the Conservatives, was laid before Rigsdagen in 1870. Even though Hall had hardly considered any of the recommendations by the commission, the issue of coordinating the elementary school and the Latin school was nevertheless accommodated to some extent in the bill. The bill stated that the Latin school should continue to be of eightyear duration; however, the bottom two classes could, in accordance with further decisions by the Ministry of Church and Education, be abolished. It was acknowledged that the headmasters of the Latin schools were interested in receiving children at the earliest possible age for advanced classical learning, but the possibility of abolishing the bottom two classes should be given consideration to enable “in respect to civil and social regards, a closer cooperation between the learned and the common, the bourgeois and the popular school system” (Skovgaard-Petersen, 1967, 90–91). Even though a link, admittedly a weak one, was ensured in Hall’s bill, a strong critique was raised from the liberal opposition. The Liberals, especially from the moderate wing, maintained that abolishing just two of the bottom classes in the Latin school was not sufficient. Instead they held that four of the bottom classes should be formally brought to an end as this would eradicate the competition between the Latin and elementary schools. This scheme would strengthen the position of the elementary school as it would be common for all children until the age of fourteen, regardless of whether their futures lay in theoretical or practical studies.
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Ultimately, it was argued, this approach would reduce social inequalities in the society. It was suggested that the money saved from this reorganization should finance post-elementary education in middle schools in rural areas. This liberal critique was not sustained throughout the political negotiation because of a growing division within the party. The national wing of the Liberal Party feared that a link between the elementary school and the secondary school would simply erode the position of the elementary school as a true popular school. It was the old skepticism toward the Latin school that had reemerged in the negotiations. The elementary school, the national wing held, should not serve as the basis for the secondary school since the two school types were of fundamentally different educational character. The elementary school was, according to this wing, a popular school expressing the spirit of the people in terms of national language, culture, and history; and the secondary school was an elitist school rooted in the ancient Greek and Roman humanistic culture epitomized by the German educator Humboldt. In order for the elementary school to serve as a base for the secondary school, the latter had thus to be transformed into a true national-romantic institution. To this end the national wing suggested establishing a third branch parallel to the already existing two branches within the Latin school. This new branch, which should educate “populous” state administrators, would provide a curriculum focusing on Nordic history, culture, and languages. The national wing assumed that such a branch would eventually draw pupils away from the two other branches and afterward a policy of transferring elementary school students to the Latin schools could be pursued. The suggestion of establishing a third branch in the Latin school was strongly opposed by the National Liberals. The National Liberals argued that this was “modern, superficial” education that would remove pupils from the common European civilization (Skovgaard-Petersen, 1967). More than anything else, the growing split within the Liberal Party caused their policy on education to fail. At the beginning, the Party’s suggestion of abolishing the four bottom classes was approved, but when several Liberals from the national wing declined to support the policy of the moderate wing, Hall no longer had to face insurmountable opposition. As a consequence, he did not make any changes to the bill, which was approved on March 28, 1871. Subsequently, the bottom two classes in the Latin school were abolished throughout the country, reducing the duration of the Latin school from eight to six years. To accommodate the wishes of the nationals in the Liberal Party, a small amount of class time was allocated for Ancient Nordic language within the study time allocated for Danish.
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Even though the Act ensured a link between the elementary and secondary schools to some degree, the transfer between the two school types was made harder rather than easier. The Latin schools rejected the idea of lowering the academic level at the entrance exam to ease the transfer from the elementary school to the Latin school. Instead they demanded that students acquire almost the same amount of knowledge as was taught in the two abolished lower classes of the Latin school. The consequence of this was that the elementary schools, incapable of preparing the pupils for the Latin school entrance exam, forced the emergence of a new type of school, the private, preparatory or adjunct school, though only in the cities, which provided pupils the required knowledge for the entrance exam. Hence the elementary school and the preparatory school ran parallel to each other, which caused an intense debate in the following decade. One of the most important figures in this debate was Carl Berg, a headmaster of the Latin school in Frederiksborg who constantly maintained that a democratic state ought to be concerned about offering the most talented people, regardless of their social standing, the best possible education. The Latin schools were in fact interested in receiving children from all walks of society, he claimed, because they would contribute to the mixing of classes and, ultimately, a “healthy” society. Therefore it was not fair that entrance to the Latin schools was made dependent on private preparatory schools, which only middle-class parents could afford. The inevitable result was that the “spiritual capital” possessed by the young people from the lower orders was not being utilized. The interest of the state and society could be met if the education system was organized in such a way that the academically gifted twelve-year-olds from the elementary school could transfer without hindrances to the Latin school (Skovgaard-Petersen, 1967). Carl Berg suggested a gradation of the education system in the following way: an elementary school for all children of 5 to 9 years of age, followed by a first cycle of the middle school for the 9- to 12-year-olds. Thereafter a second cycle of the middle school for a selected group of the 12- to 14-yearolds, and then at last the Latin school, also only for a selected group of the 12- to 18-year-olds, though a smaller group than in the previous school. In order to make the transfer possible from the middle school to the Latin school, the middle school would teach the curriculum that was required for the entrance exam to the Latin school. If a pupil did not qualify for the entrance exam, the middle school would then offer a repetition course. This suggestion was laid before the education minister, Fischer. Fischer, who in fact had already considered a reorganization of the education system along the ideas of the seventeenth-century educationalist, Comenius, appointed a commission to investigate the suggestion (Larsen, 1899, 356). The commission was torn apart over the reorganizing of the school system.
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Yet again it was the obdurate national wing of the Liberal Party that dug in their heels as they raised a strong skepticism toward the Latin school. They wished for setting up an unconditionally “free” elementary school, and such a school could not be free if it were to function as a preparation school for the Latin school. Sofus Høgsbro and Harald Holm were particularly critical of a coordination of the schools, because they feared that the elementary schools would become standardized if they were to consider the Latin school exam (examen artrium) as the final and common aim of education. Holm instead suggested a school system that resembled Frede Bojsen’s concept from the previous decade. It was in essence a conglomerate school system originating in Grundtvig’s ideas and comprising children’s schools (elementary schools), free-schools (Grundtvigian-inspired private schools that were established after 1855 in rural areas), folk high schools (youth high schools for sons of farmers), the folk high school in Soer (an already established flagship high school), and a common Nordic scientific Folk high school (still to be established). This school system, Holm maintained, was versatile as it was arranged according to different life stages and needs of children and youth, but united in a common national-romantic view of life. Høgsbro’s and Berg’s ideas indicate that they would probably have agreed with Grundtvig’s statement to the Constitutional Assembly in 1848 in which he said that he would oppose “any tyrant whether he call himself Napoleon or equality” (Skovgaard-Petersen, 1967, 97). Because of the immense opposition from the national wing toward creating a three-ladder system of education, the political negotiations stagnated completely by the end of the 1870s, even though the Liberal Party in April, 1876 had a successful election. In 1877, Education Minister Fischer put forward a suggestion for a school act that, among other things, sought to expand the elementary schooling in the rural areas. Sections of the Liberal Party expressed an interest for negotiations, but this time the talks deadlocked on the national wing’s preference for the private free-schools, which they wished to develop. Instead of participating in political negotiations, they managed “to bury the suggestion in a commission.” In 1879, when Fischer once again put forth his suggestion of rural schooling, with a few minor changes, it appeared that a compromise could be reached. In 1881, Berg and representatives from the Liberal Party were willing to concede to the national wing’s demand for increased parental influence in the free-schools and the elementary schools, as well as to the government’s plans for a more effective inspection system of the schools. In spite of this willingness to compromise, the suggestion was turned down by both the nationals and the education minister, Scavenius.
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The increasing dominance of the national wing on the Liberal Party’s education policy was clearly enhanced by the strong conflicts within the party toward the end of 1870s. The national wing, which in fact was not always successful in hampering political agreements, had become the leading force in respect to the politics of education. With no serious exemptions to their education policy, a ladder system of education had no chance of being realized. The Liberal Party failed completely in bringing forward a united alternative to the reorganization of the school system because of the national wing’s uncompromising attitude toward the Latin schools, which prevented them from integrating the different school types. This problem arose again during the attempts made by the subsequent education minister, Scavenius, to reorganize the school system. Even though he managed to negotiate with the moderate elements of the Liberal Party, his efforts were blocked by the national wing. In 1882 Scavenius put forward a bill that, if implemented, would have created a ladder system of education, but negotiations for this were not even initiated because of the frozen frontiers within the Liberal Party. In 1885 he floated another bill, this time with the backing of all of the Latin school’s schoolmasters, aimed at easing the transfer from elementary to secondary schools. The bill would allow more children into the secondary schools by reestablishing the abolished two bottom classes in the Latin school and reducing the entry requirements. But this bill was also not subject to negotiations because of the opposition from the national wing. A breakthrough occurred from an unexpected side. Leading Latin school educationalists, such as M. Cl. Gertz, Dr. Pingel, S. L. Tuxen, and K. Kroman, sparked a new debate about the role of the classical languages in the Latin school. This was of immense importance as it was directly linked to the possibility of integrating the elementary school and the secondary school. The most important role in the debate was that of M. Cl. Gertz, a professor of classical philology and head of the inspection committee of the Latin schools. He was, surprisingly, willing to give up entirely classical learning as the foundation of the Latin school education. He was not alone in this view as several other members, also within the association of Latin school teachers, raised a similar view. Provided that the classical languages were no longer to be the core subjects in the Latin school, the teaching of Latin and Greek could thus be postponed until later classes in the Latin school. Hence a serious obstacle to creating a link between elementary school and the Latin school would be eliminated. The agreement of reducing the status of classical languages in the Latin schools as well as the loss of ground suffered by the national wing to the moderate wing of the party over the issue had an immense impact on the further development of the education system. In 1901, when it won
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the majority, the Liberal Party became much more independent from the nationals. I. C. Christensen was appointed as the minister for education and on October 18, 1902 he put forward a bill to the Rigsdag, which, almost without changes, became the Act of April 24, 1903 on secondary education. The raison-d’etre for the middle school was that the Latin school was often seen as a school for the upper classes, but now it should be open for all. The Act required that the Latin schools be reorganized as the so-called higher general schools, but this was later replaced with the name gymnasium. The Liberals had by now given up their old policy of advocating spending cuts and private school policy. The core of their educational policy had now become the democratic challenge of ensuring that no one was hindered in obtaining secondary and higher education because of social and economic disadvantages. It was, moreover, in the interest of the society that as many children as possible from all walks of life take advantage of the opportunity of schooling (Skovgaard-Petersen, 1967; Skovgaard-Petersen, 1976; Larsen, 1988). Hence the secondary school system was reorganized throughout the country. It consisted of a middle school of four years duration; an upper secondary school of three years duration; and a one-year technical class that, just as the upper secondary school, continued the middle school education. Even though the middle school was planned as an attachment to the upper secondary school, middle schools were in many places also established in connection with the elementary schools (7 to 11/12 years of age). The overall result was that a school system based on a three-step ladder model was firmly established.
Norway Given the stronger rural and urban conflict in Norway than in Denmark, it is strange that a middle school was introduced much earlier here (in 1869) than in Denmark. In fact, educational development was delayed in Norway as issues concerning education became increasingly caught up politically in this conflict as it deepened toward the end of the century. However, the middle school remained unaffected as it was successfully introduced prior to the debilitating rural-urban divide. During the 1860s the Norwegian government did not yet consist of political parties in the modern sense, but of flexible groupings that got together as often on the basis of common interests as on political convictions (Pryser, 1993, 286). The largest and most powerful group consisted of the farmers—in 1884 the Liberal Party (Venstre)—with the later state minister, Johan Sverdrup, providing leadership. From a non-Scandinavian perspective it is extraordinary
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that a nonaristocratic rural group could achieve political power so early in the nineteenth century. In fact, by 1833 the government, Storting, already had forty-five peasants among its ninety-six members. The rural class was able to integrate politically because of the absence of an aristocracy, which could have acted as a conservative bulwark against the farmer’s attempts at achieving political power. A bicameral political system based on the British model was the subject of intense debate in connection with the establishment of a new Constitution in 1812. However, such a system was firmly rejected on the grounds that a class base for an upper house—in the aristocracy—was not present. The argument was that it was not suitable to organize the National Assembly in two chambers in accordance with the British system because “. . . such class segregation was less populous (folkelig), and because in Norway any large class of mighty estate owners did not exist, who could constitute a firm upper house . . .” (cited after Semmingsen, 1954, 55). In effect, the absence of an upper house meant that a politically organized conservative resistance against the rural, liberal movement could not occur. Hence, the farmers could successfully organize themselves without facing serious obstacles and achieve significant political power. The rural group, though not free of conflict, was not fragmented to such a degree that their attempts of reforming the education system would fail. Since only a few national-romantics of Grundtvigian stock were represented in the rural group, they could not form a powerful wing in opposition to the rest of the group, as could be done by their fellow members in the Danish Liberal Party. Furthermore, Sverdrup was strongly opposed to any members of Grundtvigian conviction and was able to minimize their influence considerably. Thus, his own modernist views on society and education flourished in the agrarian group. Sverdrup strongly advocated education as a means of maximizing class circulation in the Norwegian society. He even supported Urban Radicals, headed by Sars, in their “class struggles” in the towns, though Sverdrup himself, according the Norwegian historian Seip, was characterized as more moderate than radical in his views on class conflicts (Seip, 1981, 155; Pryser, 1993). Furthermore, Sverdrup vehemently opposed the strong role the classical languages played in the education of pupils in the Latin schools. He argued that Latin and Greek lead to dead knowledge as opposed to the natural sciences, which lead to emancipation: “What does it help to swarm around Maraton and Salamis, Sagunt and Numantia,” he claimed, “when you don’t have the free man’s speech confronting the monarch? The learned people have exactly been the greatest doters of the throne and the altar; they have always wanted to place the power in the most monarchial and hierarchical hands” (cited after Koht, 1914, 474). He claimed that the
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future by which education should be inspired was not from the ancient past but from the new world power that had arisen in America, which would take over the leadership of politics and science, art and technical endeavors. Sverdrup initiated a church commission that, under the leadership of Johannes Steen, addressed the issue of reorganizing the school system. The commission was particularly interested in the idea of a middle school propagated by the influential Latin headmaster, Hartvig Nissen. In several publications, Nissen had argued that a six-year middle school attached to the Latin school would enhance class circulation, allowing an increased number of pupils to obtain secondary education. At the completion of middle school, an examination would be held that would either lead to the Latin school or toward employment in certain types of jobs in the state administration. Johannes Steen expressed that “this royal suggestion [the middle school] . . . in a liberal fashion accommodate our time, bind people together, strengthen the citizenship spirit, enhance education and thus expand the learned circle” (cited after Sirevåg, 1988, 36). Sverdrup’s response to the commission’s recommendations was to radicalize Nissen’s idea even further by extending the duration of the elementary school beyond four years and further reducing classical learning in the Latin school, more than what the commission had proposed. Two Radical urban educators, Aars and Voss, who in fact were in opposition to Nissen’s suggestion, lent support to Sverdrup. They argued that Nissen’s suggestion of a four-year elementary school was of too short a duration to create true common schooling for all regardless of social background. The committee maintained that it neither supported Aars’ and Voss’ suggestion of extending the duration of the elementary school, nor Sverdrup’s plea to reduce classical languages drastically. The result was that Nissens’ suggestion of a six-year middle school won approval and became law in 1869. The middle school, which was meant for all, was to be branched into two tracks, an English language track and a Latin track, from grade four onward. The rest of the subjects were common for all (Dokka, 1967, 286). A ladder system of education was now achieved, comprising a four-year elementary school followed by a six-year middle school and a three-year upper secondary school. Johan Sverdrup, who followed its enactment throughout the country with great interest, noted, to his satisfaction, that the middle schools were not only attended by the children of the bourgeoisie but also by children of the lower orders (Sverdrup, 1884). The development of the Norwegian education system was subsequently marked by efforts to further integrate the system, in spite of the fact that it was in principle already possible for pupils to advance through the system according to academic ability and aptitude. The link between the middle
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school and the upper secondary school was in place, but the link between the elementary school and the middle school was still, as viewed by liberal politicians and educators, weak. It was not stated in the School Act of 1869 that the knowledge required for admission to the Latin school could be obtained in the elementary school; rather, this was possible only in preparatory schools without expense to the state. Even Nissen expressed his regret about the necessity of opening preparatory schools along with the elementary schools. The “link” issue, about the articulation of middle school and upper secondary school, came to a head as the successful expansion of the middle schools—almost every town had one by then—brought them into competition, especially in the smaller towns, with the elementary school. It was debated whether the top classes in the elementary schools and the bottom classes in the middle schools should to be integrated in order to remove the competition and to strengthen the link between the elementary schools and Latin schools. A commission was established in 1871, chaired by Nissen, to propose a new School Act for the towns to resolve this problem. Though Nissen died a few years later, in 1874, the recommendations of the commission were greatly inspired by his ideas. In 1873, the commission launched a plan that attempted to increase the status of the elementary school, from a school for the poor to a school for all, by extending its duration from three to five years (ten years of age). Through this change, the commission argued, a solid foundation for further schooling would be ensured, which ultimately would make the private preparatory schools superfluous (Dokka, 1967, 288; Myhre, 1992). The political discussion that followed the recommendations of the commission was marked by stronger animosity, consequent to the formal establishment of political parties, than ever before. Until 1870 it was not always easy to distinguish between conservative and liberal education policy, but later the party positions became sharper and thus also the conflicts. This was especially true in 1884 when the Liberal Party took control of the government. Johan Sverdrup, now in his capacity as the state minister, announced his plans for the reorganization of the school system—an extension of the elementary school and a reduction of the middle school to strengthen the link between them—which in fact became, more or less unaltered, the School Act of 1889. Behind his plans, he argued, was the idea of using education as a vehicle for creating an “integrated, harmonious developed nation.” All people, in spite of social standing, “to the extent it is possible, [should] be subject to equal conditions in respect to possibilities of receiving general education, that develops a good and enlightened citizen.” To this end, a school system should be organized where “a child that enters the elementary school has the view, without wasted time, abruptions or
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departure from the lane it has turned into (. . .), to rise further up through the different school stages, that end with the university or a specialist college.” Such an organization of the school system should be implemented, Sverdrup argued, because “the state should not favor some social classes at the expense of others” (Dokka, 1967, 343–345). Sverdrup appointed a school commission chaired by Johannes Steen, a leading figure in education, with the aim of proposing a plan for the reorganization of the elementary school in both rural and urban areas. The commission, whose members were mainly educators selected on the basis of political convictions, prepared a substantial report based mainly on Sverdrup’s own ideas, which was submitted to the Church Committee of the government in 1887. The greatest obstacle in carrying out the recommendations was the fact that the Liberal Party had already split into factions (the Radicals on one side and the Moderates on the other) and were continuously in conflict with each other. The Moderates—especially Bonnevie and Herrzberg, who were against the liberal educational policy—opposed the commission’s recommendations by successfully pressing for delay in action. Such tactics were meant to foil Steen and his Radical supporters. The following year, 1888, a new government was elected in which the Liberals were not as strongly represented as in the previous year. The Conservatives benefited from the split in the Liberal Party in the election, and they gained fifty-two representatives against the thirty that they had in the 1885 election. At that time the Liberal Party gained eightyfour, but the governing party, the Moderates, gained twenty-four and the Radicals thirty-eight. Steen was gone, and the chairmanship of the Church Committee was now to be held by Bonnevie, a conservative member of the school commission and headmaster of a Latin school, who was reluctant to use the law to enforce major changes in the existing order of society. The debate on the proposed legislation began in the government in 1889 and was basically a battle between the Radicals, Ullmann and Wexelsen, on one side, and the Moderates, Bonnevie and Herzberg, on the other. Ullmann and Wexelsen argued that the elementary schools in the rural areas ought to be of seven years duration, just as the urban schools, in order to bring them both to an equal level. Bonnevie and Herzberg argued that rural schooling need not continue longer than six years, the time at which children were confirmed. Also, the link between the elementary school and the Latin school was debated, as the commission had strongly recommended such a link, which had also received considerable public support. The commission took the position that the creation of such a link was very important, but the majority argued that this should not be done at the expense of the independence of the elementary school. The elementary school was a school in its own right and should therefore not be
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subordinated to the requirements of the secondary schools (Dokka, 1967; Myhre, 1992). The 1889 School Act was eventually passed, in its major outlines, and included the recommendations Sverdrup had made five years earlier, although it also contained provisions not mentioned by him and which represented various degrees of compromise in some measures. The School Act ensured that the elementary school was strengthened to such a degree that it could serve as a base for the middle school. The elementary school was to be of seven years duration (7–14 years of age) and the middle school was reduced from six to four years. Moreover, the private preparatory schools were now abolished all over the country. With the establishment of a link between the elementary school, the middle school, and the upper secondary school, a moderate comprehensive school system was achieved, which was the culmination of a long historical development that in its structural outline remained unchanged until 1920.
Sweden In Sweden, as in Denmark, the middle school was introduced rather late compared to Norway, which also should be ascribed the debilitating ruralurban split within the Liberal movement. The split hampered the party’s ability to stand united to face questions regarding education. However, as will be demonstrated below, the most destructive rural-urban conflicts were those between the rural Liberals concentrated in the second Chamber and the urban state bureaucrats and large landowners who dominated the First Chamber. The latter held the stronger position in politics, in contrast to the situation in Denmark, and also, particularly, to the situation in Norway, and on top of the conflicts within the party; it faced almost insurmountable obstacles from the First Chamber. The First Chamber was, for the most part of the latter half of the nineteenth century, successful in opposing almost all bills that the Second Chamber Liberals put forward for approval. It was only when the representation of the state bureaucrats and land owners in the First Chamber was in decline, during the period from 1870 to 1910, that the Second Chamber Liberals were able to gain stronger political influence. This paved the way for an increasing representation of industrial and commercial interests. Moreover, the remaining state bureaucrats and landowners slowly began to show a greater understanding of the social views on education. A similar change also occurred in the Second Chamber in the period from 1897 to 1907, when agrarian representatives with a conservative outlook were gradually phased out, which, in turn, allowed people from the working class and from the trades to enter the chamber.
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Because of the late emergence of political liberalism, the fight for integration of the elementary and secondary schools also began late. The Agricultural Party, the Lantmannapartiet, which was the first rural political party in Sweden, did not advocate school integration as their education policy; their policy was mainly directed at the improvement of rural schooling. It is also questionable whether the party would have succeeded in creating an integrated education system, considering the superior power of the First Chamber. It was not before an urban, radical group broke out of the Agricultural Party and established the Folk Party, Folkpartiet, that a strong political interest in bringing the different school types closer together occurred. In 1895, the liberal politicians Berg and Bergström, while writing a political program for the Folk Party, stated in regard to education that the elementary school should be transformed into a common school for all, bottonskola, and be linked to the secondary school, läroverk, which should be transformed into a modern, practically oriented school (Herrström, 1966, 27; Berg, 1883; Bröms, 1964; Husén, 1948). The first successive attempts by the Liberals to introduce a link between elementary and secondary school occurred in the years 1867, 1868, and 1870. The Liberals maintained that classical education in the secondary school was overemphasized, and they instead wanted a “useful” curriculum focusing on natural sciences and modern languages to form the core of secondary education. In the Latin branch of the secondary school, which enrolled the most number of pupils, Latin instruction began as early as grade four. The Liberals suggested postponing Latin instruction for a couple of years in order to accommodate modern subjects. In addition, they suggested transferring the lowest class of the secondary school to the elementary school in order to extend common schooling. This would create an “organic unification” of the school system. The Liberals were, according to the Swedish historian Richardson, “full of social passion and democratic opinions,” but they failed completely because of opposition in the First Chamber (Richardson, 1965, 274). In spite of all the unsuccessful attempts, ten years later (1880–1881) the liberal, F. T. Borg, presented to the Riksdag a plan for an integrated education system that aimed to “link unequal social classes together and to contribute to the cohesion and strength of the society” (Sjöstrand, 1965, 248). The plan, which for the first time achieved support from the majority of the Liberals in the Second Chamber, was turned down by the First Chamber. As stated above, the deep cleavage between the two chambers healed somewhat during the 1890s, as the representation of the Liberals increased in the Second Chamber and the ultraconservative convictions in the First Chamber were mitigated. However, the First Chamber was still skeptical
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about the Liberal Second Chamber’s zeal for educational reform. In 1890, the Church Minister, Gunnar Wennerberg, appointed a committee to draw up a bill for the secondary school. That bill, which attempted to create a link between the elementary school and the secondary school, was defeated by the First Chamber. Yet another bill was again laid before the Riksdagen in 1892 by Wennerberg’s successor, G. F. Gilljam, who was Church Minister until 1898. He suggested, based on Berg and Hammerlund’s ideas, that Latin instruction should be postponed until grade six and that the lowest class in the secondary school should be transferred to the elementary school in order to extend the duration of the latter. But this bill, too, was rejected by the First Chamber. In the following year, the bill was resubmitted, but again the First Chamber evinced no interest in reform. In 1894 an important compromise was reached. A commission was established in the Second Chamber in order to consider a suggestion advocated by Zetterman. He proposed that the academic requirements expected for entry into the first year of the secondary school should correspond to the requirements in the last year of the elementary school. In this way a link between elementary school and secondary school could be created. The commission, which agreed with Zetterman’s suggestion, presented a bill to another commission that the First Chamber had established for this purpose. The commission of the First Chamber rejected the bill on the grounds that “the aim of the läroverk, that was to prepare students for scientific studies at the university, was incompatible with the idea of a comprehensive school” (Sjöstrand, 1965, 248). However, the commission agreed that it should be possible for the academically capable elementary school child to enter the secondary school. To this end, an agreement was reached, which implied that middle schools, or a higher elementary schools, were to be established in rural areas and in towns where secondary schools were absent. However, the struggle for an integrated school system continued in spite of this compromise that ensured some kind of link, though weak, between elementary and secondary schools. In the Riksdag of 1896 a number of bills were again introduced that attempted to create a unified school system. A commission in the Second Chamber resubmitted their old proposal regarding the transfer of the lowest class in the secondary school to the elementary school. A more radical idea was proposed by C. G. Bäckgren, which recommended reducing the secondary school from nine to six years and replacing classical language education with modern language education. Berg and Hammerlund resubmitted their previous suggestion about a middle school, but they more forcefully underscored the fact that this new school type should be part of a three-ladder school system (elementary school, middle school, and secondary school). On the basis of these
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different suggestions, S. J. Boëthius, a professor at Uppsala University, suggested a compromise that implied the establishment of a middle school, but which retained the Latin branch as well as the science branch in the secondary school at every diocese in the country. Subsequently a commission was formed under the leadership of Hammerlund that undertook the task of looking into these suggestions. In spite of disagreements in the commission about the organization of the structure of the education system, they were able to reach an agreement that the first class in the secondary school should be transferred to the elementary school in order to introduce a middle stage examination at the secondary school. The lower secondary school, läroverk, which would enroll pupils at the age of ten for five years, was to be followed by a fouryear upper secondary school, a gymnasium, that included both a Latin and a science branch. This plan, if implemented, would have created a ladder system of education, but it made Berg and Hammerlund skeptical. They suggested instead a so-called “double attachment” model in order to create a unified system. The first attachment model, which was only to be implemented in the cities, consisted of a four-year elementary school followed by a five-year läroverk and a final examination. Subsequently a gymnasium would follow. The second attachment model, which would be introduced in the rural areas, included a six-year elementary school followed by a three-year middle school, leading to the same examination as the final examination in the fifth class in the läroverk. The Second Chamber debate about the different suggestions outlined above illuminated the ways in which the Liberals were divided. The liberal peasants and the school teachers supported the strengthening of the elementary school, while representatives of the urban middle class favored a free standing secondary school, läroverk, with an examination at the middle level. In spite of the disagreements, a bill was laid before the First Chamber, which was, not surprisingly, rebuffed. However, the Riksdag of 1896 was not completely fruitless. On the basis of Gilljam’s suggestion, practically oriented final classes were established in the fifth year of the secondary school in several places. This well-received development suggests that a growing popular need to have middle schools existed (Sjöstrand, 1965). Some years later a further attempt was made to unify the school system, which included the creation of a Latin-free läroverk in the five lowest classes of the secondary school. The suggestion was in essence the same as the decision of 1896 on the establishment of practically oriented final classes in the läroverk. This suggestion was not strongly debated and was received positively in both chambers in 1898. The Second Chamber Liberals supported it fully, and several members in the First Chamber were open to discussing the suggestion. It seemed that the Liberals no longer confronted
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an insurmountable obstacle in the First Chamber. The suggestion was further discussed by three educational experts, one of them being the leading educationalist Niels Højer, who advocated that they should recommend a reform for the lower part of the läroverk. The experts maintained that there should be an additional six-year general lower secondary school that could easily be converted into a class for less academically oriented pupils. They also argued that the educational value of Latin instruction was overrated, but since it was essential in understanding Western culture, Latin instruction was, nevertheless, to be maintained in the curriculum from grade four to six, but only in the läroverk in the capital (Stockholm) and diocese towns. Following the lower secondary school, a three-year gymnasium should be established that had both a Latin branch and a science branch. The experts opined that it was not possible to transfer the first class of the läroverk to the elementary school since the latter was still not of sufficient academic rigor. Extended time should be given to the elementary school to allow it to develop into a genuine “common elementary school (bottonskola) in the first three school years” (Sjöstrand, 1965, 357). They felt it should be possible, however, to experiment with a four-year elementary school in the towns. The expert’s proposal was laid before the Riksdag in 1899, but this proposal had some competition in the form of another proposal that was put forward by Ernst Carlson from the Second Chamber. He agreed with the experts that Latin instruction should be postponed and that the lower stage of the läroverk should be organized more coherently, but he wanted a five-year rather than a six-year lower school that was to be followed by a four-year instead of a three-year gymnasium. The gymnasium should be divided into Latin and science branches. The First Chamber announced that in light of this disagreement the question of school system organization had to be investigated again. Hence, in 1899, a new commission was established, of which the Director of Uppsala University, Th. M. Fries, was the chairman. In 1902 the commission floated its proposal, which approximated the suggestions made originally by Carlson. The committee wished to establish a six-year middle school, realskola (secondary technical school), which was just one year longer than Carlson’s suggestion, and recommended that its last class should run concomitantly with the first class in the four-year gymnasium. Furthermore, the committee suggested experimentation with a four-year elementary school before making the final decision on school duration. The Liberal Church minister C. von Friesen presented the bill to the Riksdag in 1904. The First Chamber, which still was reluctant to engage in educational reform, agreed to the bill, but with only a slim majority (70 against 64). This caused a major debate in the Second Chamber, which
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resulted in the suggestion of a compromise that implied a four-year elementary school followed by a five-year middle school and a four-year gymnasium. But this suggestion was turned down in the Second Chamber (140 against 53) (Sjöstrand, 1965, 256). In 1905 a compromise was finally reached and both the chambers within the Riksdag could agree to reform the secondary school. The compromise prescribed a division of the läroverk in two parts. The first part, which was to be the first stage of the läroverk, called the realskola (middle school), was to undertake modern education with no Latin language instruction. The second part, which was to be the upper stage of the läroverk, called the gymnasiet, would prepare the students for entry into the university. The middle school (realskola), which would follow a three-year elementary school, was to be of six-year duration, and the gymnasium was to be of four-year duration. Pursuant to this decision, whereby a ladder system of education was finally achieved and implemented, another decision was reached in 1909 that established the middle schools as a link to the elementary school in the rural areas. The fading rural-urban split thus ended the liberal’s seemingly impossible fight to establish a three-ladder education system in Sweden.
Germany The fact that liberal parties successfully introduced a ladder system of education in Scandinavia suggests that the weakness of political liberalism in Germany was an essential factor in the failure to integrate the divided education system there. Had the Liberal Party been a powerful force in German politics, the divided education system would more than likely have been subject to reform with the intent of democratization as in Scandinavia. In fact, during the liberal “hour” just after 1848, German Liberals and liberal-minded educators indeed attempted to reform the education system, and at various clusters of teacher’s conferences the teachers proposed radical school reforms. According to one reform that was proposed, all the secondary schools were to be integrated in such a way that the curriculum would be uniform for at least three years. It was also maintained that modern subjects, including German and Science, should have a more prominent place in the curriculum of the secondary school (Gymnasium), and the importance of Latin, upon which there was an exclusive focus, should be reduced. It was also recommended that the training, salary, and status of the elementary school teachers be improved in order to reduce the gap between elementary education and secondary education. However, none of these suggestions at the education conference of 1848 was realized.
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The power of the Liberals was in sharp decline and, consequently, strong demands for educational reform that would lead to a thorough reorganizing of the education system were not made. The result was that the education system remained structurally divided—the Gymnasium on one side and various forms of secondary modern schools on the other (Albisetti, 1983). In the historiography of German education, it has not been argued that it was the absence of strong political liberalism that caused the divided education system to survive. Hubert Ertl and David Phillips (2000), who provided the latest explanation as to why comprehensive education was never introduced in Germany, argue that it was the very success of the secondary modern school, the Realschule, that prevented politicians from integrating the Gymnasium and Realschule into a coherent system. It is true that the Realschule became very successful in Germany from the end of the nineteenth century as it fulfilled an increasing demand for educating young people for industrial and commercial occupations. As they point out, the Realschule was maintained because it had, to a certain extent, a compensatory effect concerning the social selectivity in the divided system. Only a small upper class used the Gymnasium, while the growing middle classes found the Realschule with its modern curriculum a better alternative (399). A comparative explanation as to why the divided system was maintained in Germany seems to rest on the absence of a powerful Liberal Party. As stated above, the liberal parties throughout Europe were the progressive parties of the nineteenth century and sought the democratization of political systems and modernization of societies. It is more than likely that the German Liberal Party would also have been pursuing these agendas had it not been defeated so early in the day. The Liberal Party was almost completely crushed just after 1848 allowing other political forces to dominate. The establishment of a unified Germany in 1871 led to increasingly conservative influences, which were already foreshadowed in the movement away from political liberalism and democracy in Bismarck’s policy. The Conservative Party and the Catholic Center Party dominated politics throughout the last part of the nineteenth century and, supported by the Junker class and the bureaucratic elite or the educated Bildungsbürgertum, they were able to act as an ultraconservative bulwark against any democratic reform of education. More than anything else, it was the lack of political liberalism, which allowed powerful conservative forces to dominate, that explains why the Gymnasium was maintained intact structurally and thus never became part of a ladder system of education. The educated German elite was in fact a much more powerful social class politically than its counterpart in Scandinavia and the middle class in
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Britain. As a result of intense monarchial state building, the strong bureaucratization of the German states, especially Prussia, meant that officials, priests, university professors, and secondary school teachers played a much more influential role in the political mobilization of Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The power of the educated elite was expressed in their association in one way or the other with the government and the state administration (Ringer, 1969). The educated elite were united by the same educational background and their classical Bildung ideal, political agenda, and reform initiatives, which were largely shaped in opposition to the French revolutionary ideology. Their viewpoints were often an expression of dissociation from anything French, whether it was the court culture or revolutionary experiences. Among the elite, an increasingly conservative attitude emerged, which sprang from the German revolution of 1848, the French-Prussian war of 1871, French-inspired socialism, as well as fear of the impact of British economic liberalism, Manchestertum. As a result, the historian Hahn (1998) states: “the advocates of Bildung found themselves in a reactionary, conservative position, opposing all innovation in industry and society, including the principle of democracy” (27). They thought their elite status as the true “bearers of culture” was threatened. By renouncing anything “modern” or of foreign origin and by joining the movement of nationalist pride and imperialist ambition they sought to strengthen their position in society. Increasingly more nationalist, antiliberal, and antisocialist, the educated elite constituted an unusual reactionary force opposing all democratic development in society. It is this conservative outlook that made the elite extremely reluctant to modernize the Gymnasium. Their attempt to induce new life into German culture and education by looking into the history and philosophy of the past prevented them from viewing the secondary school as a part of the wider society and thus as a vehicle for democratization (Hahn, 1998). This conservative outlook formed an underlying context in the politics of German education from 1848 until the end of the Wilhelmian Empire. In Prussia, four ministers of Education, Heinrich von Mühler, Adalbert Falk, Robert von Puttkamer, and Gustav von Gossler, and two directors of the department of secondary education, Ludwig Wiese and Hermann Bonitz, did not pursue any major restructuring of the secondary school system during the 1870s and 1880s. The most important events of these two decades were the Prussian school conference of 1873 and the introduction of a new curriculum in 1882. The conference of 1873 was one of a series convened by Falk to assist the preparation of a comprehensive education law, but the law was never passed. The regulations of 1882 did treat all secondary schools as part of a single system for the first time, but they neither
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changed the Gymnasium curriculum significantly nor made any revision in the system of privilege (Albisetti, 1983). A consequence of this was that influential associations of professional men and civil servants could continue to prevent graduates from Realschulen to enter their vocations. The failure to pass a major law strongly affecting secondary education and the fact that public attention was focused on Bismarck’s kulturkampf may be the reasons that barely any controversy was aroused in educational circles. The secondary school did not really become a subject of strong conflicts among political parties in which there were any sharp ideological differences. Ideological considerations, such as those involved in the battle between church and state over elementary schools, did not affect secondary education. Rather, there was to a large degree a consensus among politicians to retain the Gymnasium in its original form. Moreover, they also, with exceptions, showed a strong hostility toward the Realschulen, which deepened the divisions between the defenders of the Gymnasium and the supporters of the Realschulen. The Realschulen were often condemned by the educated elite as useless “petty practical” schools, while the Gymnasium was praised for representing German idealism. It was argued that the supporters of Realschulen were motivated by coarse concern with worldly gain and advantage and that they promoted “usefulness in the vulgar sense” and “profitableness for everyday life.” One Gymnasium defender warned of the danger to the throne and altar from “the exclusive direction of the mind toward the concrete . . . that utilitarianism which proceeds from materialism and ends in materialism” (cited after Ringer, 1969, 29). The sharp hostility directed at the modern curriculum, which became even more frequent toward the end of the century, shows, according to Ringer, how thoroughly the classical ideal had become entangled with political conservatism and social elitism. The nonclassical schools were still primarily the preserve of the lower middle class, and the Gymnasium, that of the upper classes. The strong animosity between the defenders of the Gymnasium and the supporters of the Realschulen made it politically impossible to negotiate a solution for integrating the two school types. Thus, during the 1880s the contours of the secondary school system were firmly established. There were three types of secondary schools: the Gymnasium, the Realschule, which now became the nine-year Realgymnasium (the six-year Realschulen continued to exist), and the Oberrealschule. All three were nine-year institutions whose teachers were educated at the university. The Gymnasium at this time still devoted almost half of its curricula to Latin and Greek, more than in the Scandinavian secondary schools. The Oberrealschule did not teach the classical languages at all. Instead, their curriculum consisted of modern languages, natural sciences, and mathematics. The curriculum
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of the Realgymnasium was a compromise between the two other types of secondary schools, as it both included classical languages and natural sciences. The Realgymnasium thus had more prestige and official support than the Oberrealschule, which was its foremost rival. Detailed and rigid curricula descriptions made it practically impossible to transfer from one type of secondary school to another. In a few German states it was theoretically possible to transfer directly from the elementary school at grade three or four to the secondary school. However, this was, in fact, nearly impossible to do so practically. The secondary schools enrolled their pupils at the age of nine or ten, but usually not from the public elementary school but from preparatory schools (Ringer, 1969; 1979). Toward the end of the century, a movement of elementary and secondary school teachers, mainly with elementary school backgrounds, emerged, which questioned the divided secondary education system. It was their belief that the secondary education system was too compartmentalized and too old-fashioned in its classical curriculum and teaching methods. Moreover, they urged that the preparatory schools be abolished altogether in order to make the elementary school the basis for secondary education. According to their ideas, which, if implemented, would have lead to a comprehensive school (Einheitschule), all children were to start education in a four-year or even six-year common school (Grundschule). Subsequent to the common school, middle- and higher schools were to be interrelated in such a way that a direct transfer could be made. Upper secondary schools were to be established above these. The curricula had to be harmonized to some degree by introducing a significant proportion of elective subjects and by accommodating several different course programs within the same secondary school institution. The upper secondary schools were not to be too specialized, though diversification was acceptable; this was to take place within a framework of a single unit as long as possible. When a branching off was necessary, preferably after nine years of common schooling, the upper schools were still to emphasize diversity in their programs in order to accommodate each pupil’s own inclinations and academic advancement. Moreover, the curriculum of the middle and upper schools to some extent had to be adjusted to modern economic and social conditions. German, modern languages, and modern history, as well as civic instruction to prepare the young people for a democratic society, were to be assigned a more significant role in the curriculum of all schools. This program, although only carried out to a limited extent during the Weimar period, constituted a serious challenge to the tripartite education system that reflected the highly stratified society. The Realschulen did flourish considerably especially around the turn of the century, but this only contributed to the deepening of the rift between the different
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secondary school types. The increasing support that the Realschule enjoyed as an independent school in its own right meant that it was not viewed among politicians as a school that would enhance the democratization process in the society. Moreover, the German educated elite, in contrast to the elite in Scandinavia, hardly made any concessions to modern educational ideals in the secondary school and did not forego classical learning as the foundation of secondary education, as did their Danish and Norwegian counterparts. Had the Scandinavian educated elite insisted as fiercely as the German elite on the maintenance of classical learning, the Liberals would have encountered serious obstacles in pursuing their democratic educational ideas. In the German conference of higher education in 1890, it was decided that the Gymnasium should teach less Greek and Latin and more Modern History, Geography, and German, but this was not the result of the adoption of modernist views on education. Rather this decision was taken to avoid making any further concessions to the Realgymnasium, which was expected to gradually die out in competition with a reformed Gymnasium. However, the Gymnasium defenders began to realize that they faced a long struggle in which the curriculum of the Gymnasium would be diluted beyond recognition unless they accepted the other secondary schools. In this way, they hoped, the reform movement could be channeled away from the Gymnasium itself, which they wished to protect as intact as possible (Ringer, 1969, Albisetti, 1983). The result was that the borders between each secondary school type were further strengthened, because they saw each other as competitors and not as cooperators who could find a model on which to base an integrated education system through compromise. In a school conference that resulted in a royal decree in 1900, the tripartite system was firmly established as the nonclassical schools were made at par with the Gymnasium. It seems plausible that the lack of political liberalism in Germany can to a large extent explain why the tripartite system was consolidated as such, rather than be integrated into a ladder system of education. In alliance with the educated elite, conservative parties thus grew particularly powerful and, as they generally lacked resistance from the opposition, such as the Liberals and the emerging SPD, they were able to resist the democratization of the Gymnasium and to maintain it as the bastion of the educated elite.
England In so far as it is possible to establish that political liberalism was essential in creating a ladder system of education in Scandinavia, and that the
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near-absence of liberalism in Germany was a contributory factor in retaining the tripartite system, the case of England, where liberalism was the most powerful political force but did not lead to an education system similar to that of Scandinavia, is quite peculiar. As in Germany, a tripartite system of education in England was further consolidated, rather than be integrated on comprehensive lines. This peculiarity, therefore, cannot be explained entirely by the power of political liberalism. During the years between 1830 and 1886 political liberalism remained almost unchallenged in England. After 1859, when the Liberal Party began to be transformed into a “modern” political party, the Liberals gained an independent majority four times, in 1865, 1868, 1880, and 1906. The Conservative Party, on the other hand, only won two elections, in 1841 and 1874 (Sykes, 1997, 20). This accrued power was sufficient for the Liberal Party to create a ladder system of education if it had so wished, but this was not the case. In stark contrast to the Scandinavian liberal parties, the English Liberal Party did not pursue a thorough reorganization of secondary education on a model that would promote social mixing. The social class backgrounds of the Liberal Party and its liberal ideology is the key to understanding why England embarked on a route different from that of Scandinavia concerning educational development. Whereas the leadership of the Liberal Party in Scandinavia constituted mainly urban middle-class radicals or rural leaders with social-liberal views, the English Liberal Party was essentially aristocratic. The Liberal Party was a continuation of the Whig party of the previous century, which was basically made up by the gentry whose domination lasted—though in decline—well into the interwar period. Of the 456 English Liberal Members of Parliament between 1859 and 1874, there were 114 who were related to peerage, 47 were patrons of the livings, 122 were officers in the services or military, and over half were large landowners or gentlemen of leisure (51–52). Thus, many of the great Whig families were landed magnates as well as major industrial entrepreneurs, and, in spite of their modest numbers, their social standing and political confidence allowed them to exercise significant influence. The liberal ideology of the British Liberal Party was also considerably different from that of the Scandinavian liberal parties. Both parties, however, maintained that state intervention in education should be reduced to a minimum, but the English Liberal Party took this view to a far greater extreme than the Scandinavian liberal parties. The Scandinavian Liberal Party acknowledged a role for the state in promoting the mixing of social classes through public education, while the English Liberals maintained, on the whole, that education should be class-based and a private matter. This extreme liberal ideology in England was essentially an expression of
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the overwhelmingly dominant values of the Victorian era: individualism, enterprise, and laissez-faire liberalism. Society was not seen as a “cohesive collective” but as a “body of individuals.” The public good was no more than the happiness of the greatest number of individuals, and this could only be achieved through the individual pursuit of enlightened self-interest. What separated Britain from Scandinavia, as well as the Continent, was the deep infusion of liberal individualism in all parts of the ruling and working classes. According to Marquand (1988), British liberal ideology was much more than just a political philosophy the Liberal Party was espousing; individualism and hostility toward state intervention constituted almost a way of life. The ethos of liberalism was, Marquand (1988) says, “more deeply embedded in her culture than in any other European culture.” More completely than elsewhere, Britain’s culture was “permeated with the individualism which its intellectuals codified and justified” (7, 211). This was evidenced in the popularization of earlier liberal ideology through the works of Herbert Spencer and Samuel Smiles. Spencer transferred Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural evolution into social organization, thus creating a “social Darwinism” that legitimized capitalist self-interest with the natural law of the survival of the fittest. Smiles, on the other hand, in his extremely popular book with the telling title Self Help, deepened popular attachment to individualist values by developing a moral framework that underlined the dignity of working-class independence and individual aspiration. The values Spencer and Smiles represented and their deep-seated popularity, combined with the liberal suspiciousness toward the state, constituted an essential part of the cultural values in the society. Through its class elitism and its pure liberal ideology, the Liberal Party renounced radicalism in the search for a thorough reformation of the society through education. Its role became increasingly one of conservatism from within, and, especially once Gladstone had assumed leadership, the gentry played an important part in reassuring moderate public opinion that it sought gradual reform but no major reconstruction. Hence the school system was never made a subject for a thorough reorganization during the last part of the nineteenth century. Even though this period saw more legislation on education than hitherto, these efforts were rather meager in contrast to the efforts in Scandinavia and the Continent. Also, the attempts for reform made by Liberals in England were directed at improving the existing system rather than reorganizing it, as was done by the Scandinavian Liberals. The elementary schools and secondary schools in England were kept as demarcated entities since they were to serve different classes, and thus there were no attempt to bring them together. Secondary education in Britain, which was private, was notable
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for its elitism, its resistance to modern curriculum, and its segmented and hierarchical structure. In contrast to those in Scandinavia and Germany, the English secondary schools, including the public, grammar, and proprietary schools, had many distinctions of rank and prestige reflecting the social divisions in the middle and upper social classes. They were divided into three distinct school types corresponding to the different social classes. The aristocracy, the gentry, and some of the wealthy industrialists sent their children to the “ancient nine” Public schools. Most preeminent among those were Eton, which was favored by Anglicans and Tories, and Harrow, which was attended mainly by the Whig aristocracy. The wealthy middle class, including the poorer gentry, those from the older professions, and the majority of greater manufacturers used the endowed grammar schools and the new proprietary schools. The lower middle class, comprising smaller tradesmen and farmers, used the less prestigious grammar schools if they could afford it (Green, 1990; Simon, 1974). In the 1860s the government began to intervene in secondary education, which was made possible by a change of attitude toward liberalism mainly due to the emergence of a liberal alliance between the radical middle class and the skilled working class. The culture of pure liberalism or laissez-faire epitomized by Spencer and Smiles was waning. This did not imply that the Liberals suddenly embraced ideas of collectivism, but rather that pragmatic arguments had forced the necessity of a more positive role for the state. Thus the government launched major enquiries into secondary education. The purpose of these was, within the existing divided school system, to improve educational standards and the efficiency of individual schools. The first commission investigating the Public schools was established in 1861 under the leadership of the Earl of Clarendon. The commission, in short, maintained that classics should form the core of the curriculum, though it suggested that Mathematics and Modern Language be included as well. In so doing, the commission strengthened the role of the public school as serving the upper class and sealed its isolation from other secondary schools and consequently the middle class. According to Brian Simon, the Clarendon Commission had “created an efficient and entirely segregated system of education for the governing class—one that had no parallels in any other country” (Simon, 1981, 318). The Schools Inquiry Commission of 1868, under Lord Taunton, investigated the remaining secondary schools. This investigation, which was the most far-reaching enquiry ever undertaken in England, found that the majority of grammar schools and private schools were of too poor a quality. In order to improve them, the commission recommended that the state take control over secondary school inspection and examinations. In addition, it proposed a three-tiered structure for these schools on the basis of
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divisions within the middle class, which would provide at each level a type of education that facilitated the specific needs of the children. The first tier would cater to those with inherited wealth—top ranking professionals and the poorer gentry—who wished to gain a cheaper form of classical education up to nineteen years. The second tier would provide a more modern education, though retaining some Latin, up to sixteen years, and would serve children of engineers and those in the lower occupations of the medical and legal fields. The third tier would offer a basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic up to fourteen years for the children of the smaller farmers, tradesmen, and superior artisans (333). This socially stratified system of secondary education was to be regulated by scholarships, fees, curricula, and statutes, employing age to ensure limitation of entry to the three different tiers on the basis of different social groups. The proposals were only partially incorporated into the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. The government did not pursue the recommendation of state control over education in respect to inspection and centralization, but it did support various measures to establish the three-tier system of secondary education. The social result of the Act was that middle-class education was enhanced at the expense of the working-class students, who were almost denied access to already very restricted middle-class education; “Far from creating a normative form of middle-class education,” says Green (1990), “based on uniform principles utility, merit and relevance . . . they institutionalized the social and cultural fragmentation of the middle class and circumscribed the meritocratic principle to exclude the majority of the population” (291). The secondary school curriculum was predominantly classical, there being little corresponding differentiation between the curricula tailored to the academic or vocational needs of the different social classes. The secondary schools remained classical in orientation and under the influence of an ethos developed by the gentry, who had taken little interest in the promotion of “useful knowledge” and, like the German educated elite, regarded their distance from worldly affairs and industrious pursuits as a mark of social status. They vehemently resisted science and vocational studies making inroads into this classical education. However, unlike in Germany where Realshulen with its modern curriculum became a popular alternative to the classical Gymnasium for the middle classes, such modern schools never took off in England. Throughout most of the nineteenth century the dominance of classical culture in these schools was almost total. Even in 1870, classics continued to occupy four-fifths of the timetable (Green, 1990, 284). Unlike the Scandinavian Latin school headmasters who were willing to accept a large reduction of classical studies in the secondary schools, the English maintained classics as the preeminent core
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in the curriculum. As with the German educated elite, their strong insistence on classics is essential in understanding why the secondary school remained structurally intact in England. Had they allowed modern subjects to dominate in the curriculum at the expense of the classics, it could have been possible to create an independent “middle stage” of the secondary school that eventually would have functioned as a bridge between elementary and secondary education. The development in Scandinavia certainly suggests that this was essential in the construction of a ladder system of education in these countries. In Britain, the liberal insistence on a class-based secondary education system with a predominantly classical curriculum explains why it was never abolished. In England elementary education was, as in Scandinavia, greatly improved, especially after the elementary education Act of 1870. However, this Act sought only to compensate for the deficiencies of the existing structure, not to carry out a thorough reform, and to do it as inexpensively as possible. In the historiography of English education, the Act of 1870 has been seen as a turning point, as it laid the foundation for a national system of education. However, the Act did not consider the elementary school attended by working-class children as a part of an integrated system of education. Elementary and secondary education were still isolated entities having different educational goals and serving different classes. The Act provided for publicly funded schools to be run locally by democratically elected school boards in areas where the existing voluntary provision was insufficient, but it otherwise retained the voluntary structure with increased state aid. The Act was unable to firmly ensure elementary education as a foundation for secondary education, as Forster did not fully support state education. Nor would such a view have found sufficient parliamentary support. Many Liberals, such as Gladstone, were only halfhearted converts to the notion of state education and were reluctant, as he put it, to “undergo the risk of extinguishing that vast amount of voluntary effort which now exists throughout the country” (West, 1975, 194). According to Green (1990), it should be stressed that “there was nothing particularly egalitarian about Foster’s Act. It said nothing about secondary education and the lack of it for the working class, and completely failed to address the question of potential inequalities where the voluntary sector remained largely autonomous. The voluntary sector was actually strengthened by the Act and remained the leading sector for many years after. . . . Forster’s Act thus created a national provision without an integrated system” (303). Elementary education was sharply demarcated from secondary education and thus could not serve as a link to it. After 1870, post-elementary education developed in the form of socalled “higher tops” for working-class children, which could possibly have
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become a middle stage education between elementary schools and secondary schools. But this “higher top” development was later to be obstructed by government. School Boards in the bigger cities provided higher tops in spite of the fact that it was not in their purview to do so. The higher tops were established either in connection to the elementary school or as a separate school in which academically able children could achieve postelementary education. In contrast to the traditional grammar schools, they offered a modern curriculum that was better able to meet the demands of the changing urban economy, which sought more highly skilled clerical and technical workers (Robinson, 2002; Reeder, 1987). The success of these higher tops in providing affordable and occupationally relevant education, which was not exclusive in terms of fees, social class, and culture, soon challenged the previously uncontested middle-class secondary education in the grammar schools. In her study on higher elementary education, Vlaeminke (2000) has demonstrated that higher-grade schools were in fact perceived as rivals of the older secondary grammar schools and were more popular with lower middle-class parents because of their advancement of vocational and technical instruction. Up until the late 1890s, the higher-grade schools, which were entirely under the control of the School Boards, received a tacit acceptance from the Education Department, but from that time, under a different central regime headed by Robert Morant, the government’s accepting attitude toward the higher-grade schools was replaced by an aggressive policy. The questionable legality of the financing of schools and the political implications of developing alternative forms of secondary education apart from the traditional grammar schools became the focus of political attention. In 1895, when the Conservative Party came to power, distinct measures were taken in order to encourage the continued development of what was perceived as pseudo-secondary education (Robinson, 2002, 162). In 1899 the Education Department decided that classes organized by local boards were ineligible to receive grant monies from the Department of Science and Art. As a consequence, higher-grade schools that were heavily dependent on this funding suffered. As a result of the Code of 1900, only a few of the existing higher-grade schools were transformed into higher elementary schools, whose curriculum was more restricted, but the remainder continued without official recognition until the 1902 Education Act, which restructured secondary education entirely. A result of the Conservative government’s efforts, the 1902 Education Act specified a dual system of education, with centrally controlled, selective secondary education being kept separate from elementary schooling. It was primarily geared toward the middle classes (Simon, 1977, 14). New Local Education Authorities that replaced the School Boards were, in conjunction
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with the central government, to exercise control over education. Instead of viewing higher-grade schools as an organic connection to the elementary schools and the grammar schools, the Act instead reinstated the grammar school as the only recognized type of secondary education. It also created a separate selective system of secondary schools organized largely on the basis of social class, providing limited opportunity for exceptional academically gifted working-class children to achieve secondary education in a grammar school. According to Brian Simon, the higher-grade school system, which sought organic and coherent relations between the various stages of elementary, secondary, and higher education, as well as accommodation of the economic and social needs of urban society, constituted such a threat and challenge to the traditional, hierarchical, and class-segregated system of education that it ultimately faced downfall. The Act introduced a legal ceiling of fifteen years for elementary schools and effectively abolished the higher-grade schools, and along with them the possibility of a bridge between the elementary and secondary schools. Robert Morant was later to reinforce the separation of elementary and secondary education by forcing the grammar schools to adopt an academic curriculum based on the public school model. Effectively, two education systems had now been created that excluded the majority of working-class children from secondary education. The limited number of scholarships provided for secondary schools ensured that the exclusion was almost total. The failure to address these educational divisions contributed to the most enduring characteristic of English education—its extreme segmentation along class lines.
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Chapter 5 Social Democratic Politics: The Advancement of Comprehensive Education
Introduction During the twentieth century the advancement of comprehensive schooling became the core of Scandinavian educational policy. The school system, which comprised the elementary school, the middle school, and the upper secondary school, was subjected to major reforms that ultimately made its compulsory part fully comprehensive—a nine-year unselective system combining the elementary and middle school, with mixed ability classes throughout. Dissatisfaction with the selection to the middle school inspired this reform movement. Increasingly the academically able children from the five-year elementary school were advanced to the middle school while the less able were relegated to the elementary school’s extra two classes, graded six and seven. Although the school system was generally viewed as successfully organized according to the comprehensive principle, the two extra classes of the elementary school inevitably came to be regarded as merely a place to “dump” the “leftovers.” It was this “socially unfair” situation that sparked the reform movement, which sought to postpone such early selection by integrating the school system even further along comprehensive lines. Reformers suggested that the middle school be abolished in order to create an elementary school of longer duration—of seven, or preferably nine, years—during which time a cohesive social community could evolve. During the interwar
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period this suggestion was gradually implemented. In Norway, the middle school was thus abolished in two steps, one in 1920 and then in 1936. In Sweden in 1927, the middle school, the realskola, was partially truncated by reducing it from six to four years in order to extend the elementary school from four to six years. By 1962 the middle school had finally ceased to exist. In Denmark, the middle school was abolished only after the Second World War, in 1958, and this paved the way for a seven-year comprehensive school. The relatively late abolition of the Danish middle school had to do with the surprising fact that it was strengthened during the interwar period by the establishment of a new, practically oriented, middle school operating in parallel to the existing middle school. Though time differences existed in the abolition of the middle schools throughout Scandinavia, it is striking that in all of these countries a seven-year comprehensive school was introduced, which was extended to nine/ten years during the 1960s and 1970s. In England and Germany also the school systems had become the subject of reform, but, in stark contrast to those in Scandinavia, these systems were not reorganized along comprehensive lines during the interwar period. Instead, the standards of the individual schools within the existing, selective school system were improved and new forms of secondary schools for the children of the working classes, apart from the traditional elite secondary schools, were created. In England and Germany, children around the age of eleven were directed to enroll in different types of secondary schools, and it was not until after the Second World War that these two countries embarked on changing their selective school systems into unified, coherent systems; however, even then their systems remained selective at the secondary level. This chapter will explore the hypothesis that the extent of radical comprehensive reform depended on social democracy. In all of the Scandinavian countries, it was the social democratic parties that played the key role in the abolition of the middle school, allowing first a sevenyear and later a nine-/ten-year comprehensive school to materialize. The power of the social democratic parties, made possible by their alliance with liberal parties, resulted in consensus-seeking politics, which ultimately led to the creation of radical comprehensive school systems. Had this alliance between the two most powerful parties in Scandinavian politics been absent, the middle school would more than likely have survived, not least since it was considered successful across political boundaries and enjoyed significant popular support. The special alliance of farmers and workers, peculiar to the political formations in Scandinavia, will be investigated in order to establish to what extent this contributes to the comparative explanation of the divergent development of comprehensive education in
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Scandinavia. The successful and long-standing alliance welded between the Social Democrats and the Liberals, which boosted social democratic power tremendously, especially from 1950 to the 1970s, radically differentiates Scandinavia from Germany and England. In both Germany and England, the social democratic parties, the SPD and Labor, respectively, commanded much less political power. Consequently, only a relatively less comprehensive school systems were able to develop in these two countries.
Social Democratic Variations Social democracy, according to Hodge (1994), can be defined historically as a “political movement based on the advocacy of political, economic, and social reform primarily on behalf of the European wage-laboring populace and committed to the achievement of such reforms through the institutional vehicle of parliamentary government” (xiii). In Scandinavia, the social democratic parties, with nearly full backing from a growing working class, were founded in late nineteenth century. In Denmark, Louis Pio had established the first branch of the First International, but the party fell apart when the police disrupted it by imprisoning its leaders and forcing them to emigrate to the United States. Subsequently, in 1878, the Danish Social Democratic Party was reconstituted by trade unionists. However, this party still faced obstacles in mobilizing politically since the entire working class was ineligible to vote at the time and the Conservatives continued to attract many of the more affluent workers. The Social Democrats elected two representatives to parliament in 1884, but it was not until 1901 that the party really began to mobilize. In 1924, the first Social Democratic government was established. It was short-lived, however, since the still rather powerful Liberals assumed governmental power from 1926 to 1929. In 1929 the Social Democratic Party returned to power and established a government in coalition with the Radical Liberals (Bertolt, 1954/1955). In Norway, the Social Democratic Party, the DNA, was established in 1887, but since an urban working class barely existed until the turn of the century, the party remained very weak. Thus, although their Danish counterpart had already gained parliamentary representation by the 1880s, in Norway the party had to wait until 1903 for the same. Only after 1905 did the party start to grow electorally, gaining 16 percent of the votes in 1916 and 32 percent in 1915. In 1935, Johan Nygaardsvold was thus able to establish the first Social Democratic government. In Sweden the Social
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Democratic Party (SAP) was established by trade unionists with support from Danish socialists. The first great social democratic figure in Sweden was Hjalmar Branting, who, through his role as a politician, party leader, and state minister, laid the foundations for the strong position that the Social Democratic Party later attained. Branting was elected to parliament on a Liberal ticket in 1897, and in 1898 the party was reorganized into separate political and trade union branches. However, the Social Democratic Party did not start to grow before the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1905, the party had thirteen representatives in parliament, and subsequently the number increased. In 1914 the party received more than 36 percent of the votes, and by 1917 it was the single largest party in Sweden, with 39 percent of the votes. The Social Democratic Party gained power eight times during the interwar period, and Branting was state minister in three of them at different times from 1920 to 1925. The party experienced a final breakthrough when P. A. Hansen established, in 1932, a pure Social Democratic government (Einhart, 1972; Bäckström, 1971a, 1971b). Common to all the Scandinavian countries was the fact that social democratic parties during the interwar period were highly successful in political mobilization. However, the period was also marked by shifting governments. It was only in Sweden that the Social Democratic Party achieved a sustained period of governmental power on its own and without parliamentary alliances. The Norwegian and Danish social democratic parties achieved power only for shorter periods, as the liberal parties in these two countries still had a more prominent political position than those in Sweden. After the Second World War, the power of the social democratic parties was strengthened further. However, in contrast to Sweden, the liberal parties in Denmark and Norway still held a strong position, particularly in Denmark. This resulted in more frequent coalition governments in Denmark than in Norway, where the Social Democratic Party alone held governmental power for longer periods. As Scandinavian economies were still predominantly agricultural well into the 1950s and offered very little that was propitious for subsequent social democratic hegemony, it is peculiar that social democracy could grow immensely powerful here. One would expect that liberalism, as it maintained the support of farmers, would continue its domination of the political scene. However, liberalism, as elsewhere in Europe—England being a particularly good example—was, in fact, in decline during the interwar period. The failure of liberalism to establish political dominance was due to the threat the liberal parties faced from the increasing political organization of the workers. Perhaps even more importantly, most Liberal leaders rejected the creation of the kind
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of Liberal-Labor alliances that was a characteristic before the war, since these alliances required concessions that would increase political leverage of the workers. In Scandinavia, however, such a Liberal-Labor alliance was reestablished to some degree during the interwar period, but this was mainly for the benefit of the workers. In fact, as the Danish political scientist Gösta EspingAndersen (1985) has concluded from his major study on social democracy in the Nordic countries, social democracy was able to produce powerful parties because of its ability to forge alliances with the liberal peasantry. As he claims: “the peasantry was ultimately decisive in the social democratic breakthrough before World War II. Where peasants were unorganized and politically inarticulate, as in most of Central Europe, they were susceptible to fascism but were unlikely to enter into political alliances with labor. The democratic character and peculiar organization of the Scandinavian peasantry enabled social democracy to gain its firmest foothold in the Nordic countries, and it was the absence therof that stifled socialist parties elsewhere, most notably Germany” (xv and xvi). A precondition of social democratic power in Scandinavia was thus the social democratic parties’ ability to weld alliances with other influential political parties. Had the social democratic parties declined to form alliances with the Liberals, they would have become politically isolated and unable to make their influence felt. It was simply not sufficient for the social democratic parties to be “carried forward” by the great electorate they had in the working class. Where the parties were conceived as strictly working-class movements, they have, according to EspingAndersen, always been doomed to fail. Even when optimally mobilized, the numerical size of the working class was still too small to permit social democratic majorities (xiv and xv). And, as he points out, size can hardly explain the wide international variations in the strength of social democratic parties. The relative size of the working class across Western Europe and the United States was quite similar, but the power of their social democratic parties does not correspond to this. In fact, there is hardly any correlation, as social democracy was most powerful in Scandinavia and weakest in the United States. This does not imply that the size of the working class was not essential for social democratic power, since the nature of class structural development defines, to an important extent, the possibilities of social democratic mobilization. However, more than anything else, it was the ability to forge coalitions with other parties that ultimately determined the level of power the social democratic parties could possibly achieve. In Scandinavia, the alliance with the peasantry, which allowed social democratic parties to enter parliamentary politics, was demonstrated
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on two historical occasions: in their common struggle for universal suffrage in the late nineteenth century and again during the economic depression in the 1930s. During the depression the Social Democrats and the Liberals cooperated and, among other things, they agreed on social reforms and full employment in return for agricultural price subsidies. The early and successful mobilization of the peasants was thus essential for the Social Democrats in initiating an alliance with them. Esping-Andersen goes so far as to claim that social democracy would have been aborted had it not been for its capacity to ally with the rural classes (38). It is also important to stress that the main reason an alliance between the Liberals and the Social Democrats could be welded was that the Liberals, because of the accrued power behind them, did not perceive the Social Democrats as a serious threat. The Liberals learned, in Esping-Andersen’s words, “that the socialists were not necessarily a threat; socialists discovered that significant strides could be made through ad hoc alliances” (7). Moreover, since the social democratic parties were not rooted in radical Marxist ideology and sought to achieve their political goals through democratic means, they could more easily form alliances with the Liberals. Had they, as in the German Social Democratic Party, been permeated with radical Marxist ideology, their political integration and influence would have been seriously hampered. Instead, the Scandinavian Social Democrats argued that the existing state apparatus should be a vehicle for promoting peaceful reform strategies on a parliamentary basis. The parties, clearly moderate, pragmatic, and reform-seeking, successfully marginalized both leftist and rightist foes and, through alliances with the Liberals, ingratiated themselves politically and achieved immense political power (89).
Denmark The Danish Social Democratic Party formed an alliance with the Liberal Party from 1884 until 1903, after which the alliance was dissolved temporarily. During this period, collaborations were successfully undertaken, since both parties had common political goals: the introduction of parliamentary sovereignty, universal suffrage, and social reforms. They also practically cooperated in the elections (Bryld, 1992, 209–221). After 1903, the Social Democrats welded an alliance with the Radical Liberals, which had left its mother party, the Liberal Party, in 1905. The Radical Liberals, which comprised of more left-wing farmers, occupied the center in the political spectrum, situated between the Social Democratic Party
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on one side and the Liberals and Conservatives on the other. The latter two parties now became the right-wing or the “bourgeois bloc” in the political spectrum, even though the Liberal political viewpoints regarding education at this point could still be characterized as Social Liberal. The alliance between the Social Democratic Party and the Radical Liberals was based essentially on three key policy areas: reduction of military spending, a revised constitution in the “spirit” of the June Constitution of 1848, and social reforms. Except for a few short periods, the alliance lasted for more than a hundred years and allowed the integration of the Social Democratic Party politically, as expressed through successful elections. In the election of 1913, for example, the Social Democrats received, for the first time, a greater share of the votes than the Liberals, at 30 percent; at the election in 1920 the party gained 33 percent of the votes, and in 1924 they gained 36.6 percent (Esping-Andersen, 1985, 75–76). In 1924, for the first time, the party could thus form a government, in which Stauning was the state minister. These successful elections were also made possible by the absence of a leftist opposition. The communist splinter group, later the Danish Communist Party, which emerged just after the Russian revolution of 1917, failed to attract enough sections of the working class to put the Social Democrats under serious threat. The Communist Party experienced some growth during the 1930s—peaking in 1939 with 2.4 percent of the votes—but since the Social Democrats reduced the high rate of unemployment during that decade, the drift of unemployed workers into the Communist Party was limited. The increased power of the Social Democrats had to do with the fact that the party did not view their electoral successes as a platform for socialistic “experiments” but as a stepping-stone for further electoral success. The party was remarkably pragmatic in orientation and did not pay much attention to Marxist ideology. The party did have an ideologist in Gustav Bang, who sought in his theoretical work to establish an “organic relationship between reformist work and revolutionary goals.” However, he never exercised a great influence in the party (Togeby, 1968, 107). The absence of intellectual, radical ideologists in the party implied that debilitating conflicts could be avoided. In fact, the arrival of the Communists only helped the party to unify in adopting a pragmatic approach to politics. The overriding conflict within the party was between the unskilled workers and the dominant, skilled workers organized in the union movement and the party (Bryld, 1992, 160). The Social Democrats stepped down in 1926, but returned again to power in 1929 and, until 1940, governed in coalition with the Radical Liberals. In 1935 the Social Democrats experienced their greatest
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electoral success, garnering 46.6 percent of the votes. In the run-up to the election, the party, in order to attract voters beyond the working class and increase power, revised its political programme. The programme, which was named “Denmark for the People,” (Danmark for folket) included areas of social reforms, education, public service, and unemployment, thus signalling that it was intended for all citizens and not just for the working class. To this end, the word “socialism” was replaced with “democracy,” and “working class” with “the people” (Bryld, 2004). In spite of adopting a new strategy of broader appeal, it was not until after the Second World War that this programme met with success. During the 1930s, the workers engaged in close collaboration with the farmers. In return for promises of agricultural subsidies and trade union wage restraint, both the Radical Liberals and the Liberals approved an active crisis policy under Social Democratic leadership (Bertolt, 1954/1955). This collaboration would form the basis of a long era of Danish Social Democratic welfare state politics. It also included the area of education, as we will see later, as the farmers and workers would work together, though not without conflicts, on reorganizing the school system on comprehensive lines.
Norway The Social Democratic Party in Norway did not wield much influence until 1905, when it forged, without hindrance from the Conservatives, an alliance with the Liberal Party. A powerful conservative force could not develop in Norwegian politics mainly because the wealthier farmers from the southern part of Norway neither allied themselves with the poorer small holders nor with the growing industrial bourgeoisie. Hence, the Conservative Party, which was hobbled by strong internal conflicts that reduced its influence, was too weak to pose a serious threat to the Liberals and Social Democrats. Consequently, the emerging Social Democrats, in cooperation with the Liberals, simply had nothing to fear from the Right. However, cooperation between the Social Democrats and the Liberals could only take place when the conservative wing—the farmers with strong religious beliefs who declined to work together with the urban Liberals— broke out of the Liberal Party and joined the Conservatives. The Liberal Party, which was the governmental party until 1918, now embarked upon a close cooperation with the Social Democrats in pursuing social reforms (Elvander, 1980). As in Denmark, the Norwegian Social Democratic Party was based on a reform-seeking programme, which was essential in creating an alliance
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with the Liberals. However, the alliance was brought to an abrupt end when, in 1919, the Social Democratic Party affiliated with the Comintern. It was only in 1927, when the party broke off this affiliation and abandoned a radical, revolutionary programme that the cooperation with the Liberals could be revived. Dissatisfaction with the electoral system—until 1920, this was based on single-member constituencies that heavily overrepresented the largest parties—caused the Social Democrats to change political course. Even though it had obtained great victories in both the 1906 and 1915 elections, the party did not gain commensurate representation in parliament. The change in political course was provoked by the unusually powerful influence from the syndicalist opposition within the labor movement following a strike in 1909 and the subsequent Trondheim Resolution in 1911. The syndicalist opposition, lead by the influential journalist, Martin Trammael, managed, with the Russian Revolution as an historical backdrop, to overtake control of the Social Democratic Party. At the 1918 party congress, the Social Democratic Party transformed itself into a revolutionary party, committed to opposing the bourgeois state and replacing it with “workers and soldier’s soviets” (Esping-Andersen, 1985, 79; Elvander, 1980, 42: Zachariassen, 1979). Five years later, in 1923, the Social Democratic Party left the Comintern on the grounds that it could not agree to the principle of democratic centralism. However, a small fraction in the party remained in the comintern and formed a separate Communist Party. The Social Democratic Party did not immediately renounce its support of revolutionary ideas, but in practice it had gradually come to pursue its political goals through parliamentary practice. In 1927, the Social Democratic Party reunited with reformist Social Democrats from the Communist Party and was thus able to win a substantial electoral victory, obtaining 27 percent of the votes. The party, however, only enjoyed its victory for a couple of weeks, before it was forced to step down. It had proposed a radical program for socializing the means of production, to which proposal the bourgeoisie responded with massive capital flight. With the financial system close to collapse, the Conservatives ousted the government. The political system during 1920s was very volatile because the old two-party system of Conservatives and Liberals had broken down, as the parties did not gain sufficient votes to form a coalition government. Also, the introduction in 1920 of proportional representation made it possible for a separate agrarian party to break with the Liberals and mobilize their own electorate, thereby weakening the Liberals. Thus, unstable minority governments governed successively, led either by the Conservatives or the Liberals, except for the two-week interval of Social Democratic rule. The once powerful Liberal Party decayed gradually, since it was no longer
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based on a firm, well-defined class base and became a party composed of a hybrid of Christian fundamentalist movements, temperance organizations, and nationalists. The electoral failure of the Social Democrats, however, did not persuade the party to curb their radical, revolutionary ideology in favor of more moderate views. In the run-up to the 1930 election, the party continued its radical ideology, resulting in a major electoral defeat. This defeat finally forced the Social Democratic Party to revitalize the reformist wing within the party. Hence, in the period of 1930–1933, the party gradually replaced its radical ideology for reformist viewpoints. Also, the evolving Nazi sympathies expressed in the Conservative Party and in some rural areas, as well as the establishment of Quislings’ Nazi Party, helped the Social Democrats quickly to adopt a moderate, reformist way of pursuing political agendas. The party was, from now on, just as the Danish Social Democratic Party, focused on welfare reforms, including education, employment schemes, and subsidies to farmers. In the 1933 election, the Social Democratic Party achieved a great electoral victory with 40 percent of the votes, as against the two percent achieved by the Communist Party, and formed a government with the first parliamentary majority since 1918. Thus, just as in Denmark, according to EspingAndersen (1985), “a farmer-working-class alliance gave rise to a social democratic realignment” (81).
Sweden The mobilization of social democracy in Sweden was marked, in contrast to Denmark, by a long struggle for parliamentary sovereignty, which was not introduced until 1917. The fight for parliamentary sovereignty was consigned to social democratic forces since Swedish society in the late nineteenth century did not give rise to a large liberal-minded class of farmers and urban bourgeoisie who, through the Liberal Party, could successfully pursue parliamentary sovereignty. However, in the beginning of the twentieth century, both the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party gained political strength because of the extended franchise and the increased size of the working class. The 1911 elections gave the two parties a majority in the Second Chamber—the First chamber was still largely controlled by the Conservatives—and a loose alliance was established with the view to carry through the social reforms. This alliance broke down when the Conservatives took power in 1914, but after a short time the Liberals returned to power and revived the alliance with the Social Democrats. Together they managed, in a close collaboration, to abolish
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the last hindrances to universal suffrage and parliamentary sovereignty (Bäckström, 1971a, 1971b). Subsequently, the Social Democratic Party increasingly gained power through successful elections. Nevertheless, the 1920s was a politically unstable decade since it was not possible for any single party or a coalition of parties to sustain governmental power for very long. Also, the Social Democratic Party was, from its ideological standpoint, shifting between a revolutionary and a reformist political strategy. A conflict arose because Branting, the leader of the party, showed greater sympathies for radical thinking, having, as he did, a close connection to intellectual socialists such as Ernst Wigfors, Nils Karleby, and Gustav Müller. In spite of this, the party ultimately decided to adopt a reformist platform and was able to do so without losing the support of the left wing within the party. It thus avoided losses to the left and helped the party to remain united and strong (Esping-Andersen, 1985, 84). The opportunities for welding alliances after the 1920s were quite limited because the five-party system that had developed after 1918 was not appropriate for either conservative or social democratic alliances. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing did not show any particular interest in cooperating with the Social Democrats. The Liberal Party was not able to offer itself as an ally to the Social Democrats because the party had gradually been weakened during the elections, and consequently it was squeezed in between the two large parties, the Agricultural Party (Lantmannapartiet) on the one side and the Conservatives on the other. The Liberal Party did not regain its political strength because its electoral base, like that of its Norwegian counterpart, no longer consisted of a welldefined social class but consisted of myriad temperance movements, intellectuals, and white-collar groups. Because of this aspect the Conservative Party became the most powerful party on the right wing of the political spectrum. The Social Democrats continued their adherence to radical ideology, though in a more muted fashion than their Norwegian counterparts, discouraging the Conservative Party’s interest to collaborate with the Social Democrats and further sharpening opposition between the Socialists and the Conservatives. After their defeat in the 1928 election, the Social Democrats attempted to pursue more explicitly a pragmatic reform, a move caused by increasing unemployment, for which the party was expected to find a solution. With his notion of a “people’s home,” Per Albin Hansson suggested that the party broaden its electoral base beyond the working class. Wigfors and Möller, who were the architects behind major social welfare reforms, including a comprehensive scheme for unemployment, also argued that reforms should benefit not only the working class but also all citizens.
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A fear of fascism on the right and communism on the left propelled the Social Democrats toward political realignment. Rejecting the opportunity for revolutionary “action” in favor of proposing a pragmatic solution to unemployment was essential for the party’s victory at the following election in 1932. Winning nearly 42 percent of the votes, the Social Democratic Party could now form a government, but without a majority, which compelled them to forge an alliance with the right wing. The Liberals declined to support the Social Democrats on the grounds that their welfare programs, including the unemployment scheme, were far too costly. As a result, the Social Democrats approached the Agricultural Party for support, even though they did not have a history of mutual cooperation. The Agricultural Party, vehemently opposed to trade unionism and social welfare support for workers, cooperated with the Social Democrats, agreeing to support deficit-financed employment programs and welfare legislation in exchange for price supports for farmers. “By 1933,” Esping-Andersen claims (1985), “the Swedish Social Democracy had entered the era of a farmer-worker political alliance” (87). The social democratic mobilization in Scandinavia was thus made possible by their pragmatic social reformist policy and by their alliance with liberal parties. The alliance with the Liberals was possible only because the peasantry had hitherto successfully organized themselves into influential political parties. The alliance between the Social Democrats and the Liberals characterize all policy areas, including education, even to this day. The alliance between farmer and worker was essential for the development of an absolute comprehensive school system.
Social Democracy in England and Germany In Germany and Britain, during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, social democratic parties floundered and lost the political upper hand, either to conservative parties or to new party formations based on revolutionary or reactionary programmes. Paradoxically, the parties based on stronger labor movements in Britain and Germany suffered the most spectacular political defeats. This was most true of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which, prior to 1914, was considered the most prestigious member of the Second Socialist Internationale. The German Social Democratic Party, pursuing democracy after the abolished Prussian absolutism, could neither prevent the carnage of First World War nor consolidate the democratic republic established in the
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wake of Germany’s defeat. Though the parties sought power in very different domestic political settings, common to Britain and Germany was, according to Hodge (1994), a failure to link the political economy of the industrial working class of the interwar period to the broader bourgeoisdemocratic inheritance of the nineteenth century in such a way as to validate their claim to be the architects of a new social order (xii). The ability of the Scandinavian Social Democrats to link their interests to the rural middle class (the farmers) helped them escape political isolation and achieve the great political power that was utilized later to create universal welfare states and effect major reforms in education. Socialists in Germany and Britain were faced with the same central dilemma: in order to achieve reform on behalf of the workers, they required the support, either by vote or by coalition, of an electorate that comprised political parties beyond labor.
Germany In 1863 Ferdinand Lasalle established the Social Democratic Party under the name of Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein (ADAV), and in 1869 August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht founded the Socialdemokratischer Arbeiter Partei SDAP. The two parties merged at a conference in Gotha in 1875, taking the name The Socialist Workers Party (SAPD), and formulated the “Gotha Programme” wherein socialist ideology became the foundation of the party. In 1890 the party came to be known as the Sozialdemoktratische Partei Deutcsland (SPD). It was the first of the social democratic parties formed in Europe, and also the most dynamic force in domestic political life in the period between the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the First World War. From the outset, it was a political party committed to succeeding where the democrats of the revolutionary year of 1848 had failed. It seemed probable that the SPD, with the backing of the working class, would dominate the electoral landscape of the great European industrial power in the twentieth century. But this was not to be the case. The party faced massive internal as well as external obstacles that caused it almost to disintegrate. The political mobilization of the Social Democratic Party was deeply affected by Bismarck’s suppression of socialists and trade unionists during his era as Chancellor of the second Reich from 1871 to 1890. With the passage of the Socialist Laws in 1878, measures were designed to eliminate what Bismarck believed to be a serious threat to the unity of the Reich. This debilitated the SDP for years. Provisions of the Socialist Laws allowed the Social Democratic Party to stand for Reichtag
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elections, but its press, extra-parliamentary organization, and associated trade unions were forbidden. As Social Democrats could be elected, the party continued to grow in parliament, but it and its labor organizations were not able to resume functioning fully till the SPD was legalized again in 1890. Far from the Social Democrats being completely crushed, as Bismarck had hoped, the limited concessions permitted them to overcome their period of exile, and they later staged a massive effort in organizational innovation all over the country. Instead of destroying German socialism, Bismarck’s years of repression succeeded only in schooling the SPD in the importance of organization for the survival of its cause. This allowed it to become, ultimately, a mass party. During the 1880s the party had developed its covert organization into a powerful political force able to garner around 20 percent of the votes (Mommsen and Husung, 1984; Hodge, 1994). Under Bismark’s suppression the Social Democratic Party became radicalized and was transformed from a Socialist Party into a Marxist Party. This was accomplished under the immense influence of the party’s leader, August Bebel, whose ideology was mainly drawn from Karl Kautsky. The principle of Marxism became official in the party’s Erfurt program of 1891, which made the programme even more radical than the previous Gotha programme. The SPD was by now an ostensibly revolutionary mass political party with a program firmly based in Marxist principles, which aimed at a democratic republic in the place of the Wilhelmine constitution and the abolition of capitalism through socialization of Germany’s major industries. This radicalism was forged both by the repression of the Socialist Laws and by intense dissatisfaction with Prussia’s so-called threeclass voting system, which discriminated against socialists in the distribution of seats. This probably explains why the Erfurt program’s first goal was to establish universal suffrage based on proportional representation, and not the abolition of private enterprise. However, it was clear from the beginning that the party sought to replace a capitalistic state with a socialist one. Despite its successful organization and the intention of turning Imperial Germany into a democracy, the SPD faced serious hindrances that it struggled to overcome. The antidemocratic constitution of the country and the coercive powers of the Prussian state placed profound limitations on the party’s ability to promote political reform with the view of adding more substantive elements of parliamentary government to the symbolic concessions of the elections. Equally, the party leadership’s lack of appreciation for how vital the institutions of Liberal-Democratic government were in carrying out its political agendas limited the party’s possible advancement. In fact, the party’s leadership went so far as to declare that there existed in
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bourgeois democracy nothing of inherent value to the industrial working class. Mistrust of the Liberal-Democratic government caused by this radical Marxist ideology seriously hampered the integration of the SPD into the political system of the Second Reich. Entering into the interwar period, the SPD maintained the tradition of Marxist ideology and saw its electoral strength grow, reaching 37.9 percent of the votes in 1919. However, the party did not succeed on its own in forming a government, but became part of the so-called Weimar Coalition that led several short-lived interwar cabinets. Thus the political integration achieved by the SPD was far from what the Scandinavian social democratic parties were able to obtain. As stated above, political integration in Scandinavia was essentially made possible for two reasons: (1) the Scandinavian parties remained moderate and renounced radical ideology as the basis of their politics; and (2) they forged alliance with the farmers. The SPD, in sharp contrast to its Scandinavian counterpart, maintained a radical Marxist ideology and rejected initiation of an alliance with the farmers (Nipperday, 1984; Hodge, 1994, 6). The SPD’s rejection of an alliance with the farmers is a crucial issue in understanding their failure to integrate politically. The party expressed a strong antipathy toward welding political alliances in general and with the farmers in particular, especially in the years between 1923 and 1929. This drastically reduced the party’s chances to exert a major influence on politics during the only period of relative stability in the republic’s short history. The SPD never again secured a share of the votes as high as that secured in the 1919 election (37.9 percent) (58). The party did not realize the potential of gaining political strength by extending its mass base to include the farmers. The rejection of an alliance with the farmers was, surprisingly, supported by Friedrich Engels, to whom the small-scale farmers represented a retrograde class and a natural enemy of all socialism. The possibility of SPD agitation in the countryside that would have brought them a crucial measure of electoral support was simply missed. In addition, agrarian interest lobbies, such as the Bund der Landwirte, who were, during the 1890s, communicating a strong antilabor and antisocialist message to the rural populace, dampened the farmers interest for an alliance with labor. The SPD never departed from their traditional rejection of political alliances with the farmers. Only in 1927 did the Social Democrats officially pledge to include German agriculture in their policy by declaring the Agriculture Programme, Agrarprogramm. The programme was, in fact, not designed to appeal to the farmer’s political loyalties. It was more important for the party to “organize” agriculture—among other things, to free agriculture from damaging price fluctuations—than to win a rural electorate
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for the SPD. The programme was, in other words, entirely consistent with the tradition of the SPD and its scientific socialism. And, as late as 1932, the SPD’s treatment of agriculture continued in an academic sprit. The failure to address farmers as potential allies and gain a percentage of their votes made the party’s return to government in 1928 unattainable (Hodge, 1994, 65; Gerschenkron, 1943, 21–32; Laursen, 1988). Few political parties have failed so completely in the achievement of their manifest destiny as the Social Democrats of the Weimar Republic. Having finally secured the establishment of parliamentary democracy after fifty-five years of unparalleled mass agitation and electoral progress, the most dynamic political force of the Second Reich miscarried the consolidation of the first German republic. As Hodge (1994) maintains, “At home and abroad, the SPD was considered the great party of revolutionary socialism in Europe, but factors of time and place imposed upon the party the more immediate mission of transforming the greatest power of continental Europe into a democracy. The fact that too many of the SPD’s formidable intellectual talents were to be devoted instead to theoretical debate about something with more ambiguous contours, called socialism, is the great tragedy of German democracy in this country” (16).
England Unlike the SPD in Germany, Britain’s Labor Party was deeply rooted in the trade unionist movement from the onset, beginning as a parliamentary force as an unimportant offshoot of the Liberal Party. The German SPD was never based on a congress of trade unions, like the British Trade Union Congress (TUC). In fact the German trade union federation, Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), was established five years later than the party. Trade unionism in Germany therefore generally did not share the British experience of political alliance with liberalism before the nationwide electoral agitation by socialists took place. Hence the emergence of a labor movement in Germany was more or less indistinguishable from the establishment of the Social Democratic Party (Hodge, 1994). In contrast to the situation in Germany and Scandinavia, where workers managed to establish their own party, British workers attempted to pursue their political agendas first through the Liberal Party, only later founding their own independent party. British “social democracy,” or more accurately laborism, thus began as an overwhelming grassroots effort among the organized working class for the representation of working-class interests, articulated initially through the radical wing of the Liberal Party.
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However, it was also a peculiarly inward-looking movement from the beginning, forged from a corporatist mindset based on trade union interests rather than as a party with wider class appeal (Miliband, 1960). Before 1914, for instance, issues of democracy, including the question of socialism’s challenge or renewal of parliamentary government, were outside their interest. The labor movement was not faced with the task of democratic reform, and hence the Labor Party came into being for the specific purpose of providing independent parliamentary representation for workers. Thus, proposals for comprehensive economic, social, and political changes were an unusually long time in incubation before claiming the center of Labor attention. Trade unionism prospered in Britain and had already become a major factor in remolding British politics in nineteenth century, not least through their affiliation with the Liberal Party in support of Free Trade and a “cheap loaf” for the working people in the growing urban areas (Hodge, 1994; Hinton, 1983). In contrast to Scandinavia and Germany, the Conservatives in Britain were able to secure a relatively large fraction of the working-class electorate. In Britain, by 1875 the Conservative National Union had developed more than 472 local associations for the cultivation of working-class Toryism. The result of this was that politics featured two-party competition between the Liberals and the Conservatives, but over the long term the Liberals held the advantage by attaching the skilled working class to them. The relationship between organized labor and the Liberals was mediated by the Nonconformist churches, around which many of the first workingmen’s clubs and “friendly societies” were clustered. The Methodist church became a vehicle for the recruiting by the Liberal Party of working-class support through projects of social reform. In many communities the Methodist preacher was also the secretary of the local trade union. By the 1890s, several working-class movements gained importance in organizing workers in politics, such as the older craft unions, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the newer general unions, the Labor electoral association, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and the Independent Labor Party. In general, the unions and the TUC opposed independent representation until the end of the century. The SDF and ILP, which were much less influential than the ILP, did endorse independent candidates, but these were not necessarily socialists. The main challenges to the trade unions’ political dominance among workers came from the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labor Party, but neither of these challenges had much effect. However, their vision of labor politics eventually came to dominate Labor Party politics. The SDF was based on a platform of class conflict, more in line with social democratic ideology
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on the continent; on a centralized and coherent working class movement in politics and in the labor market; and on a radical reorganization of the economy. The vision in the Independent Labor Party, however, expressed a much more cautious or lukewarm socialist view, which was influenced by notions of justice and ethical society as well as Fabian reformism (Hogde, 1994, 20). Fabian ideology was derived originally from the early nineteenthcentury liberal utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. But it had been transformed into a gradualist, reformist, municipal socialism, often referred to as “Gas and Water Socialism,” in the 1880s, by the society’s prominent intellectuals, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. These intellectuals, who preferred the politics of influence and “diffusion” amongst the elite establishment to mass political mobilization, did not contribute to the cause of independent labor representation in the early stages, but rather, in most cases, to the Liberal imperialism (Scally, 1975, 38–39). The origins of the Labor Party, formed in 1906, lay more with the Independent Labor Party, inaugurated in 1893, and the Labor Representative Committee, formed in 1900. These more grassroots organizations promoted radical social reforms for the working class. However, they were also pragmatic rather than ideological in orientation. Whatever socialist tendencies were nurtured within the parties, they were more moralist than Marxist in inspiration. Labor Party pioneers, such as Keir Hardie, Phillip Snowden, and Robert Blatchford, based their politics on the notion of Christian brotherhood: the ideal of social and political equality of human beings merely reflected “a common humility before God” (quoted in Hogde, 1994, 4). For Bruce Glacier, for example, who succeeded Hardie as the editor of the Labour Leader, socialism was an ethical affirmation that defined one’s duty toward others in terms of fellowship as well as leadership. The mark of Methodism was everywhere, as Hodge (1994) argues, in the form of personal ethical creed rather than official party doctrine: “It [ILP] carried with it the royalist baggage of British history, the Monarchy, the Lords, and even a dash of the anti-republican animus of British nationalism” (14; Greenleaf, 1983, vol. 2, pp. 412–414; Hinton, 1983, 148–149). The ILP had more influence on British labor than the SDF (the latter having no more than 1000 members in the 1880s). Until 1880, socialism was essentially nonexistent in Britain, being largely the preserve of a handful of eccentric middle-class intellectuals. The Independent Labor Party was the most important prewar socialist movement in Britain, as it was more anchored in the trade unions. By the end of the century, the ILP had realized that it could either gradually build up its base of individual membership and thereby preserve its socialism, or join a federation with
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the trade unions and quickly acquire a much larger base, but at the cost of toning down its socialism and accepting some degree of alliance with the Liberals. Most of the trade unions had no interest in a separate workingclass party at this stage, but when they did, at the turn of the century, they did not encourage their members to join the ILP or SDF, but created a new organization based on federation that would ensure the hegemony of the unions in the new party. The TUC, along with SDF, joined the new party, the Labor Representation Committee (LRC), in 1899 with the main aim of increasing the number of Labor MPs. And when it did so, it implicitly accepted a vision of working-class politics premised mainly on sectionalism and unionism rather than class or cross-class alliances. Collaboration with Liberals was not excluded and the LCR was in no way committed to socialism. The LRC fought the 1900 election with no definite program and with no clear attitude toward the Liberal Party. It contested only ten seats and returned only two candidates (Hodge, 22–23). In the final election before the First World War, its share of the votes in England was 6.4 percent, compared with 36 percent in Sweden, 30 percent in Denmark, and 32 percent in Norway for the same period (Luebbert, 1991, 168). The enfranchised male working class was far larger in Britain than in Scandinavia. But the British Labor Party was not able to win a majority of the working-class votes, since they were still voting for the Liberal Party. Victories in several by-elections in 1902 and 1903 persuaded the Liberals that the LRC would have to be accommodated. Consequently the Liberal Herbert Gladstone and Labor’s Ramsay MacDonald reached an agreement on a list of constituencies in which the LCR would be allowed to compete against the Conservatives. Both sides had an interest in avoiding a three-cornered contest that would split the traditional coalition and hand victory to the Conservatives. After the election of 1906, the new Labor party became a reality. The alliance between Labor and the Liberals continued after the formation of the Labor Party. The extent to which Labor depended on the Liberals between 1906 and 1914 is seen in the small number of seats it was able to win on its own. Only when it allied with the Liberals did it achieve much success, and this success increased over the years (24). After the First World War, the British Labor Party changed from a parliamentary lobby into a political party with a programme of radical reforms. In the 1920 election, the Labor Party increased its representation in the House of Commons from forty-two to sixty-two seats. By 1924, the party was committed to capture a popular vote beyond the strict confines of the working class. MacDonald and Snowden reasoned that their party’s inauguration as the new governing alternative to conservatism
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should demonstrate above all “that the Labour party was the true heir to radical Liberalism (. . .) to a standard (. . .) of which Gladstone would have approved” (Hogde, 1994, 76). Meanwhile, with the substantial electoral advances achieved by the Labor Party in municipal elections in 1919, in the parliamentary by-elections, and in the General Election of 1922 (with 142 MPs), Labor became the second largest party in the House of Commons. In 1924 the Labor Party formed its first government, and it went on to form two more governments from 1929 to 1931. During these two short-lived periods of governmental power, however, Labor failed to carry through any major social reforms in any area, including education (Hinton, 1983, 131). Any understanding of the weaknesses of a British labor movement must, according to Luebbert (1991), be found in the behavior of the unions and, ultimately, in the attitudes of the millions of workers who apparently endorsed union behavior. The unions, like the ILP, consistently sought before the turn of the century to obstruct, isolate, and render illegitimate independent movements that attempted to define politics mainly in terms of class and class alliances rather than in sectional and union interests. In this the unions were successful—“so much so, as it turned out, that the legacy of their success defined the character of British working-class politics and thereby of the larger political and economic order for decades to come” (25). Very few British workers had much use for politics, precisely because “Lib-Labism gave them a measure of confidence, however small, that was sufficient to undermine a more comprehensive vision” (25). Liberals still had so much to offer that the great majority of workers did not vote for the Labor Party until after the First World War, when the Liberal Party had been virtually destroyed. The Liberal Party had endorsed a range of reforms, but they were generally piecemeal, ad hoc, and fell short of the expectations of labor, and this sufficiently convinced them that effective social change had to be enacted through the Labor Party (Luebbert, 1991). *
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Social democracy clearly took very different political paths in Scandinavia, on one hand, and in Germany and Britain, on the other. In Scandinavia, social democratic mobilization was most successful, mainly due to the parties’ adoption of pragmatic social reformist views and because of their success in forging alliances with liberal parties, which represented cross-class political settlements. Had these alliances not been forged, the parties could not have gained a secure foothold in political life. The alliance between
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the Social Democrats and the Liberals was manifest in all policy areas, including in education, and was characterized as consensus-seeking policy. In Germany, the SPD was a revolutionary mass political party of the working class with a programme firmly based in Marxist ideology and which firmly rejected an alliance with the farmers. Though not forgetting the difficult circumstances the party faced in the wake of the First World War, its attempt to form alliances was nevertheless hampered by its insistence on continuing as a radical party and its rejection of forming alliances with farmers. This would have given them a broader electoral base and, thus, increased power. In England, the mobilization of labor started through the Liberal Party, and so an independent party was established relatively late. It was deeply rooted in the trade unionist movement and saw itself as more a heir to liberalism rather than to socialism. Whereas the SPD retained a sweeping, radical and self-consciously Marxist mandate, that of Labour was specific, limited, and even conservative. These differences in social democratic mobilization and ideology affected education policy deeply, as will be demonstrated below.
The Middle School as Intermezzo in Scandinavia The abolition of the middle school was at the heart of social democratic policy in Scandinavia, since this was necessary for the establishment of the seven- or nine-year comprehensive school system. Since the Liberals were not interested in abolishing the middle school that they once had fathered, they came to adopt a more conservative role in education politics than was intended. This was, however, more true of the Danish and Swedish liberal parties since the Norwegian party tended, to a much further extent, to support the Social Democrats in their views on education. However, it was not as easy for the Social Democrats to abolish the middle school straight away, since the interwar period was marked by short-lived governments. Consequently, the social democratic parties in Denmark and Norway, but not in Sweden, were unable to sustain governmental power for a longer period. In Sweden, the interwar period saw shifting governments, which also made it difficult for the Social Democrats there to pursue their political interests. The social democratic parties were not completely united in the question of the seven-year comprehensive school, which created a discord among them, particularly in the cases of the Danish and Swedish social democratic parties but much less so in the Norwegian party.
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Denmark Educational development during the interwar period in Denmark has not received much research attention (Skovgaard-Petersen, 1997). This may have to do with the fact that the only school Act that was passed, in 1937, has never been perceived by school historians as particularly decisive in the overall development of Danish education. In a comparative perspective, however, the Act is of significant interest, because, in contrast to Norway and Sweden, where the middle school was abolished during the interwar period, in Denmark the middle school was with this act, in fact, strengthened. A new middle school was established in parallel to the already existing middle school that was based on a modern or practical curriculum and free of exams. These two middle schools thus continued into the post Second World War period and were only finally abolished in 1958, a few decades later than in Norway and Sweden. It is thus peculiar why the Social Democrats did not abolish the middle school, especially since they had gained sufficient political power to do so. The idea of abolishing the middle school in order to create a seven-year comprehensive school was already discussed in a School Commission, Den store Skolekommission, during the period of 1919–1923. The commission, chaired by the prominent Social Democrat, K. M. Klausen, proposed a plan for the reorganization of the elementary school. The commission was concerned about the negative effect of early selection to the middle school, which left behind the less academically able children in the remaining last two classes of the elementary school (grade 6 and 7). The effect of this, the commission held, was that the top classes of the elementary school “withered away.” However, the proposal of the commission to create a seven-year comprehensive school did not become legislation. This was despite the fact that the political situation after 1913 favored the commission, as the center of political gravity had moved away from the Liberals to the Social Democrats and Radical Liberals. Instead, several municipalities led by the Social Democrats took the initiative to solve the selection problem locally by creating seven-year comprehensive schools through the abolition of the middle schools (Kolstrup, 1996; Nørgaard, 1977; Nørgaard, 1991; Bomholt, 1954). The outlook for reorganizing the elementary school seemed more optimistic when, in 1924, a Social Democratic government was formed. However, reforms did not materialize as the Social Democratic Party could not agree about a seven-year comprehensive school. The Social Democratic education minister, F. J. Borgbjerg, was hesitant about such a school since he feared that the academic standards, which were maintained through
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selection, would decline. Instead, he suggested a so-called “forked” middle school that admitted children from eleven or twelve years of age. A new middle school would be created, in parallel to the existing middle school, that would be practical in orientation, free of exams, and have strong ties to vocational education and training programmes. With this suggestion, he hoped to avoid a glut of students entering the middle schools that would, according to his view, inevitably lead to decline in the academic standards. By opening another middle school with a practically oriented curriculum, the less academically able children would still gain secondary education, but it would be tailored for their own specific needs (HolmLarsen, 2003). Borgbjerg’s proposal for a “forked” middle school was not carried out by this Social Democratic government, but The Radical Liberal education minister, Jørgen Jørgensen, in the subsequent government, which was a coalition comprising the Social Democrats and the Radical Liberals, put it forward as a bill. Despite having reached an agreement in his party about the new type of middle school, the Education Minister sought approval from the opposition—the Liberals and Conservatives—in order to gain as broad a consensus as possible. Education, he argued, was a matter concerning the entire population, and reforms warranted cross-party support. In this case the bill was passed without support from the opposition, as they declined to support it. The School Act of 1937 was thus the result of efforts by the Social-Democratic-Radical Liberal government, and it outlined the new organization of the school system. The elementary school was now to be of four-year duration. After the elementary school it was possible to transfer into either an exam-free, fouryear, practically oriented middle school, with the last year as optional, or into the four-year academically oriented middle school, which required students to take exams. The implementation of the Act showed that it was difficult to create a proper alternative to the academic middle school. The problem was that the compulsory school age only covered the first two years of the middle school, with the result that only a minority of pupils stayed on until the end of middle school education. So, the Act did not solve the selection problem, which we will examine later. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the Act was a result of the alliance between the Social Democrats and the Radical Liberals, but that the middle school was not abolished as a consequence of it (Markussen, 1978; 2003). An explanation of this may be found in the ideas of the Education Minister, Jørgen Jørgensen, whose educational beliefs were greatly influenced by the Grundtvigian national romantic ideas from the previous century. Jørgensen might have accepted—in the name of consensus politics—the abolition
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of the middle school had he been faced with unavoidable pressure from the Social Democratic Party. However, since the party was divided on the question of a seven-year comprehensive school, it allowed Jørgensen to pursue his own party’s beliefs to a greater extent. During his time as education minister, he did not pay much attention to questions about selection, comprehensive education, and social cohesion, as he was mainly interested in improving rural education and the education for those young people who would enter vocational occupations later in life. He sought, among others things, to improve the Grundtvigian folk-high schools, the agricultural schools, and the adult education programmes in rural areas (Rambusch, 1988). The great interest he showed in rural, vocational education presumably made him more interested in creating an alternative to the academic middle school rather than abolishing it in order to create nonselective, common education. Seen in contrast to Norway and Sweden, once again the stronger influence of Grundtvigianism in Denmark, now visible in the Radical Liberals, hampered the development of comprehensive education.
Norway In Norway, the issue of integrating the school system further along comprehensive lines was already debated politically in the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1910 the government appointed a committee, the so-called Comprehensive School Committee, Enhetsskolekomite, chaired by the Liberal, Geelmuyden, whose task was to propose a plan in which the elementary school and the secondary school were to be further integrated. Perhaps strangely, a Conservative government was thus appointing a committee to investigate comprehensive schooling despite the fact that Conservatives traditionally did not support comprehensive education. The Norwegian historian, Myhre (1992), suggests that the government, facing great popular pressure, was simply forced to look into the issue. Also, in Norway the concern was raised that the early selection to the middle school left less able pupils behind in two extra classes in the elementary school. The committee, which comprised members from the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the Labour Democrats (which should not be confused with the Social Democrats who were not represented), recommended, almost unanimously, a seven-year comprehensive school with “organic” transfer to the middle school, which was now to be reduced to two years. Furthermore, the middle schools were, like the elementary schools, to be administered by the municipalities as this would strengthen the link between these two school types. The rationale behind the suggestion, the
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commission stated, was a desire to root firmly education politics in social, not academic, considerations. The Norwegian school system was still marked by profound class differences, the committee argued, which the suggested seven-year comprehensive school could help diminish. The committee was certainly aware that their suggestion was radical. “We have to be aware,” the commission stated, “that it [the seven-year comprehensive school] is if not an entirely new school, then an entirely new school organization, that has to be created. If we succeed, our country’s school system would thus have reached a stage of development that no other country has achieved” (Dokka, 1967, 104). The committee was correct in this assessment and recognized that the suggestion would require a lengthy implementation period. By 1912 the political situation was already such that the seven-year comprehensive school could be introduced, but the reform became stalled because the Liberal Party was at this time reluctant to “cast the school system in a single mould,” as this would be against Liberal politics, or so it claimed. It was not until 1916 that the government, after a request made by the Social Democrat, Johan Gjörstein, investigated the possibility of creating a stronger link between the elementary school and the middle school. Even though a solution had been found to the selection problem by the Comprehensive School Committee, it was nevertheless reinvestigated in a church committee whose overall aim was to address the financing of secondary education. The church committee recommended, on the basis of Gjörstein’s idea, that only middle schools that admitted children from the elementary school would be eligible for financial support by the state. In this way, a tighter connection between the elementary school and the middle school could be ensured, as the middle schools would face serious problems of survival without economic support from the state. The Social Democratic government, in 1920, unanimously carried out the church committee’s recommendation. It was also agreed, with ninety-five votes against nineteen, that the middle school should be reduced from four to two years, allowing a seven-year comprehensive school to be established (Myhre, 1992). In Norwegian educational historiography, the successful introduction of the School Act in 1920, through which the seven-year comprehensive school was introduced, has been mainly attributed to the influence of Gjörstein in Norwegian politics. It is certainly correct that the Act bore a heavy imprint of his ideas. However, these would hardly have had any effect had it not been for favorable political conditions—conditions that have not received much attention in key historical works on education (Højgaard and Ruge, 1971; Myhre, 1992). The three parties, The Liberals, the Social Democrats, and the Labor Democrats (Arbeider-Demokraterne),
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which according to their political programmes sought the promotion of comprehensive education, had all made considerable gains in the election in 1912. The Liberal Party had increased its seats from forty-six to seventy, the Social Democrats from eleven to twenty-three, and the Labour Democrats from two to six. After the election in 1915 the parties continued to maintain their strong position and, even though they experienced some diminution, especially the Liberal Party in the elections of 1915 and 1918, they were still a majority in the government. Given this political alliance backing Gjörstein, it is clear why his comprehensive school idea met with such positive political reception. It was not only because of increased social democratic power that the seven-year comprehensive school could be introduced; the Liberal Party also changed its politics on education. The “old” Liberal skepticism about “casting the school system in a single mould” lost ground in favor of a more social democratic way of thinking. This change of attitude should be seen in connection with the Liberal Party’s conflictual past. As stated in the previous chapter, after 1884 the party was increasingly in turmoil from within over questions of urban Liberals versus rural Christian fundamentalism. Although the Liberals maintained governmental power until 1918, they suffered several internal schisms. The splinter groups in the Liberal Party leaned toward the Conservative Party, which helps to explain why the Liberals coalesced with the rising Social Democrats. During the early years, the Social Democrats supported Liberal candidates for parliament, and the Liberals embraced social reform. It was because of the change of Liberal attitude toward education on social democratic lines that such a large majority behind the 1920 School Act could be formed. Moreover, the upper secondary school’s fight for the retention of the four-year middle school also lost ground as the Conservative Party, which represented their interest, hardly had any influence in connection with the Act. From a comparative perspective the Act seems radical. However, in relation to the existing school situation in Norway, this was not the case, because at the time the 1920 Act was enacted, there were hardly any four-year private middle schools left. Prior to 1920 the municipalities had already sought to accommodate the recommendations of the church committee by creating seven-year comprehensive schools followed by either a two-year or a three-year middle school. It was possible for a student to leave the elementary school at grade five in order to transfer to a private middle school, but the most common practice was to undergo seven years of common schooling before entering a state-run middle school and thereafter, perhaps, three years in the upper secondary school.
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In the following years further attempts were made to strengthen the link between elementary and secondary education. The so-called Parliamentary School Commission that was established by the government proposed several education reforms from 1922 to 1927. The commission suggested that the middle school should be abolished in order to place a five-year secondary school on top of the seven-year elementary school. Instead of the middle school, a three-year secondary technical school, realskole, in which the first two grades were common with the first two grades of the secondary school, was to be created. The first two classes in the technical secondary school and the upper secondary school were common for all pupils, which, in practice, made schooling common until grade nine. The third grade of the secondary technical school was made practical in orientation and aimed at vocational occupations. These suggestions were approved with majority governmental support and enacted by the School Act of 1935. In the following year, 1936, a further Act was passed concerning the elementary school in the rural areas, to ensure that it reached the same level as the urban schools in terms of educational standards. As such, the seven-year comprehensive school became consolidated both in urban and rural areas (Myhre, 1992).
Sweden The possibility in Sweden of reorganizing the school system along comprehensive lines occurred in 1917 as the Liberals and the Social Democrats formed a coalition government in which the Social Democrats held the post of education minister for the first time. In 1918, Verner Ryden, the education minister, who was aligned with Fridjuv Berg (who introduced the middle school) in terms of educational thought, established a School Commission under his leadership to propose a plan to “organically” reorganize the school system (Herrström, 1966). The commission maintained that the school system was still divided between the poor-school ( fattigskola) and the “posh” school (finskola), and that the middle school had failed in its original purpose to reduce social inequalities. To enhance “rational mixing of social classes” the commission suggested the creation of a more integrative school system by abolishing the lowest three classes of the middle school and establishing a six-year elementary school (bottonskola). A four-year secondary technical school and a three-year upper secondary school would then follow. Streaming within the schools would be postponed as late as possible in order to enhance social equality (70; Isling, 1974, 161–162).
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A bill to this effect was put forward in 1922. As expected, it met with substantial opposition not only from the Conservatives and the headmasters of the secondary schools, but also from the Liberals. The idea of a comprehensive school was no longer in the mainstream of the Liberal’s educational policy. This was partly because there was no leading figure, after the death of Fridtjuv Berg, to unite the party in the fight for comprehensive education, and partly because of debilitating conflicts within the Liberal Party, which led to its split in 1923. The Liberals with an academic background, who felt themselves associated with the tradition of secondary education and university, became the Liberal Party, and the Liberals who sided with Fridtjuv Berg, and his notion of comprehensive education as a means of creating social mixing, established the so-called Liberal-Minded Party (Frisinnade parti). The promotion of comprehensive education now became the task of the Social Democrats, but as the Social Democratic government was dissolved in 1920, the bill fell on the wayside. After Ryden had left his post as education minister, the Social Democrat, Oluf Olsson, took over. His task was to take up the recommendations of the commission for renewed consideration. This endeavor quickly was terminated as a Conservative government came to power in 1923. The government replaced the old experts in the commission with new ones, resulting in a new set of recommendations along conservative lines. But these were not formalized into legislation, as the government collapsed the following year. The Social Democrats returned to power and Olsson was once again appointed as the education minister. He did manage to put forward a bill, but it did not pass because a new government came to power based on an alliance of Liberal Party and the Liberal-Minded Party. This government floated a bill inspired by the recommendations of experts in the previous Conservative government. The idea of a seven-year comprehensive school was rejected in favor of a so-called “double attachment” between the elementary school and the secondary school, which was essentially a transfer from either grade three or grade six in the elementary school to secondary education. A school committee was appointed, chaired by Ryden, to investigate further the proposal for “double attachment.” In this committee both Social Democrats and Liberals were represented, and they agreed to organize the school system on the basis of this “double attachment.” However, the transfer would happen at a later stage than was proposed by the previous Conservative government. The proposal that eventually became the School Act of 1927 outlined a new school system that comprised two attachments: attachment one was a six-year elementary school followed by a five-year secondary technical school; and attachment two was a four-year elementary school followed by a five-year secondary technical school.
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Those who wanted a seven-year comprehensive school saw this Act as less than successful, since it maintained a parallel school system. However, since the first attachment (six + five) became the most common way of organizing the school system, and because state financial support to private preparatory schools for the secondary technical schools was abolished, the comprehensive school system gradually emerged. In fact, in the 1930s, the Social Democratic education minister, Arthur Engberg, referred to the School Act of 1927 as the “comprehensive school act” (Herrström, 1927). One wonders why the Social Democrats accepted the Liberal proposal of a “double attachment” school system, since they had officially stated that they would introduce a seven-year comprehensive school as soon as the political situation made this possible. According to Herrström (1927), who has investigated this Act thoroughly, the Social Democrats had, in fact, the necessary power to do so, but their internal disagreement about a seven-year comprehensive school, as with the Danish Social Democratic Party at the same time, made them reluctant to pursue it and they chose instead to make a compromise with the Liberals. During the political negotiations regarding the 1927 School Act, three groupings of Social Democrats can be identified. The first group, the socalled “elementary school group,” were supporters of Ryden and carried the official party line on school politics. The group was strongly committed to the party’s school policy and the 1918 commission’s recommendations, and as such they were the strongest supporters of the seven-year comprehensive school. Opposing them was a group of academics, among whom Oluf Olson (education minister in the 1920s), Ivan Pauli (a journalist), and Arthur Engberg (education minister in the 1930s) were some of the most prominent members. They supported secondary education to a larger degree than the elementary school group and demonstrated a stronger will for making compromises concerning comprehensive education. The elementary school group was “firmer” in its own demands. A similar division between elementary school and secondary school supporters was also visible within the Liberal Party until it fractured in 1923. The third group, spearheaded by Oscar Olson, did not have strong views about either the comprehensive school or the secondary school, but focused on developing a plan for an “organic” integration between the top classes in the six-year elementary school and the secondary technical school (184). These schisms within the Social Democratic Party prevented any unified demands for a seven-year comprehensive school, and stymied its introduction even when parliamentary power was available to them to achieve this. It is also questionable whether this would have been easy for the Social Democrats, since the Liberals (Bondeförbundet), with whom they were in coalition, had discontinued their support of comprehensive education. The
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Liberals, despite their acknowledgment that comprehensive schools would enhance social mixing in society, feared that such schools would promote increasing urbanization as more young people from rural areas would use these schools as stepping stones for further education in the cities. Hence they preferred to concentrate their education policy on advancing rural education. These conflicts within the Social Democratic Party continued into the following decade of the 1930s. Whereas in Norway this decade was marked by further successful attempts to develop comprehensive education, in Sweden the above mentioned conflicts were debilitating to such an extent that no Acts were passed despite increased Social Democratic power. The Swedish historian, Åke Isling (1984), who has investigated Social Democratic education policy in the 1930s, claims that the Education Minister, Arthur Engberg, did not seek to revise the 1927 School Act by abolishing the “double attachment” organization. Even though he was firmly rooted in socialistic thinking, Engberg did not support comprehensive education and thus reinforced the disagreements between the elementary group and the secondary group within the Social Democratic Party. He claimed that a democratic system of education should be effected through the meritocratic selection of academically able students into secondary education, regardless of their social background. It was thus the task of the politicians to remove economic hindrances in the education system in order to enable all children to advance according to their ability. He did not support common schooling when it meant that the pupils had to stay together in a single school “as long as possible,” as this, he believed, would inevitably lower academic standards. Hence, the 1927 School Act remained unaltered throughout the interwar period. The advance of Social Democratic power in Scandinavia gave the parties a central position in formulating school policy during the interwar period. The efforts were mainly directed at abolishing the middle school in order to create an elementary school of longer duration. The result of this process was, however, different in the three Scandinavian countries, and this can be ascribed to the variety of ways in which the cooperation between the Social Democrats and the Liberals took place. Norway, where the Social Democrats were last in achieving governmental power, was the earliest to abolish the middle school. In Sweden the middle school (secondary technical school) was only partially abolished, as the six-year elementary school was made the basis of the middle school, which was reduced from six to four years. However, this was only an alternative organization, as the secondary schools still could select their own pupils from the elementary schools after grade four, though this became less and less common over the years. Seen in the light of Norway and Sweden, it is remarkable that in Denmark the
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middle school was strengthened instead of being abolished, or was merely reduced by a few years, considering that the political situation there was similar to that of Norway and Sweden. Another type of middle school was instead established next to the “old” middle school. Even though it never became popular, this new middle school in effect upheld a parallel system of lower secondary schooling. In contrast to the liberal parties in Norway and Sweden, the Grundtvigian national-romantics had a much stronger foothold in both the Danish Liberal Party and the Radical Liberals. It is exactly this peculiarity of Danish Liberal politics, which survived into the interwar period, that explains the divergent route the Danes took in educational development at this time. However, as in Norway and Sweden, the Danish middle school was finally abolished. This development will be addressed in the following chapter focusing on the period after the Second World War.
Germany An effort to reorganize the German school system occurred immediately after the Weimar Constitution of 1919. A Social Democratic coalition government came to power in 1920, and even though the SPD met with opposition from the coalition parties—the Catholic Center Party and the Liberals—they initiated a reform of the school system. A Department of Culture was established under the Federal Ministry of Interior, and a commission with representatives from both the federal and the individual states was established with a view to develop a national policy for education. An important result of setting up the commission was the preparation of a bill that later was passed as the School Act of 1920. The Act stated that public as well as private preparatory schools be established for the secondary school, the Gymnasium, in order to make the first four years in the elementary school the foundation of the school system. At this point the secondary schools received their pupils mainly from private preparatory schools. The Act was thus a landmark decision, as it was the first attempt toward creating a comprehensive school system. However, the Act met with immense opposition from Conservatives, including antirepublican parents and the secondary school association, Verband Akademisch Gebildeter Lehrer. The secondary schools tried to undermine the new position of the elementary school by maintaining their right to select pupils through entrance exams and parental consent. The result of this was that the preparatory schools survived, though fewer in number, as late as 1933 (Hahn, 1998). These developments were almost all that was achieved during the Weimar republic. The reason for this was partly that the Social Democrat’s
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effort to actualize their education policy was hampered by the Catholic Center Party and the Liberals, and partly because of state financial problems that resulted in the collapse of the Social Democratic-led coalition government the same year it achieved power. Subsequently the Social Democrats were in opposition to a new coalition government lead by the Catholic Center Party, and thus they were unable to make their influence felt. The historian Hearnden (1976) argues that perhaps the broad coalition government had sufficient power to carry through extensive school reforms, but the coalition partners’ education policies were so far removed from each other that it was almost impossible to make compromises. The Social Democrats were advocating a national system of education and the abolishment of confessional schools. This was completely unacceptable to the conservative, Catholic Center Party, which had close ties to the Catholic Church. The religious question was thus an obstacle the parties faced in obtaining a compromise solution to the development of the German education system. The Social Democrats also met with solid opposition from the influential cultural elite. The majority of university professors and secondary school teachers were immensely critical of reforming the school system. By joining “anti-modern” organizations in the Conservative Party, they became a bulwark against reform. The elite’s antireform attitude can be explained by the intellectual “climate” that appeared in the wake of the First World War. According to Hahn (1998), the material and psychological effect that followed the Versailles agreement should not be underestimated. The reactionary attitudes the elites developed with renewed strength during the Weimar republic, Ringer argues (1969), were caused by various circumstances related to the country’s vulnerable situation just after the war. Many feared that the German nation-state, which was at this time not even fifty years old, would collapse during its transformation into a Republic from an Empire symbolized by the Hohenzollerske dynasty. The cultural elites were extremely hostile toward the Republic as it had paved the way for competing political parties. “They hated the republic,” Ringer (1969) states, “they feared new party politics, and they were horrified at the social transformations associated with industrialization and inflation.” Furthermore, writes Ringer, “they categorized the efforts of the educational reformers as aspects and symptoms of a more general movement in which the masses intended to capture their institutions of higher learning, to disrupt their internal organization, to tear down their standards of excellence, to make them instruments of social leveling, and to force them to abandon their own learned traditions in favor of a narrowly practical type of modern education” (80). The cultural elites, in close association with the powerful Conservative Party, were thus able to constitute
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a bulwark against educational reform, and thus the school structure was maintained more or less intact. As a result of their reactionary attitude, he continuous, “there was no really thorough re-codification of German educational legislation during the Weimar Republic” (71). Just after the School Act of 1920 was passed, the government acknowledged that the attempt to introduce a national system of education had failed, and thus the responsibility of education was transferred to the individual states. Within the individual states, which at this time numbered eighteen, various initiatives were taken to soften the sharp divisions between elementary schools and secondary schools. In Prussia, for example, there was an attempt, though not completely successful, to make the elementary school the basis for secondary education. In Thüringen, where the zest for reform was most apparent, a formal link between elementary and secondary schools was made. In Catholic Bavaria, the fewest initiatives were taken in implementing the School Act of 1920. The elementary school remained confessional and no bond was mandated with the secondary schools. According to Ringer (1969), “the old barriers between different types and levels of schools had been lowered to some extent. While the ideal of selecting secondary school candidates on the basis of ability alone had not been extensively realized, the German educational system as a whole was more varied, a little more flexible, and therefore probably more democratic than it had ever been” (75).
England While the Scandinavian social democratic parties used comprehensive education as a means of social mixing, the British Labor Party, more “labourist” than social democratic, had no such policy. Even though a seven-year comprehensive school was favored by some Labor politicians, this never became part of the official Labor Party education programme either in the interwar period or immediately after the Second World War. During the period until after the Second World War, Britain still retained parallel education systems in the state sector, as well as a separate system of private independent schools. State-funded secondary schools had been created by the 1902 Balfour Act. Middle-class access to these schools was often gained through the separate system of private preparatory schools, and only a very small number of children from working-class families could climb the ladder into the secondary school by transferring from the elementary school into the grammar school with the aid of a scholarship at eleven years. However, the system was deliberately designed so that this was the exception rather than the rule, so as to keep the educational ladder
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for the working class largely separate from that of the middle class. The working-class educational ladder was still largely limited to the elementary school, where children typically finished their schooling at fourteen, and the 1902 Act had capped these schools so that they could not educate children beyond fifteen years, thus debarring most from anything that might be properly termed secondary schooling. Robert Morant, Permanent Secretary at the Board of Education from 1903, later reinforced this separation by implementing a traditional classical curriculum in the grammar school, which deliberately mirrored that of the Public schools, in order to emphasize the elite nature of the grammar school (Simon, 1974; Simon, 1978). The creation of a Scandinavian-style seven-year comprehensive school in Britain would have required that primary level education in Britain first became unified, which would have meant bringing the private preparatory schools together with the elementary schools in a single system. This was not a remote possibility at this time. The 1918 Fisher Act did make education compulsory up to fourteen years, which officially included a component of “secondary education for all,” but for the majority of children this was no more than extended elementary education in the elementary school. The reality was that working-class children were provided elementary schooling while secondary schooling was reserved primarily for the middle classes in the grammar schools and Public schools, largely accessed through a separate system of private primary schools. No party seriously sought to change this at this time. The Labor Party’s ambitions did not go far beyond the existing system, which offered secondary education only to academically able children from the working class through a scholarship scheme. By 1938, the Labor Party policy had evolved somewhat. Following the ideas set forward in Labor historian R. H. Tawney’s famous 1922 Secondary Education for All, their policy was now to integrate the different types of state secondary school types into a single multilateral school system. This still left the Public school in the private sector untouched and outside of the system, as would be done by all future Labor reforms, but it at least sought to create an integrated secondary school system in the state sector. At this time there were still two unintegrated systems, in the private and state sectors. In the private sector there were the primary level preparatory schools from which the student, at the age of thirteen, was transferred to the secondary Public school. The state school system comprised, with some local variations, a five-year elementary school, followed by transfer at 11 years, for some, to different types of secondary schools, including grammar, technical, and modern schools. These school types were not be integrated in such a way that they had common
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classes, curriculum, and teachers, but they were at least to be gathered under “one roof.” The efforts toward educational development in the interwar period was thus not directed toward integrating the existing school types into a single system of education, as in Scandinavia, but to expanding the existing “parallel” or “dual” systems of education by allowing an increasing number of working-class children to transfer from the elementary system to the secondary schools in the other system. One reason for the very limited and piecemeal nature of these reforms had to do with the lateness of the party in developing a long-sighted and concerted plan for the reorganization of the education system. The Labor historian Parkinson (1970) posits that Labor tended to react in an ad hoc fashion to issues as they arose rather than attempting to control the pace of reform (8). This was indeed a longstanding characteristic of British educational reform, where policies still reflected the traditional Victorian voluntarist belief in maintaining a high level of independence and variety within the system. However, more concretely, it reflected the fundamental problem that Britain still had a dual structure of education along class lines, which it found extremely hard to integrate. Powerful lobbies still supported the distinctiveness and independence of the Public schools and the state grammar schools. Along with their feeder preparatory schools, they constituted a separate system that strongly resisted incorporation into a single-ladder state school system. The policy of providing secondary education for an increasing number of working-class children was officially expounded by Labor in the pamphlet Labour and the New Social Order. Even though a free scholarship scheme was introduced in 1907 by a Liberal government, the “endowed secondary schools . . . are still reserved to the sons and daughters of a small privileged class,” the pamphlet stated (10). As a consequence, the party required a systematic reorganization of the entire education system on the basis of the principle of social inequality. This concept was not understood to mean all children should attend the same secondary school, but that all children should be offered a variety of choices in secondary education. At this point very few working-class children received secondary education. The Board of Education had, in a report from 1911, drawn attention to the fact that 25 percent of the free scholarships were not utilized fully by working-class parents because of extra costs involved, and estimated that not more than 5 percent progressed from elementary school to a secondary school. In 1918, the Labor Party established the “Advisory Committee on Education,” which was, among other things, to propose a plan of facilitating the transfer between the elementary schools and secondary schools, the continuation schools and the scholarship scheme (Parkinson, 1970, 8–21).
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The committee advised that increasing the number of scholarships would ensure the transfer. It claimed that it was willing to lower the academic standards if it meant that more working-class children would be allowed into the secondary schools. “In that sense,” the commission said, nearly all educational progress has taken place by “lowering the standards of education until it was accessible to classes hitherto excluded from it” (12). However, the secondary school should not be for all. As Parkinson states in this connection, “even those Party members most intimately involved in educational reform at least tacitly accepted the immediate situation that secondary education could only be provided for a limited number of children and not the whole child population” (12). The first time it was considered, the committee’s proposal had no practical effect. The Conservatives came into power and reduced public spending. The consequence for education was that extra scholarships were not offered. This suited the government, which preferred to maintain the system as it was anyway. Many continuation schools were closed because of reduced economic support, which considerably limited the chances of working-class children achieving education beyond the elementary school level. However, according to the education historian, Taylor (1972), the closing of the schools should not be seen as particularly problematic to working-class education, as their remaining open would probably have led to “a strictly proletarian education and so made the class cleavage in education even worse” (14). Tawney’s proposal to increase working-class access to secondary school did finally become part of the Labor Party’s official school policy. With this policy, the party arguably progressed from ad hoc decisions regarding education to a more carefully planned, long-term school policy. In the pamphlet it was claimed that the division of the elementary school and the secondary school was “educationally unsound and socially obnoxious,” and that this contributed to a waste of valuable talents. The two school types ought to be tied together “in a vital and systematic manner.” This could not be achieved by just offering to a restricted number of working-class children scholarships for secondary schools, but by transferring “all children, irrespective of income, class or occupation of the parents . . . at the age of eleven from the primary or preparatory school to one type or another secondary school where they would remain until age sixteen” (15). Moreover, it was stated that in spite of traditional Labor’s support for continuation schools, they should no longer be maintained as they could not be a replacement for the secondary schools. The same was the case for the central schools and junior technical schools, which in many towns were used as continuation schools.
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The plan, which was to be implemented in steps over a longer period, proposed reducing economic support to the secondary schools and increasing the number of scholarships to the secondary schools from 25 percent of the total places to 40 percent. It was hoped that by 1934 positions under full scholarship would reach 75 percent. The Labor Party had thus a clear plan intended to provide free secondary education for all regardless of social class background. The possibility of carrying out the plan arose when Labor formed a minority partner in the post World War One Liberal government of Lloyd George after 1919. However, economic constraints hindered the government from “any sweeping innovations,” as C. P. Trevelyan expressed it. It was financially possible only to implement a few adjustments on education. Regardless, the economic support for the scholarship scheme did increase from 25 to 40 percent. However, the scheme was in use for only a short duration as a Conservative Party took over the government in 1922 and abolished the economic support for scholarships on the grounds that the road to secondary education should be narrow in contrast to Labor’s “broad highway.” The Conservatives argued that a universal secondary education “ought not to be the educational ideal to which we should work” (21). Instead they focused on raising the academic standards within the grammar schools. Under the Conservative government, a committee was formed, under Hadow, whose mandate was to draft a proposal for the reorganization of the school structure. The report that the committee published in 1926, the so-called Hadow Report, which by and large coincided with the proposals from Education for All, emphasized that secondary schools were not the sole privilege of the wealthy or the academically able working-class children. Secondary education was a right for all children. The committee recommended that the secondary schools be a direct continuation of the elementary school, to which children should be transferred at the age of eleven. Furthermore, the secondary school should comprise different types of schools having the same status. Since there were not sufficient numbers of secondary schools to absorb all the compulsory school age children, the local school authorities should establish intermediate junior schools or postprimary schools within the framework of the elementary school sector. The secondary school types (five in total) should be placed in parallel to the already existing secondary schools. The reason for creating a diverse secondary school system instead of integrating it was found in the explanation by English and American psychologists, mainly Cyril Burt, who had argued that selection to the different school types could be done on the basis of intelligence tests—the most appropriate way of accommodating the different intellectual needs of the children. The committee thought
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that children by the age of eleven already manifested varying interests and abilities, which could be catered for by means of schools of varying types sharing a broad common foundation. As the committee argued, “We regard the general recognition for the second stage, but secure that the second stage is sufficiently elastic, and contains schools of sufficient variety and type, to meet the needs of all children, as one of the most notable advances . . . Thus all go forward, though along different paths. Selection by differentiation takes the place of selection by elimination” (Test of Educable Capacity, 1924). Generally, the Hadow report was received positively. The Conservatives expressed that they agreed to its recommendations in principle, although they did not intend to provide the economic means to finance their implementation. Only in 1929, when Labor was once again in power, and Trevelyan was reelected as a chair of the education association, were attempts made to implement the recommendations of the Hadow report. The short time Labor controlled the government was marked by efforts to extend the compulsory school age to fifteen years, as the Hadow report had also recommended. The Conservatives were in strong opposition to Labor’s efforts and, in the end, the bill was defeated in the House of Lords. However, Labor succeeded in extending the scholarship scheme, which had now reached 50 percent. The Labor government was replaced by a national coalition government in 1931. Through a Select Committee on National Expenditure, this administration severely curtailed public spending, and this had immense consequences for education (Simon, 1974). Similarly, in 1931 and 1932 spending on scholarships was yet again reduced considerably. The committee argued, using class-biased language, that “since the standard of education, elementary and secondary, that is being given to the child of poor parents is already in very many cases superior to that which the middleclass parent is providing for his own child,” only the academically gifted working-class child should be able to obtain a scholarship. And in the case that such a child received a scholarship, the parents of that child should pay a school fee, though of a smaller amount than middle-class parents were required to pay. Labor was very critical of this “unashamed, naked class war” and argued that, under this scheme, the only working-class children who could gain secondary education had to be both “exceptionally clever and exceptionally poor.” After 1936, Labor, for the first time, considered the possibility of creating a unified system of secondary education. The idea had already been advocated in the 1920s and the 1930s by prominent educators and associations, such as the Association of Head Mistresses, the Association of Assistant Mistresses, and the National Union of Teachers. However, the
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idea conflicted with the dominant school philosophy of the time, which dictated that children’s academic needs were best accommodated through provision of various forms of secondary schools and selection processes. The committee that Labor set up in 1918 had, in 1925, recommended consideration of a multilateral school to avoid “the classification of secondary schools as superior in type, which would perpetuate class differences and prevent any real unity of outlook in secondary education” (31). But that year Labor did not show any sympathy for such an idea. It was only in 1938 that this type of school was made the official school policy of the Labor Party.
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Chapter 6 Comprehensive Education Consolidated
Introduction This chapter investigates the continuing impact of social democracy on the development of comprehensive education in the period after the Second World War. As will be seen, forms of social democracy continued to develop in all the countries under investigation here, either in the classic mode of social democratic parties, as in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, or in the particular laborist and liberal mutations found in Britain. Here Labor remained the only major party on the center-left of politics, despite a short-lived breakaway to forge an alternative Social Democratic Party between 1981 and 1988 (the Social Democratic Party merged in 1988 with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democratic Party). Historians and state theorists (Judt, 2005; Jessop, 2002) have identified the period from 1945 to 1970, at least in the northern part of Western Europe, as the age, par excellence, of Keynesian welfare capitalism, characterized by mixed economies, full-employment policies, and expanding welfare states. To a significant degree this represented a near consensus across mainstream parties around some of the key principles of social democracy. However, political systems, economic models, and welfare regimes still differed in crucial respects. When, in the early 1970s, the Keynesian postwar “consensus” began to break down, under the growing pressure of rising oil prices, industrial unrest, and declining capital profitability, countries began to chart different courses to reach new, more durable political settlements.
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Social democracy remained dominant in Scandinavia and continued to influence the European “social model” to which many in northern continental states adhered, but it was all but eclipsed for a generation in Britain as the new Thatcherite politics of neoliberalism held sway, even after Margaret Thatcher’s demise as Tory leader. After the war, social democratic parties in Scandinavia had become much more powerful than their counterparts in Germany and England, and this continued to be the case after 1970. This had important effects in the different countries on all major components of the welfare state, including education. This major differential in social democratic power provides much of the explanation for the divergent history of comprehensive schooling in the Scandinavian countries, on one hand, and England and Germany, on the other. The Scandinavian countries emerged from the 1930s with convergent and consensual welfare policies, which were based on renewed political alignments with the farmers. It was this realignment, above all, according to Esping-Andersen (1985), “that made Scandinavian social democracy internationally unique and has given it a degree of power unmatched elsewhere” (88). This accrued social democratic power permitted fullemployment policies and social reforms of various kinds, including in the area of education, which became subject to major reforms that eventually resulted in the radical comprehensive school systems we know today. On the basis of the political realignment with the farmers, the Social Democrats successfully managed to marginalize the opposition on both the Left and the Right, and this was essential to maintaining their power. Both leftist and rightist parties challenged social democratic power, but the social democratic parties, especially in Norway and Sweden, were able to crush them quickly. In Denmark, on the contrary, they made inroads into social democratic power. The Danish Social Democrats were therefore consistently weaker than in Norway or Sweden and often found themselves squeezed in between the Right and the Left. As a consequence, and due to the necessity of retaining the farmer alliance, social democratic ideology was diluted. It was not until the alliance began to crumble during the 1960s, that the ideology was renewed and radicalized. The worker-farmer alliance had begun to weaken as a result of a decline in the population of farmers. Since it was necessary for the Social Democrats to forge alliances in order to stay in power—it was not sufficient to base their power on the working class alone—they were forced to seek political partnerships elsewhere. The rapid growth of the white-collar workers thus constituted an obvious “new” electoral group with which the Social Democrats could associate. To this end, the social democratic parties began to recast their image in a more universal form—from class parties
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and, later, people’s parties, to parties of wage earners in general. According to Esping-Andersen (1985), one of the most important preconditions for social democratic advances in the postwar era was thus the ability of the social democratic parties “to exchange alliance partners, drop the petite bourgeoisie [farmers], and seek a coalition with the new middle strata” (29). The Scandinavian social democratic parties differed in their capacity to forge this new wage earner alliance, as we can see from the somewhat different trajectories that their political partnerships took from the 1970s until today. The Norwegian, and especially the Swedish, Social Democrats were more successful than their Danish counterparts in establishing coalitions with the new white collar class. In electoral terms, the parties did increase their vote beyond levels attained during the 1930s. However, with minor fluctuations, their average parliamentary strength has remained fundamentally stable in each of the countries. Social democracy was already very strong in the 1930s, so, even without any electoral boost thereafter, it remained strong and the postwar period was truly an “era of social democracy” in Scandinavia.
Denmark Because of the more influential position of the Liberals in Denmark, the Social Democratic Party there was only able to form minority or coalition governments throughout most of the postwar period. Threats from the Left also made the Social Democratic Party vulnerable at times. Just after the end of the Second World War the party was challenged by the Communists, who had gained considerable popularity by virtue of their participation in the wartime resistance movement. The Social Democrats attempted to meet the challenge and weaken the Communists through a radicalization of their own political programme, and through discussions concerning a possible merger of the two parties. In their 1945 programme, the Future of Denmark (Fremtidens Danmark), the Social Democratic Party claimed that it would go forward by co-opting the Left without alienating the Right. It stressed the party’s Marxist ideological heritage and its commitment to Keynesian policies, asserting that private enterprise was to be democratized and central government planning pursued. A merger between the Social Democratic Party and the Communists was negotiated, but it quickly collapsed. The Communists refused to dismantle the Communist press and adopt Social Democratic policy, as required by the Social Democrats, in return for a number of constituencies and cabinet representation. The Communists won 12.5 percent of the vote, meaning
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that the Social Democrats were unable to form a government (EspingAndersen, 1985, 91; Elvander, 1980; Lindblad, 1974). However, the Communists subsequently went into electoral decline, whereas the Social Democrats gained in political influence. Thus, a Social Democratic government was formed in 1947. But three years later, in 1950, they were ousted by a bourgeois alliance that formed a coalition government. In 1953, the Social Democrats were back in power as a minority government, but it was only after 1957 that they were able to form a majority government together with the small farmer’s party, the Radical Liberals. This lasted until 1964. Even though the Social Democrats had some influence over governments during the 1950s, they were still relatively weak, as their power completely depended on the legislative support of the bourgeoisie. As a consequence, they were unable to implement any major legislation. With social democracy still fragile at this time, the Communists could have prospered during the 1950s, but the Social Democrats blocked their attempt to influence the trade union movement. Their 1957 coalition with the Radical Liberals was sufficiently powerful to overcome the opposition and the Social Democrats introduced wide-ranging economic, social, and educational reforms (e.g., the 1958 School Act that abolished the middle school) (Bryld, 2004, 216). In 1960 the Social Democrats faced a new left-socialist challenge in the form of a newly established party, the Danish Socialist Party, or SF. This new party absorbed, amongst others, former Communists, as well as the more left-leaning Social Democrats, and grounded its strategy in foreign policy, in particular on the issue of NATO membership. Because of the Social Democrat’s hostility toward the Socialist Party—as they thought the party was the old Communist Party in a new disguise—the political negotiations into which they entered (mainly concerning housing policy) miscarried. Consequently, in the election of 1966, the Social Democrats suffered heavy losses to the Socialist Party. The political situation changed after 1966, as the Radical Liberals transferred their allegiance to the bourgeois parties, and the Social Democrats entered into a short period of renewed cooperation with the Socialist Party. This collaboration was based mainly on issues of domestic policy upon which they could agree, but over issues surrounding foreign policy, such as the NATO membership, they continued to clash. The cooperation between the two parties foundered when a splinter group broke away from the Socialist Party to establish a party on their own, the Left Socialists (VS). Hence, the election in 1968 was devastating for both the Social Democratic Party as well and the Socialist Party. The experience of cooperation with the Socialist Party forced the Social Democrats to rethink their policy. That same year, the party presented
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a revised programme, called The New Society (Det Nye Samfund), which sought to move policy toward the left by stressing the enhancement of equality through the societal institutions. This movement resulted in losses to the Right, and, even more importantly, helped to unify the divided bourgeoisie against the Social Democrats. Consequently, the 1968 election resulted in a bourgeois coalition government under the leadership of the Radical Liberals devoted primarily to a programme for curbing the rapid growth of public spending and taxation. This government lasted for four years, but it did not, however, succeed in its policy. On the contrary, public spending continued to grow. The 1971 election restored the position of both the Socialist Party and the Social Democrats, and a tacit collaboration between the two parties resumed with the formation of a Social Democratic minority government. Meanwhile, small right-wing protest parties emerged that pitted their politics against welfare reforms and growing taxes. In the 1973 election, these parties won substantial gains, which in turn caused heavy losses for the Social Democrats. Moreover, this election signaled an end to the old two-bloc pattern of Danish politics and the rise of a new set of cleavages. Eleven parties were now represented in parliament, none of which was able to form a viable coalition or minority government. The final result was a weak Liberal minority government that lasted only two years. In the 1975 election the Social Democrats recaptured some of their previous constituencies with 29.9 percent of the votes. Still, one of the protest parties, the Fremskridtspartiet, retained its position, and the parliamentary situation remained virtually paralyzed. The political situation worsened with the oil crisis and a global recession, which hit Denmark particularly hard. The Social Democrats responded by forming another minority government, but it too did not last for more than two years. The economic crisis, and the high unemployment of the time, did help strengthen the Social Democrats in the 1977 election, in which they gained 37 percent of the votes. However, the protest parties held on to their 1973 position, rendering impossible a return to the two-bloc pattern. Concurrently, the Left, in general, and the Communists, in particular, experienced a new era of growth (Esping-Andersen, 1985, 98). Following the 1977 election, the Social Democrats tried to build a government by admitting the Liberal Party to its coalition, but this only served to antagonize the trade union movement. Ergo, this experiment with a “broad unity” coalition also failed, and elections were called again in 1979. The Social Democrats now made small gains and, for the first time, the protest parties began to decline. The Social Democrats continued to govern the country, again as a minority and still without any real chance of finding support for an effective crisis policy. In the meantime,
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the rate of unemployment continued to increase and the economy’s imbalances worsened. In 1981, once again, the Social Democrats were forced to call an election. They lost heavily and the Socialist Party’s vote jumped to 11.3 percent (99). The Social Democrats remained in government with the tacit support of the Socialist Party on the Left and Radical Liberals support on the Right, but a workable parliamentary majority around a broadly acceptable crisis policy did not develop. The government resigned in 1982 and was replaced by a right-center coalition led by the Conservative Party. This was the first time in the twentieth century that Denmark was led by a Conservative state minister. The government lasted until 1988 (EspingAndersen, 1985; Elvander, 1980; Lindblad, 1974). From 1988 until 1990 the government consisted of a coalition of the Liberals, the Conservative, and the Christian Peoples Party. From 1990 to 1993 the Liberals returned to power in coalition with the Conservatives. In the period of 1993–2001, the Social Democrats returned to government under the leadership of their state minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, who maintained a parliamentary majority through the support of the Socialist Party and the Red-Green Alliance. These years witnessed a significant redistribution of income and the maintenance of the extensive welfare state institutions with collectively financed services such as health care, education, and infrastructure. Toward the end of the 1990s, trade surplus gave way to deficits, resulting in increased taxes. That this was not popular with the electorate can be seen from the defeat of the Social Democrats in 2001 when the Liberals assumed power. This defeat was repeated in 2005, when the Liberals formed the current government under Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s leadership in coalition with the Conservatives and with support from the Danish People’s Party. However, the Liberals in power were not able to roll back substantially the social democratic policies.
Norway The DNA, the Norwegian “sister party” to the Danish Social Democratic Party, was, in comparison to the Danish party, dominant from the 1940s to the early 1960s, holding a complete monopoly on government, which was eventually broken at the end of that period. “The DNA,” argues Esping-Andersen (1985), “managed to implant a degree of social democratic hegemony that was probably unmatched elsewhere” (101). Having absolute parliamentary majority for almost twenty years saved the DNA from constantly having to make compromises with the bourgeois parties,
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who, in contrast to their Danish counterparts, and somewhat surprisingly, embraced to a great extent social democratic policies and programmes. The DNA emerged from the 1930s with a political alliance with the farmers, which was broadly similar to that in Denmark, although the two differed in certain ways. The bourgeois bloc did not carry the same political weight as it did in Denmark. Since the Norwegian tradition of agrarian party opposition to the Conservatives ran much deeper, bourgeois coalitions against the DNA were almost impossible to mount. Also, in contrast with the Danish Social Democratic Party, the DNA was able to mobilize large sections of small peasants, fishermen, and forestry workers within the party, which gave them a solid backing beyond the working class. Moreover, it is important to stress that the electoral system itself benefited the DNA as it worked against parliamentary alliances in the formation of government by giving an overrepresentation to the largest party. Thus, with less than an absolute electoral majority, the DNA could maintain a parliamentary majority until 1961. As in Denmark, the 1945 election rewarded the Communist Party in Norway too when it received almost 12 percent of the votes, but the electoral system allowed the Social Democrats to form a majority government. The DNA also adopted a radical ideology, considerably more radical than the Danish version, envisioning planned economic development, industrial democracy, and collectivism. This helped to marginalize the Communists. By 1949 the Communist Party was largely decimated, and it continued to decline thereafter. The DNA, on the contrary, continued to grow throughout the 1950s. Among the bourgeois parties, the Conservatives were the strongest, but their inability to cooperate with either the stagnant Liberal Party or the agrarians (after the 1950s, the Norwegian Center Party) made them weak challengers to social democracy. The DNA was thus able to consolidate its position on the Right and the Left. Having an absolute parliamentary monopoly and pursuing radical politics certainly helped the DNA maintain its powerful position. In addition, a socialistic party was formed in Norway, absorbing anti-NATO members from the pro-NATO Social Democratic Party. However, in comparison with the Danish party, it was not able to gain substantial electoral support. As there were few political issues, save NATO, on which left-socialist critique of social democracy could gain momentum, the party could hardly survive. Adding to the pressure created by the left, another threat arose that had a tremendous effect on the DNA. In 1963, a mine, in which the Ministry of Interior was alleged to have failed to conduct proper safety inspections, collapsed—which was a grave disaster. The three bourgeois parties, along with the support of the Socialists, forced the Social Democrats to step down, installing in its place a bourgeois government. The Socialist Party
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thus established itself as the opposition on the left, and the bourgeois parties were able to represent themselves as a unified opposition to the DNA. In the 1965 election, the Socialist Party lost its parliamentary seats, while the bourgeois parties attained their first parliamentary majority since the 1930s. This new bourgeois coalition government based on an alliance of farmers and the urban bourgeoisie, which was under the leadership of the Center Party and in opposition to the DNA, was able to stay in power through the 1969 election. These new political cleavages resembled those of Denmark. In Norway the EEC question inflicted even deeper divisions within the Social Democratic Party than in Denmark. Opponents within the DNA broke with the party and affiliated with the newly established Communist and Socialist Party umbrella organization, the SV, which launched a campaign against Norwegian entry into the EEC. In the face of this, the DNA’s ability to stand united collapsed. However, the bourgeois bloc, also unable to agree on this question, was forced to step down from government, after which the DNA took over until the referendum in 1972. The EEC question created such turmoil in the political system that it shattered the traditional Right-Left axis. The pro-membership group comprised Conservatives, part of the Liberal Party, and the right wing of the DNA. The opposition included the agrarians, the DNA’s left wing, and the SV. With its pro-EEC attitude, the DNA had managed to alienate not only its traditional base in the rural periphery but also its urban, younger generations, who crossed over to the Socialist Party. The referendum, which resulted in a majority against the EEC membership, did not help to restore the legitimacy of the DNA’s leadership, and the party immediately relinquished office. A minority Center-Christian government was then formed, which persisted until the elections in 1973. At this election, the DNA was decimated, losing more than 11 percent of its votes. The group in the ascendant was now the SV coalition, which received 11.2 percent of the votes. As in Denmark at this time, a protest party arose representing a right-wing populist attack on welfare and tax policies, but this party was weaker than its Danish counterpart and had little impact on Norwegian politics (Esping-Andersen, 1985, 104; Elvander, 1980). Despite heavy losses, the DNA proceeded to form a new minority government. Because of the SV’s remarkable gains and the new divisions debilitating the bourgeois parties, a majority could be formed with SV support. In the 1977 election, the DNA regained most of what it had lost in 1973. Despite the fact the SV had only attained a level of support equivalent to the Socialist Party’s pre-1973 average, it was able to remain in government. The bourgeois parties regrouped into a new alliance of the conservative parties, Center parties, and Christian parties. Now the old
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political order of the Right axis and the Left axis was more or less restored. In 1977 the DNA received 42.3 percent of the votes; however, during the 1980s, it faced decline. In the election of 1983, its share of the votes was reduced to 37.3 percent (Myhre, 1992, 90). From that time to the present, the Social Democratic Party has been in power most of the time, including in 1986–1989, 1990–1997, and 2000–2001. In 2001 it reached a nadir of 24.3 percent of the votes but was still the biggest party in the Storting. In the election of 2005 the party regained support and received 32.7 percent of the votes and thus was able to form a majority in a center-left government, in which the social democratic leader, Jens Stoltenberg, was the state minister.
Sweden The Swedish Social Democratic Party, the SAP, was in an even more electorally dominant position than its Norwegian and Danish counterpart. Like these parties, it benefited initially from its alliance with the farmers and was in a uniquely favorable position to build on its legislative accomplishments in the 1930s. Its ability to enact unemployment insurance during the depression, and to bring down considerably the rate of unemployment, helped to establish the party as a powerful agent of reform. The SAP’s newfound power did not only rest on the working class and farmers, but also on the support of large sections within the business community. The SAP’s ability to revitalize Swedish capitalism helped to establish social democracy as a vehicle for economic prosperity and effective government. As in Denmark and Norway, the postwar popularity of the Communists in Sweden declined to its prewar level as soon as the SAP began to deliver its promised social welfare programmes. Nevertheless, even though electorally stronger than the Danish party, the SAP experienced a decade of stagnation in the 1950s. Since it could not produce, as did the Norwegian party, a parliamentary majority, it was forced to revive its old alliance with the agrarians (Bondeförbundet) between 1953 and 1957. The programme and ideology had to be diluted, and political attention was concentrated on educational reform, an area in which both parties could agree. As the rural population was declining at a rapid pace—and therefore also their party the Bondeförbundet—it was therefore not a promising party for future coalitions. Instead, the Social Democrats sought support from the increasing population of white-collar employees. This they were able to obtain successfully when the Social Democrats introduced the pension
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reform (ATP), which had a lasting consequence for the SAP as well as for the bourgeois parties. First, the pension reform helped terminate the Social Democrat’s alliance with the farmers. Second, it exacerbated divisions between the bourgeois parties, which allowed the SAP greater room for maneuver. Third, the reform mobilized the electorate to peak levels of involvement, which directly benefited the Social Democrats. In the 1960 election, the SAP gained almost 48 percent of the votes. The Communist received 4.5 percent, and with their implicit parliamentary support the SAP could govern with a majority. The pension reform vastly improved the Social Democrats standing among white-collar voters and their unions. As a consequence, between 1956 and 1960, SAP support among white-collar voters jumped from 37 to 42 percent, and this was achieved without losing working-class support. A social democratic wage earner realignment was now in the making (Esping-Andersen, 1985, 109). The bourgeois parties had now disintegrated and the Social Democrats departed from the consensual welfare state policies. With its strengthened electoral base, the SAP went through the 1960s with a recast programme emphasizing extended public regulation and control of the economy, rapid structural modernization of industry, active state direction of investment and housing development and, finally, wage solidarity and income equalization. When, in 1968, the Social Democrats, in concert with the trade union congress (LO), stressed, in order to combat unemployment, the need for extended state control of investments, ideological differences with the bourgeoisie parties again came to the fore. This proved to be an advantage for the SAP, which achieved a substantial victory with 50.1 percent of the votes. In the 1970 election, the SAP started its decade-long electoral decline and stagnation, while the Swedish Center Party became the principal beneficiary of the new electoral volatility. The SAP suffered stagnation, but it did not experience sharp setbacks. This was repeated in 1973 and 1976, when three bourgeoisie parties realized the historically unprecedented achievement of uniting in a coalition government led by the centrists. In Sweden there was no EEC issue to create political turmoil, nor did welfare-backlash parties on the Right or the Left upset the existing balance of party power as in Denmark (Esping-Andersen, 1985; Elvander, 1980; Lindblad, 1974). In the 1979 election the SAP was forced to take the defensive while employer organizations and the three bourgeois parties barraged the media with propaganda against industrial democracy. With unanticipated resilience, the bourgeois coalition government, although enduring repeated fractures, remained in power until 1982. However, these bourgeois parties could not, or dared not, initiate any radical departure from conventional social democratic politics. The bourgeoisie could not survive the 1982 election, since the coalition had shown itself to be an inefficient alternative to
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the SAP. The Social Democrats won the 1982 election, and with the support of the Left Party Communists, Oluf Palme assumed the leadership. This government stayed in power through the election of 1985 until 1991, a year of economic crisis, when the bourgeoisie returned in the form of an alliance of the Moderate Party, the Center Party, the Liberal Party, and the Christian Democrats. This government lasted until 1994, when the Social Democrats again assumed power, which they held until 2006. In the election of that year, the alliance of the Moderate Party, the Liberal Party, the Center Party, and the Christian Democrats returned to power with a seven-seat majority in the Riksdag and with Frederick Reinfeldt from the Moderate Party as the state minister. In Sweden, as in Denmark, a new coalition of the Center and Right is in power, but social democracy remains largely the guiding ideology.
Germany In stark contrast to the Scandinavian social democratic parties, the German SPD did not enter postwar politics with any great power. On the contrary, it was beaten so severely during three elections by Konrad Adenauer’s newly formed Christian Democratic Union (CDU), that by 1957 the chances of electoral victory were remote. The party had difficulty coming to terms with this, especially given that it had defied Bismarck, created the Weimar Republic, and survived the Third Reich. The defeat to the Conservatives was in part a result of the Cold War division of the country through which territories in Saxony and Prussia, where the SPD had a traditional stronghold, were lost. However, the primary explanation for the party’s defeat is that the SPD was rooted in the past. They did not emerge from the war as a new, ideologically reformed party. Instead, they maintained a version of the traditional Marxist ideology only slightly revamped. At the outset, an enthusiasm for a “new beginning” was expressed in respect to ideology and strategies, but this soon abated. Instead, party members returned to old and familiar methods of organization and agitation rather than adopting new ways. In contrast, the CDU was determined to break with the past, and became, in essence, a broad-based, non-confessional popular party of center-right, with the aim of combating the historical appeal of Marxism and enhancing the doctrine of the sanctity of individual rights in a social-market economy. With the backing of the drastic postwar currency reform and the infusion of West German prosperity, the first CDU government, guided by the vision of its celebrated Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard, laid the macroeconomic foundation for West German prosperity (Hodge, 1994, 120; Judt, 2005).
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The SPD’s Aktionsprogramm of 1952 was, according to Hodge (1994), a snapshot of an organization in metamorphosis. Since the party was in doubt as to whether they would ever win a parliamentary majority under the Federal Republic’s electoral system of proportional representation, the SPD looked instead to the possibility of a future governing coalition with the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). However, the concern over the fact that a coalition would inevitably involve concessions concerning any SPD policy seemed to be of greater importance for the party than engaging in a pragmatic discussion about ways to attract new voters. Regardless, considering a coalition for pursuing power was indeed a break from the traditional past of rejecting the bourgeoisie and disdaining coalitions. When, in 1953, the party’s vote declined to 29 percent, the campaign for reform of the SPD’s ideology received renewed attention. Prominent SPD heads in the city-states of Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg argued that a socialist programme based on its traditional Marxist heritage was superfluous, which aided the strengthening of revisionism within the party. However, it was completed neither quickly nor demonstratively enough to break the hold of the Christian Democrats on political power in Bonn. Only after the major electoral defeat in 1957 propelled revisionism within the party did Carlo Schmidt recommend the SPD to open itself toward the Right in order to expand SPD’s electoral basis. However, it was not before the appearance of Willy Brandt that the party embarked on a major renewal of its ideology, which ultimately resulted in the SPD-led governments of the 1960s and 1970s. Also, Brandt’s personal appeal, epitomizing the prototypical new Social Democrat, was certainly critical to the success of the SPD in the elections. Those governments may never had been formed had it not been for the Godesberg Programm that reoriented the party in the direction that Schmidt had suggested, of formally dismantling the barriers between Social and Liberal Democrats. Hence, in the wake of the programme, Keynesian economics and fullemployment policy thus gained acceptance with the SPD. “Despite the understandable sensation created when the original mass-socialist party of continental Europe, the party of Bebel and Kautsky, called off its war with capitalism, the reforms were passed on the power of 334 against only sixteen dissenting votes because the SPD was considered by its members and leadership to be overripe for a ‘second founding’ ” (Hodge, 1994, 124). German social democracy thereby recovered from its mistakes of the immediate postwar era and transformed itself into an alternative party of government. However, the success of revisionism did not make the German social democracy powerful anyway. The social-liberal coalitions under Brandt’s and Schmidt’s leadership suffered under the economic impact of the oil
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crisis and the recession in the mid-1970s. They did, to some extent, successfully accommodate wage restraint, inflation, unemployment, and social security. However, ultimately the SPD lost power to the new CDU/ CSU-FDP coalition under the CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who subsequently served four terms as chancellor. Later, in 1998, Kohl lost the election and the SPD, together with the Green Party, under Gerhard Schröder’s leadership, formed a government. In the 2002 election, the SPD gained 38.5 percent of the votes, barely ahead of the CDU/SCU, and was able to form a government together with the Green Party. But the election in 2004 heralded a major defeat for the SPD, which commanded only 21.5 percent of the votes. Under Schröder, the party moved far away from its traditional socialist stance. An ever increasing tendency to embrace liberal politics and cutbacks in government-spending on social welfare programmes led to a dramatic decline in voter support. This was an issue the party strove to reconcile with, and in the election of 2005, their programme included more traditional left-wing themes and led to success. In the current government, the SPD is part of a coalition with the CDU/CSU under Chancellor Angela Merkel.
England In Britain it was the Labor Party, not a Social Democratic Party, that reaped the benefits of the postwar swing to the Left. In the election immediately after the war, Labor gained a huge parliamentary majority over Churchill’s Conservative Party, and Clement Attlee led a government of radical reform lasting until 1951. While both British and German socialists listed a mixture of economic planning, social welfare, and industrial nationalization among their post-1945 policies, public ownership was of much greater importance to the Labor Party. Clement Attlee’s Labor government thus proved to be one of the most radical British governments of the twentieth century. It consolidated the welfare state as well as presided over a policy of nationalization of major industries and utilities. According to Hogde (1994), Labor continued to see themselves as political agents of fundamental socioeconomic change, but they remained in many respects more sentimental about their philosophical heritage than their conservative or liberal competitors. Labor remained very much a party of the trade unions, and their corporatist interests, even when it was able to project a national vision during its greatest moment of reform under Attlee, nurtured the experience of wartime collectivism that transcended class interests (Addision, 1975; Marquand, 1988).
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Labor won the 1950 general election with a much reduced majority of only five seats. Soon after, the “defense issue” came to greatly trouble the Labor Party, since defense spending during the Korean War placed great strains on public finances. Another election was called in 1951 in which Labor lost to the Conservatives, and a new government was formed with Churchill again as prime minister. Following this defeat, the Labor Party remained for a long period in the opposition, lasting 13 years. The party suffered an ideological split during the 1950s, and the postwar economic recovery meant that the public was broadly content with the Conservatives, particularly as postwar austerity gave way to a new affluence under the broadly welfarist mixed-economy policies of the Conservative Centrist Prime Minster, Harold MacMillan. It was not until 1964 that the Labor Party broke the long period of Tory rule. However, Labor returned with only a slight majority of four seats under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It was not until the 1966 election that Labor was able to govern with a substantial majority (ninety-six seats), and it was during Labor’s subsequent term that the Wilson government was able to legislate a number of social and educational reforms, among which was the expansion of comprehensive education. Labor lost the 1970 general election to the Conservatives, who then faced great difficulties in accommodating the ensuing crisis due to the rise in oil price, inflation, and recession. Labor returned to power again under Wilson after the 1974 general election, forming a minority government. They too struggled with the economic problems wrought by the crisis, which lead to a declining majority in the Commons. Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister in 1976 and was replaced by James Callaghan. The Wilson and Callaghan governments were hampered by their lack of a workable majority in the commons. The 1974 election saw a Labor victory with a majority of three seats and Callaghan found himself heading a minority government; he was thus forced to make compromises with other parties in order to survive politically. An agreement was negotiated in 1977 with the leader of the Liberal Party, David Steel, which was dubbed the “liblab pact.” However, this pact was terminated after one year. Subsequently, compromises were sought and made with various smaller parties, including the Scottish National Party and the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, which slightly prolonged the life of the government. The Wilson and Callaghan governments tried to control inflation in the 1970s by instituting a policy of wage restraint. This policy met with some success. However, it engendered increasing tensions between the government and the trade unions, and the economic crisis forced the government, in 1975, to undertake widespread public spending cuts and undergo a humiliating bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
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The government managed to hang on. Callaghan, who had succeeded Wilson in 1976, was expected to call a general election in 1978, but instead he decided to prolong the wage restraint policy for another year in the hope that the economy would improve. These hopes were dashed and, during the “winter of discontent” in 1978–1979, unions staged widespread strikes calling for higher pay. The resulting unpopularity of the government forced a new election. In the 1979 general election, the Labor Party suffered heavy losses to the Conservatives who took over under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership (Maquand, 1988). Following their defeat in 1979, the Labor Party remained in the opposition for eighteen years. The party during these years became increasingly divided between the ever more dominant left-oriented politicians under Michael Foot and Tony Benn and those inclined to the Right under Denis Healey. The election of Foot as Labor leader in 1980 dismayed those leaning to the right of the party, who argued that Labor had veered too much to the left with its 1983 election manifesto, dubbed by Gerald Kaufman as the “longest suicide note in history.” In 1981, a group of former cabinet ministers from the right and center of the Labor Party issued the so-called Limehouse Declaration and broke away to establish the Social Democratic Party, which existed until 1988 when it merged with the Liberal Party and became known as the Liberal Democrats. This breakaway substantially weakened Labor electoral base for many years. At the outset, Margaret Thatcher’s government was rather unpopular due to high unemployment and inflation, but her popularity, and that of her party, revived as a result of the Falklands War in 1982. As a consequence, the Labor party was defeated by a landslide in the 1983 election, winning only 27.6 percent of the votes, its lowest share since 1918. This outcome was also due to the splits between the right and left wings of the party. The alliance between the Social Democrats and Liberals received many of the votes of former Labor supporters. Michael Foot resigned as leader of the party and was replaced by Neil Kinnock, who gradually moved the party toward the center. Labor’s performance improved in the 1987 election, but not sufficiently to form a government, and Margaret Thatcher maintained her increasingly embattled premiership until forced by her own Cabinet to stand down and make way for John Major in 1990. The Conservatives under John Major continued to govern, though with a smaller majority, until 1997. However, with economic recession in the early 1990s, Major’s support waned, and a reformed New Labor Party won the 1997 election with a resounding majority. Tony Blair, unwilling to break substantially with the Thatcherite mould, moved the party to the Right, adopting policies that broke with Labor’s socialist heritage, not least its historic commitment to “common ownership” of the commanding
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heights of the economy. The 2001 election produced a similar majority for Labor, and although the 2005 election resulted in a smaller majority, Labor continued in power. In 2007, Blair, damaged by the Iraq war controversy, stood down as prime minister and was succeeded by Gordon Brown. *
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After 1945, electoral choice in Germany and Britain has tended to favor the conservative side of the political spectrum. In Germany, there was a remarkable dominance of the conservative CDU under Konrad Adenauer after sixteen years of Nazi dictatorship, war, and occupation. Not until 1966 did social democracy regain the power it lost in the 1930s. It held power during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as under Schröder in the 1990s, but Conservative governments have had a much stronger foothold on German politics than the SPD. In Britain, Labor had long periods of power, but, in the long run, their policies also failed to achieve a sustained social democratic advantage over conservatism. The radical postwar Labor Party in Britain had given way to a succession of Conservative governments in the 1950s, which increasingly occupied the middle ground in politics. Labor did come into its own electorally during the 1960s but failed to establish an enduring social democratic consensus that could rise above the factional and often inward-looking politics of laborism. They managed, more or less, to carry the mantle of Butskellism, the near cross-party consensus around the welfare state and the mixed economy, for their six years of governance in the 1960s under Wilson, and succeeded in a number of liberal social reforms. However, despite being seen for a while as the “natural party of government,” they never quite succeeded in consolidating the cross-class alliances that gave Scandinavian social democracy its power. Still hobbled politically by what the Right regarded as their overly close relationship with the increasingly militant trade union movement, and unable to break the cycle of economic stagflation in the early 1970s, made worse by the oil price hikes, industrial conflict, and the general crisis of capital profitability, Labor proved incapable of responding to the end of the long era of Keynesian welfare state politics (Gamble, 1981). It was the Conservative Party, and Thatcherism, that finally broke the mould and ushered in the new neoliberal, market-oriented policy settlement that would dominate British politics for the next thirty years, including under Blair’s New Labor, and which buried social democracy in Britain for a generation.
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The fortunes of social democracy in Scandinavia were very different. With their realignment with the liberal parties, the Scandinavian social democratic parties could enter the postwar period having achieved considerable power. When the farmer population started to decline during the 1960s, Social Democrats sought an alliance with the new middle-class strata in order to maintain their power. In Norway and Sweden, the social democratic parties were much more successful in annexing the middle class than they were in Denmark, where the middle class had a tendency to swing both to the Left and to the Right, but especially to the Right. In Sweden, the SAP went through the turbulent 1970s more successfully than its Norwegian and especially Danish counterparts, because it managed to dodge such divisive issues as ECC entry. However, more important was the fact that the SAP garnered support from the white-collar employees and experienced no serious threat from either the Right or the Left. Moreover, the constant divisions within and between the bourgeois parties kept the SAP powerful. According to Esping-Andersen (1985), there is no doubt that the SAP’s impressive performance, even during the troublesome 1970s, had been aided by its superior capacity to mobilize the new white-collar groups around political programmes designed to appeal to workers and salaried employees alike. In other words, the 1960s were watershed years in SAP history because this period witnessed the forging of the first links between the traditional manual worker and the new white-collar employee. In Denmark, where also the farmers’ alliance started to break down in the 1960s, the Social Democrats proved incapable of making any effective realignment. Repeatedly, they were compelled to collaborate with one or more bourgeois parties in order to pass any major legislation. However, the most decisive issue has been, according to Esping-Andersen (1985), the Social Democratic Party’s inability to establish a durable alliance of any kind with the new middle strata. Because of these differences in the social democratic parties’ abilities to make alliances with the new white-collar classes, these parties became much more powerful in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark. The dissimilar levels of social democratic power in the three countries can also explain the differences of timing in consolidating comprehensive education. Sweden and Norway were the earliest to introduce the nine-year comprehensive school; Denmark did so later. In 1962, the SAP introduced, after a twelve-year-long nationwide “experimental period,” a nine-year comprehensive school. Seven years later (1969), and also after a long nationwide “experimental period,” Norway finally established a nine-year comprehensive school. In Denmark, the nine-year comprehensive school was not introduced until 1975. Due to the more powerful
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Danish Liberal Party, which was reluctant to support fully the school policy of Social Democrats, it took longer for the Social Democrats to reach a compromise before the nine-year comprehensive school finally could be introduced. In Germany and England, social democracy and laborism also reached its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s. However, the SPD and Labor parties, respectively, were not able to maintain their power as in Scandinavia, paving the way for the greater influence of conservative politics. The Scandinavians’ ability to make and sustain alliances with the middle classes made social democracy particularly successful there, while lack of the same constituted a weakness in both the SPD and Labor. The SPD hesitated to form an alliance until late in the day, and thus hampered its ability to secure a great part of the middle class as an electoral group. Labor faced similar problems in keeping sufficient numbers of the middle class aligned with them instead of allowing them to drift to the Conservatives, who still had a lot to offer. The overall effect of this social democratic weakness was that the reorganization of school systems along comprehensive lines failed in Germany and was never completed in England.
Denmark Postwar education politics in Denmark centered around a number of unresolved issues caused by the 1937 School Act, including, amongst other things, the question of the early selection of children after grade five, the difference between rural and urban schools, and the parallel middle school system. The traditional middle school became increasingly popular. Around half of the pupil cohort was enrolled in a four-year programme, whereas the rest—the less academically able children—went into the less popular practical middle schools for two years. Hence, in 1949, the Social Democrat education minister, Hartvig Frisch, invited representatives from political parties, teacher associations, and the universities to a conference with the view to tackle these problems. Frisch claimed that he wished to solve the middle school selection problem through the creation of a seven-year comprehensive school. This suggestion caused an intense debate. Members of the Danish Teacher Association (Danmarks Lærerforening, DLF) were against this proposal, except for members of the elementary school, who were in favor. Other teacher organizations, such as the Secondary Teacher Association (Gymnasieskolernes Lærerforening, GL), the Danish Secondary Technical School Association (Danmarks Realskoleforening), and two smaller teacher organizations based in Copenhagen, were more strongly
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opposed to Frisch’s suggestion and proposed instead an alternative solution. They argued that it was not the school system as such that needed to be improved but the individual schools within the existing system. They suggested that the practically oriented middle school should be made more attractive by introducing child-centered learning, which would offer more optional subjects and require a final examination. In regard to the traditional middle school, they wanted to reduce the importance of examinations by relaxing the demanding entrance exam and subject exams during the course of study (Johannesen, 1988; Bryld, 1990; Bregnsbo, 1971). Simultaneously, in 1950, supporters of Frisch’s proposed seven-year comprehensive school organized themselves into the so-called “Askov Group.” Among the most prominent members of this group were the education minister Jørgen Jørgensen from the Radical Liberals, a school master from the Grundtvigian Askov Folk High School, J. Th. Arnfred, and Professor Hal Koch. Later, the Social Democrat education minister, K. B. Andersen, and, surprisingly, the leader of the Secondary Teacher Association, Sigurd Højby, joined the group. The latter was, however, replaced by director W. F. Hellner, since Højby’s own secondary school members in the GL did not appreciate his support for comprehensive education. The Askov Group opposed the teacher associations’ suggestion and advocated instead a seven-year comprehensive school, which would branch off into a five-year secondary school (Gymnasium) and a three-year vocational school, with different tracks. The GL strongly criticized this plan, as it would allow elementary teachers to enter secondary school territory. The GL sought an alliance with the DLF and the other teacher associations to establish a bulwark against the Askov Group. However, since the GL and the DLF had fundamentally opposing political interests in education, this proved difficult to construct. Instead, the teacher associations petitioned the Liberal-Conservative government to consider their reform proposal. The government declined because the reform proposal would have caused a split within the coalition, the Liberals being in favor of a seven-year comprehensive school and the Conservatives wishing to maintain selection at grade five into the two different middle schools. It was only after the 1953 change of government, in which the Social Democrat, Julius Bomholt, became education minister, that initiatives could be taken to introduce the seven-year comprehensive school. Hence Bomholt sought to establish a compromise on the issue between the Social Democrats, the Radical Liberals, and the opposition party, the Liberals. The Social Democrats could, in fact, have passed a reform without the support of the opposition party, but there existed an agreement among the parties that school reforms should be based on broad political consensus. The political situation, however, complicated this. During the previous
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government, the Liberals became closely connected to the Conservatives in order to establish a “bourgeois bloc” as a counterweight to the Social Democrats and with a view to win the election in 1957. A political compromise between the Social Democrats, the Radical Liberals, and the Liberals would therefore debilitate this strategy. Even though the parties were, in fact, interested in reaching a compromise, the Liberals could suddenly become a major obstacle, especially if they succeeded in gaining support from the teacher organizations. Bomholt realized that it was essential for the Social Democrats to enlist support from the teacher organizations in order to institute the seven-year comprehensive school. In 1954, he initiated negotiations with the teacher associations as well as the Askov Group. The result of these negotiations was a compromise reform proposal, which, in line with the proposal already suggested by the teacher associations, entailed selection at grade five in order to keep the middle school and upper secondary school intact. The GL had no problem accepting this proposal as it would not interfere with secondary education, but the Askov Group disagreed strongly with early selection. On behalf of the Liberals, Paul Hartling opposed the compromise reform proposal and put forward a competing proposition, inspired by the Askov Group—a seven-year comprehensive school followed by a three-year middle school. As his suggestion was closer to Bomholt’s and the Social Democrats’ original viewpoints than the compromise reform proposal, Bomholt’s negotiations foundered. In 1956, Bomholt presented a new proposal, which was the result of unofficial negotiations between Bomholt, Jørgensen (Radical Liberals), and Hartling (Liberal). The plan entailed a reduction of the duration of the secondary school in order to make room for a seven-year comprehensive school. GL immediately rejected the suggestion on the grounds that a secondary school of reduced duration could not maintain the necessary academic standards. Then GL suggested that the proposal be discussed in a committee in the hope of delaying the issue until the election the following year, in 1957, when the political situation would change in their favor. It was of great importance that the Liberals accept the proposal. In the spring of 1957, a committee comprising the teacher associations and ministerial civil servants was appointed. In spite of GL’s rejection of the proposal, an agreement was reached. A “soft,” but compulsory, selection in grades six and seven would be introduced, followed by a three-year secondary technical school and a three-year upper secondary school (Gymnasium). Even though a compromise had been achieved, the Liberals declined to support the proposal, because after learning about the date of the election (May 14, 1957), they did not want to agree to a compromise without the support of the Conservatives.
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However, the election did not result in a Liberal-Conservative government as the two parties had hoped. Instead, a majority government consisting of the Social Democrats, the Radical Liberals, and a small center party, called the Retsforbundet, formed a new government. The education minister, Jørgensen, from the Radical Liberals, floated a suggestion that was based on the proposal the Committee had formulated in the spring of 1957. The only difference was that the “soft” selection at grades six and seven was completely abolished in order to create a continuous seven-year comprehensive school. This suggestion met strong opposition from both the GL and the DLF who could not agree to the abolishment of selection. Jørgensen then initiated unofficial negotiations with the chairman of the DLF, Stinus Nielsen. Nielsen had unsuccessfully tried to persuade his fellow members in the DLF to accept Jørgensen’s suggestion, but the “threat” of a school reform based on the Askov Group’s ideas forced the DLF to negotiate. The possibility of attaching two class years from the middle school to the elementary school helped bring them to the table. These negotiations between Jørgensen and the DLF resulted in a compromise that was put forward in a meeting held by the education ministry on April 15, 1958. At the meeting, which was attended by the political parties’ spokesmen for school politics and representatives from DLF, a compromise was discussed and an agreement was reached between all partners. The compromise introduced selection at grades six and seven (in two academic ability settings) unless the majority of the parents preferred the two grades to be organized as mixed-ability classes. This compromise agreement was thus a major defeat for the GL, which immediately suggested a five-year secondary school in order to “save” their Gymnasium, but this was turned down. The DLF, especially the elementary school teachers, were strongly opposed the latest GL suggestion, and without their support the Liberals would not take part in any compromise. Hence, the Jørgensen/DLF compromise agreement was turned into law on May 30, 1958. It is interesting to note that it was the exception in the Act—that selection could be postponed until the end of grade seven in case the majority of the parents wished so—that turned out to be the rule. The majority of parents throughout the country took advantage of this exception, consequently, the seven-year comprehensive school was finally introduced in Denmark (Bryld, 1990; Bregnsbo, 1971; Markussen, 1978; Markussen, 2003; Haue, 1986). Subsequently, political attention was directed at extending the sevenyear comprehensive school to nine years. The Social Democratic Party argued that the enhancement of social equality in society could be achieved though a comprehensive school of longer duration. This view gained increasing momentum as social researchers started to publish
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empirical research that suggested a close link between social background and educational attainment. A significant study (Hansen, 1966) revealed that 29 percent of children whose fathers were from the upper class and upper middle class (social group I) went to upper secondary school, the gymnasium, while only 1 percent of children from the middle working class and lower working class (social group V) attended the same. This discordant relation between social-economic groups and education was made even more apparent when one considered that social group I only consisted of 4.9 percent of the population whereas the social group V made up 25.8 percent. These findings gave the Social Democrats a further rationale for their policy of reducing social inequality through comprehensive education. Their political programme of 1969, entitled The New Society (Det Nye Samfund), and that of 1977, entitled Solidarity, Equality and Welfare (Solidaritet, Lighed og Trivsel), argued that compulsory education should be extended to nine years in order to level social, economic, and gender inequalities in the society. Prior to these programmes, in 1965, the Social Democrat education minister, K. B. Andersen, had already appointed a committee tasked with investigating the possibility of extending the compulsory schooling age to nine years, with the view of creating a nine-year comprehensive school. The committee put forward a bill that recommended compulsory schooling that included grades eight and nine. This was not, however, a radical bill, as 90 percent of the children were already enrolled in grade nine at the time, but since a new government took over in February 1968, this bill came to naught. The education minister, Helge Larsen, of the Radical Liberals in the new government, which was made up by Liberals, Conservatives, and the Radical Liberals, presented the so-called Nine Bullet Programme for the Reform of the Basic School Education (Ni-Punktsprogram for Reform af de Grundlæggende Skoleuddannelser). The programme outlined directions for the reorganization of the school system as well as for the extension of compulsory school age. It recommended that the elementary school should consist of ten grades where the last grade would be optional. The curricula in grades eight and nine would contain compulsory and optional subjects in order to accommodate the different abilities and interests of the pupils. To the great disappointment of the Social Democrats, the question about abolishing setting, which takes place in the compulsory subjects, was not considered in the nine-bullet program. K. B. Andersen argued that with the nine-bullet program, not enough had been done to abolish the class biased “sorting school.” The Liberals were not pleased with the programme either, as they did not support extending the compulsory school age. They would agree to a seven-year, but not nine-year, comprehensive school.
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They feared that this would encourage children in the rural areas to look to the cities for further education and thus enhance the urbanization of society. However, in spite of disagreements, this programme was unanimously agreed in May 1969. Thus the most important decision regarding the future development of the comprehensive school system was taken: the extension of the compulsory school age. In September 1971, a Social Democrat government was formed in which the education minister, Knud Heinesen, put forward a bill for a new school act he claimed would abolish the “sorting school” and provide pupils with equal opportunities for their future. The bill stated that the pupils should be kept together in core subjects for common education and be able to choose between optional subjects as long as these did not restrict their choice in future education. Moreover, a “soft” form of setting in two ability classes, in Mathematics, Foreign Languages, and Physics/Chemistry, should be introduced. The “soft” setting implied that the pupils in the two ability classes should be presented for the same topics but at different academic levels, both leading to qualification. Lastly, it was suggested that all grades in the school as well as the restricted entry to the upper secondary school should be abolished in order to allow more pupils to have access to upper secondary education. The argument went that in such a school system it was possible to give pupils equal education. Once again the political negotiations were terminated as a new government was formed. The education minister in this latest government was the Liberal, Tove Nielsen, who introduced a new bill. Her legislation resembled Heinesen’s bill, except that Nielsen replaced the “soft” setting with a more strict form of setting. This implied that setting in core subjects and grades would be maintained, and it would be implemented from grade seven onward in all subjects. The Liberals were, in principle, supporters of a comprehensive school, but held that setting should ensure that the children’s different academic needs were satisfied. Nielsen stated that “they [the pupils] are different and we don’t serve pupils and schools by hiding this fact” (Michelsen, 1978). However, the bill was not laid before the government, as a new election was called. A Social Democrat government was formed in 1975 in which the Social Democrat, Ritt Bjerregaard, was appointed as the education minister. Instead of putting forward her own bill, she continued working on her predecessor’s bill, but chose to abolish setting all together. She defended this by saying, “Now you can have different opinions about what a comprehensive school is. For me it is simply a school where no setting takes place on the basis of the individual child’s ability and academic achievement. If this aim cannot be obtained immediately, then it can be achieved through development. However, such a development is hampered by the structure that the Liberal’s are putting forward” (96).
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In 1975, a School Act was finally passed on the basis of a broad compromise between the Social Democratic Party, the Liberals, the Socialistic People’s Party, and Christian People’s Party. The compromise could be achieved if the Social Democrats were willing to modify their policy by accepting examinations, grades, as well as setting in grades eight and nine. However, Bjerregaard managed to strike a deal where the setting in grades eight and nine could be abolished if local school authorities wished to have mixed-ability classes. Thus, with the 1975 School Act, the nine-year comprehensive school was introduced, with setting in two different academic ability classes in grades eight and nine (Dehn, 1996; Hansen, 1997; Haue, 1986; Markussen, 1978). Subsequently, the Social Democrats continued to lobby for further development of the nine-year comprehensive school. The Central Education Council (Det Centrale Uddannelsesråd) report, entitled A Comprehensive Education Plan until the 1990s—U 90 (En Samlet Uddannelsesplanlægning frem til 1990’erne—U 90) argued for the extension of the comprehensive school to twelve years for all, with a project-based and interdisciplinary curriculum. The report initiated a major debate, but it subsided quickly as a new Liberal government took over and, as a way of bringing to an end the discussion on further development of comprehensive education, abolished the Central Education Council. Bertel Haarder, who was the education minister in this government, launched, in the spirit of Margaret Thatcher, a fierce attack on comprehensive education, but he did not succeed in dismantling the work of the previous governments on education. A new government was formed in 1993. The education minister, Ole Vig Jensen from the Radical Liberals, instigated a School Act the same year that can be seen as the temporary end of comprehensive education development in Denmark. The academic setting introduced by the 1975 Act was finally abolished in order to have mixed-ability classes throughout the nine-year comprehensive school. The Act stated it was possible to organize ability groupings in time-restricted periods throughout the school year, but this had to be done within the framework of an unselective comprehensive school during the compulsory school age (Markussen, 2003). The school acts introduced after 1993 were not directed at reorganizing the school structure, and thus today, as of 2009, radical comprehensive schools with mixed-ability classes still exist.
Norway Immediately after the Second World War, initiatives were also taken in Norway to further develop the comprehensive school system. In contrast
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to Denmark, in Norway a seven-year comprehensive school had already been introduced prior to the Second World War, and political efforts were now directed at extending it by two years in order to create a nineyear comprehensive school. Due to the more powerful Social Democratic Party in Norway, the Liberals could not, as in Denmark, become a serious obstacle for social democratic policy. Hence, the Social Democratic Party could introduce a comprehensive school system more or less according to their initial political programmes without making concessions to the Liberals. Soon after the end of the war, the political parties formulated a common strategy, which stated that the education system must be integrated so that all parts, from the elementary school to the university, would linked naturally together, regardless of whether the schools were academicallyoriented or practically-oriented. Thus, in 1947, the so-called Integration Committee (Samordningsnemda) was established, which put forward numerous suggestions about how further integration of the education system within the framework of the existing laws could be improved. Also, the Church and Education Department had suggested in a 1954 publication (Om Tiltak til Skyrkning av Skolverket) that a reform of the elementary school was necessary. It recommended, for example, extending the compulsory school age and creating a common youth school for all, in which the existing continuation school and the secondary technical school were integrated as two different branches. On the basis of these recommendations, the Social Democratic government decided in 1954 to launch a “school experiment” in a few municipalities. The school experiment was focused principally on different ways of organizing setting in grades eight and nine. The outcome of the experiment was limited as many pupils dropped out by grade eight, since grade nine was not compulsory. In response, the Social Democratic government passed an Act in 1959 in which the compulsory school age was extended to grade nine with the explicit purpose of creating a nine-year comprehensive school (Dokka, 1981; Myhre, 1992). During the following ten years, from 1959 to 1969, the focus was on molding the nine-year comprehensive school into shape. The most common model was a six-year elementary school followed by an integrated three-year youth school, but in some places a seven-year elementary school was introduced that was linked to a two-year youth school. In addition, most attention during this decade was directed at organizing setting in the last two grades in the youth school. Immediately after the School Act of 1959 was passed, two streams were introduced at grade eight—an academic stream and a practically oriented stream. These two streams continued into grade nine, except that the practically oriented stream was divided further into five streams that were directed at various vocational
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occupations. Moreover, setting was introduced in core subjects. In the subjects of Norwegian, Mathematics, and English, three academic sets were introduced, and in the subjects of German and Natural Sciences, two academic sets. The organization of streaming and setting caused increasing concern as the gap between the academic and nonacademic pupils seemed to widen, with the consequence that it became more difficult for nonacademic pupils in the practically oriented stream who had improved their knowledge and skills to transfer to the academic stream. In other words, pupils who matured late academically were stuck in the stream in which they were originally placed. During a 1961 government debate about the school experiment, a strong reaction was expressed against the social consequences of streaming and setting in the youth school. It was stated that the aim of the nine-year comprehensive school was to strengthen common education for all people. Therefore, it was imperative that the question of streaming and setting be solved in such a way that pupils were not forced to choose any particular stream, and thus an occupation, too early. The government demanded that streaming be postponed and requested that the council responsible for the experiment with the nine-year comprehensive school revisit the selection issue. In 1963, the Council published The Blue Plan (Den Blå plan), a teacher guideline in which streaming was abolished and replaced with mixed-ability classes. Flexible ability groupings were possible but they must be operated within the context of the comprehensive school. A couple of years later, in 1965, the Council initiated further experiments with mixed-ability classes in Norwegian subject and later in Mathematics (Telhaug and Vestre, 1969). The Council argued on the basis of the experiments that it was possible to verify that teaching in heterogeneous classes gave better learning results than teaching in homogenous groups. Setting was finally abolished with the so-called Mønsterplanen of 1974, which was a teaching guideline meant for teachers. This continued with the subsequent Mønsterplanen of 1987 and the Mønsterplanen of 1997. The education historian Eckhoff states in connection with the Mønsterplanen of 1974 that it “promoted in principle a radical or absolute form of comprehensive education, with great freedom for the teachers, schools and the pupils within the nine-year comprehensive compulsory structure” (Eckhoff, 2001, 112). Subsequently, the government began to prepare another school act. In 1963, a committee was established to formulate a plan for the reorganization of the school system, which eventually resulted in the Elementary School Act of 1969. In this Act, which was based on a broad consensus among the political parties, the nine-year comprehensive school was finally introduced. However, even though the Social Democrats could
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decide the content of the Act on their own, they sought support from the opposition parties. The bourgeois bloc offered only a mild critique. The Conservatives were not in favor of the comprehensive school idea, but supported the extension of the compulsory school age. The Liberals embraced the comprehensive school, but were skeptical about the mixed-ability classes. The Liberal, Bjarne Undheim, for example, expressed that he would prefer the middle stage schools—the technical secondary school and the continuation school—to be maintained in order to accommodate the different academic needs of the pupils. But his opinion was in the minority. The Social Democrats, the majority, dominated entirely the debate about pursuing comprehensive education as a means of leveling social inequalities in the society. The Social Democrats Sonja Ludvigsen and Olav Totland gave expression to the dominant view when they said that “breaking down class differences implied that the school should consist of children of unequal theoretical ability and from all walks of society in contact with each other in a social community. The school must actively work for making a bridge over the traditional division between theoretical and practical education” (Telhaug and Vestre, 1969, 77). When the teacher guideline Mønsterplanen of 1974 was launched, mixed-ability classes were introduced throughout the nine-year comprehensive school. It could be followed by a three-year upper secondary school (gymnasium), a tenth grade, a two-year folk high school, or a vocational school of various streams and duration (Engelsen, 2003).
Sweden On November 22, 1940 the wartime coalition government appointed an expert commission under Gösta Bagge’s leadership to devise a proposal for the reorganization of the elementary school, the secondary school, and create a link between the two schools. As the link had an important impact on the organization of the elementary and secondary schools themselves, it soon became a central issue in the work of the commission. The commission included educational experts from both the elementary school and the secondary school, läroverket, but not politicians, as a political agreement about keeping “peace” during wartime hindered their involvement. The commission agreed that the middle school that was supposed to bridge the elementary school and the secondary technical school, the realskola, had become too independent. They thought that the middle school ought to be articulated more closely with both the elementary and secondary schools
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in order to create a genuinely integrated school system. Consequently, the Commission proposed an eight-year elementary school that was divided into two phases, a lower unselective phase and a higher selective phase, also known as the secondary technical school. The commission was divided on the question about when the transfer from the lower to the higher phase should take place. One wing, which was composed of experts representing the secondary school, wished to ensure high academic standards through early selection and therefore argued for a 4 + 4 model. The other wing, a group of experts from the elementary school, argued for a 6 + 2 model in order to strengthen basic education. With this suggestion of a 6 + 2 model, the old battle about the six-year comprehensive school from the 1920s came to the fore once again. The Commission continued its work until 1947, but prior to this, the new Social Democratic government established another committee, the so-called 1946 School Commission, which replaced the old committee in due course. The Social Democrats, however, were still divided over the question of the comprehensive school. One faction, including people such as I. Pauli and Engberg, who was education minister in the 1920s and member of the 1946 Commission, was against comprehensive education and preferred to strengthen secondary education academically through early selection of the children. The Social Democratic state minister, P. Albin Hansson, did not seem, in his “ folkhems” ideology, to show any sympathy for the idea of comprehensive education either. The other faction, including the former state minister Richard Sandler, the Minister of Finance Ernst Wigfors, and Oscar Olson, fought for comprehensive education in order to promote social equality in society. This disagreement among the Social Democrats about the comprehensive school versus the secondary technical school was so strong that they were unable to reach an agreement in their revisited political programme of 1944. The only issue this programme was able to state in respect of education was that it should be free and foster democratic citizens. The elementary school should be maintained as the basic form of schooling (bottonskola) and a suitable number of secondary schools should be ensured (Marklund, 1980, 54; Sjöstrand, 1965; Richardson, 1999). As the Social Democrats renounced their advocation for comprehensive education, various organizations within the labor movement, such as the Youth Association, the Women’s Association, and the cooperative associations, the LO (Trade Union Confederation), and the ABF, argued for this school type. Together, these associations established their own independent committee chaired by Ernst Wigfors, and, in 1944, advanced a political programme whose aim regarding education was to “create a nine or ten-year comprehensive school to provide citizenship and humanistic education” for all, ensuring “equal education opportunities for the
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entire youth regardless of parent’s income and educational background” (Marklund, 1980, 290). In response to this pressure from the labor movement, the Social Democrats established a committee led by Adolf Wallenheim, with the prominent leader of the labor women’s association, Alva Myrdal, as the secretary. The committee proposed a reorganization of the school system based on the same ideas the labor associations espoused. However, the Social Democrats were still in disagreement about comprehensive education and declined to take up the plan for further political consideration. But the comprehensive school ideal did slowly become part of Social Democratic policy anyway, since views held by the members of the labor movement and the Social Democratic Party increasingly overlapped. The comprehensive school ideal came through the “back door,” so to speak, of social democratic policy. The Social Democratic Party established the above-mentioned 1946 School Commission, which had a great impact on the development of the school system during the 1950s. The members of the commission were mainly Social Democrats and they proposed a programme that was more radical than the programme of the previous 1940 Commission. The 1946 School Commission suggested that the overall aim was to create an integrated school system where the different school types were closely interlinked. Accordingly, a comprehensive school should replace the old six-year elementary school, the bottenskola. The duration of the comprehensive school should be as long as possible, preferably nine years, and be unselective, and it should be followed by either secondary education or vocational training. The secondary technical school, the realskola, should be made more uniform and the study of Latin postponed until the upper secondary school in order to better link together the elementary school and upper secondary education. On the question of selection, the 1946 Commission departed radically from the previous 1940 Commission. Whereas the 1940 Commission wished to maintain selection at the age of eleven, the 1946 Commission argued that it should be postponed until the age of fifteen (Marklund, 1980, 77). This was a radical suggestion considering that the “double attachment,” which was introduced into the school system with the 1927 School Act, still existed. The majority of the pupils were selected after completing grade four; the remaining were selected after grade six. In essence, the Commission had recommended that this be experimented in a school before making a final decision. The Commission’s proposal for a new school system, launched in 1948, caused an intense debate. In particular, many viewed the suggestions for mixed-ability classes until grade six, optional subjects in grade seven and eight, and the postponement of selection at grade nine as too radical.
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The Secondary School Teacher’s National Association (Läroverksläranas Riksforbund) stated that selection of the children ought to take place as early as possible in order to maintain the academic standards in secondary education. Allowing the majority of pupils secondary education in the name of equality, the Association claimed, would inevitably lead to declining academic standards. On the other hand, the Association of Elementary School Teachers (Sveriges folkskollärarforbund) supported the Commission’s proposal; in particular, that schooling should be common until at least grade six for democratic reasons. They were willing to reduce the academic standard if that would permit access to secondary education to more pupils. These proposals did not immediately lead to a reorganization of the Swedish school system, but their historical implication, according the Swedish historian Gunnar Richardson, was that they managed to turn the old double-attachment discussion into a question about setting (Richardson, 1983, 181). In February 1950, the Social Democratic education minister, J. Weijne, presented the government with a bill that was, to a large extent, based on the 1946 Commission’s proposals. It proposed that a nine-year comprehensive school replace the old school types and be divided into three stages, 3 + 3 + 3. The bourgeois bloc was critical toward this proposal, though the Conservatives were more strongly opposed to it than the Liberal Party, the Bondeförbundet, which viewed it positively. The center, liberal-oriented, party, the Folkpartiet, was somewhere between the two. The bill was processed by a commission, of which Richard Sandler was leader and whose members were mainly old members from the 1946 Commission as well as educational experts. The commission was to a great extent in agreement about Weijne’s bill, but in regard to the question about selection, diverse opinions were expressed. The representatives of the Conservatives agreed to support the comprehensive school if setting according to academic ability was enforced. Bondeförbundet and Folkpartiet accepted the bill fully, but the representatives from the Folkpartiet wanted streaming to be introduced earlier than the suggested grade nine. The disagreement in the Commission was eventually resolved in a compromise that entailed introducing the nine-year comprehensive school if the school experiment revealed that it was superior to the old school. In 1949/1950 an experiment was initiated with a nine-year comprehensive school that integrated the elementary school and the middle school. At the beginning, only fourteen municipalities took part, but 367 more joined the study in 1961. This meant that about half of the pupil cohort received education in an experimental comprehensive school. The school experiment was monitored by a newly created department within the Ministry of Education (Skolöverstyrelse), and in 1957 a commission was appointed that
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summarized the debates surrounding, and experiences within, the school experiment. In the same year the Social Democrats assumed governmental power and appointed a commission, which declared, after a long debate, the outcome in a press release in 1960. The press release revealed that an agreement, which was dubbed the Visby Compromise, had been reached. The compromise entailed that pupils in grade seven and eight should partly be kept together in the core subjects and partly be grouped according to elected subjects. At grade nine, nine different streams should be introduced, where some streams would be oriented toward academic studies and some toward practical studies. The Conservatives requested that the school experiment be postponed, but this was without success since the other parties supported the Visby Compromise. The compromise was later passed as the School Act of 1969, which finally introduced the nine-year comprehensive school (Isling, 1974; Isling, 1984; Richardson, 1999). Immediately after the 1969 Act was passed, demands were made to integrate the streams at the top grades in the comprehensive school. It was claimed that the streaming, as in Norway, would result in an overly fragmented education. In reality, however, it was not as fragmented as was feared, because around 75–80 percent of a cohort that opted for the theoretical elective subjects in grade seven and eight went on to the theoretically oriented stream in grade nine. Parents, who opposed to the Visby Compromise, could themselves “solve” the streaming problem by allowing their children to opt for the theoretically oriented route. But the streaming issue was also taken up politically. By now the issue of streaming did not inspire so much controversy. A working group in the Ministry of Education, comprising educational experts and representatives from different interest groups, was established. A proposal introducing mixedability classes put forward by this group was received positively by the government. Oluf Palme forwarded it as a bill before the Rigsdagen in 1968. Without much resistance from the Conservatives, the government decided, on the basis of a broad political consensus, that the top classes in the comprehensive school should be integrated in mixed-ability classes and that a limited number of optional subjects should be offered (Isling, 1984, 109). A new teacher guide, Lgr 68, was produced based on this agreement, but setting was maintained to some degree. It was not until 1980 that setting was completely abolished from the schools, with the teacher guide, Lgr 80. The three governmental decisions in 1950, 1962, and 1968 can be seen as successive stages in the development of the comprehensive school. The national experiment with the school that was launched in 1950 was a breakthrough for social democratic policy on education. In 1962, the
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Social Democrats could finally introduce the nine-year comprehensive bylaw, and in 1968 the top classes in the comprehensive school became integrated. During the 1980s, the large expert committees were replaced by smaller and faster-working expert groups in order to introduce partial reforms and to initiate local school experiments. Since this great reform period the comprehensive school system has not been subject to any substantial change. Today, the nine-year comprehensive schools with mixedability classes continues to exist.
Germany In contrast to Scandinavia, postwar Germany did not reform its education system to enhance democratization, but instead reestablished the old system of the Weimar Republic. This system comprised a three-tired, selective secondary school system, which was, in most Länder, based on a four-year elementary school. “Once again,” Hahn states, “it is the mandarin class, in a tradition almost unbroken since the second Empire, which sought to reestablish German culture, unwilling to accept the influx of Western rationalism” (Hahn, 1998, 96–97). The secondary school, the Gymnasium, reemerged with an even stronger focus on the classical subjects, especially German Literature and Music. It was, according to Hahn, “more concerned with the pursuit of its ‘humanist’ tradition than with democratic values, thereby favoring the traditional Bildungsbürgertum, whilst parents, frequently under the influence of the churches, were intent on the restoration of anti-democratic, conservative system which had previously hindered progress under the Weimar republic” (93). The period from 1949 to 1989 was marked by a reluctance toward reforming the school system, a period also dubbed Keine Experimente (no experiments), since no major interventions initiated by any government resulted in a thorough reorganization of the school system on comprehensive lines. Neither were there any interest groups that were prime motivators behind reforming German education. One such group, the Education and Scientific Workers Union (GEW), which represented the largest proportion of elementary school teachers, long remained hesitant toward reforming the school system. One explanation for this is that less than 50 percent of the teachers were organized, since considerations of status, religion, and class kept many teachers from joining a group with a common course. Catholic teachers in denominational schools, for example, had their own interests and thus also competing organizations. When the
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GEW, in 1949, affiliated with the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB), a large group of south German teachers refused to join. A concern to appeal to groups of diverse members rendered the GEW’s school programmes similar to those of the conservative official commissions. Only in the mid-1960s did the GEW commit itself to creating a comprehensive school system in the form of a differentiated Gesamtschule. The Secondary School Teachers Association, the Philologenverband, was a powerful interest group that was able to hamper initiatives toward reforming the school system. It had influential allies at all the higher levels of the bureaucracy, and its cooperation with middle-class parents associations allowed it to form powerful resistance coalitions when Land ministers of education proposed reforms of the tripartite structure. For example, such an alliance was responsible for the defeat of a Social Democratic government that tried to pursue the creation of a comprehensive school system in Hamburg during the 1950s. In contrast to its Scandinavian counterparts, the German secondary school teacher organization was much more successful in derailing the reform movement. The closest equivalent to the Swedish great reform plans that the Germans created before 1965 was the Deutscher Ansluss (1953), which, in 1959, suggested a Framework Plan. However, the recommendations were only partially adopted by the Länder governments because of strong resistance from the reactionary coalition of the Catholic Church and the Secondary School Teachers Association. This plan recommended postponing selection by two years as a way of breaking down the class bias in the school system and to contribute to the democratization of the German society. The two grades, five and six, should function as a kind of “orientation phase,” Förderstufe, during which pupils were allowed sufficient time to mature academically before the inevitable selection was carried out. The two grades, however, should not be part of the elementary school, but of the three different secondary schools, in order to create a more integrated phase at the lower secondary level (Hearnden, 1976, 60–66). A decade later, in 1969, a much more influential set of recommendations was submitted by the Bildungsrat, a commission of researchers and administrators, which called for a large-scale experimental programme of integrated comprehensive schools. However, even if these recommendations had been carried out, they would not have transformed the school system significantly. The Commission stated that in transforming the school system, consideration of enhancing equal chances should be made, but not at the expense of leveling academic standards. Since democratization of a school system is likely, at least initially, to dilute academic standards as more students are allowed access, this remark in the plan
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would surely become an obstacle in the movement toward comprehensive education. On the other hand, this plan could become a stepping stone for a more radical proposal later, and the timing for its introduction was propitious, since it was launched a few months before Willy Brandt, together with the Free Democrats, formed the first SPD-led Federal cabinet. Both parties had shown a zest for reform, which appeared in the wake of influential works by educationalists such as George Picht (Die deutsche Bildungskatastrophe, 1964) and Ralf Darhendorf (Bildung ist Buergerrecht, 1968). They had, in 1969, helped to pass a constitutional amendment that allowed the Federal government to share the responsibility for educational policy with the Länder. In his 1969 governmental address, Chancellor Brandt explicitly gave education top priority among reform agendas. Because of the federal and local governments’ shared jurisdiction over education policy, the comprehensive school programme had to be processed through a rather complex set of decision-making institutions. The first obstacle was the Permanent Conference of State Ministers of Education. This body had approved the programme in 1969, but they made an important amendment: The Bildungsrat’s integrated comprehensive school plan should be along the lines of the Scandinavian model rather than the so-called “additive” or “cooperative” approach of the British model. However, the more conservative Land education ministers successfully argued that the “additive” model should also be kept within the experimental programme. But this programme was debilitated from the outset by the fact that no politically powerful Social Democrat was in the Federal ministry to channel and integrate the various vested interests promoted by Social Democrats in Land ministries and the Federal and Land parliaments (Heidenheim, 1974, 398; Robinsohn and Kuhlman, 1967). Subsequently, in 1970, the Federal government made its first contribution to a joint educational planning policy in which the ministry had developed an ambitious and comprehensive Bildungsbericht. In its report, extensive reforms in all educational sectors were proposed, including for, among other things, “an overall internally differentiated system of integrated comprehensive schools, indicating an explicit break with the traditional tripartite school system.” It emphasized that West Germany was lagging behind its neighbors and its goals constituted a “maximum uncompromised programme which succinctly brings together in a single package the most advanced official thinking on the future of education in the FRG” (quoted after Hardenheim, 1974, 398). The most controversial decision was the introduction of a revised Förderstufe, now called Orienterirungstufe (orientation stage). This stage should apply to grades
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five and six and smooth the transfer from the elementary to the secondary school stage. It was designed as a two-year comprehensive stage with a common curriculum for all secondary schools. This was the height of the comprehensive reform movement in Germany, but it soon faltered drastically thereafter as it faced an intense conservative attack. In a Bundestag debate in 1971, Bavarian and other conservative politicians advocated strongly for the rejection of the report. Other decision-making bodies also rallied in opposition. Most important was the Federal-State Commission for Education Planning and the Bund-Länder Kommision, which sought to coordinate the initiatives received from the Bundesrat and the Federal and Land ministries and legislatures. Within this body, the representatives of the CDU-led Länder launched a massive conservative counterattack against the integrated report proposing the comprehensive school. The left-wing SPD politicians, especially those in the Bundestag Education Committee, became timorous in their quest for comprehensive education after facing such forceful opposition. The SPD, as well as the FDP, fought a losing battle during the buildup to the 1972 election. The SPD did not want to emphasize divisive issues in the comprehensive school campaign and toned down its rhetoric. After Brandt had won the election in 1973, he pleaded for a “new start” toward Bund-Länder cooperation, but he did not mention comprehensive schools at all. However, the Bildungsplan (1973), the final reform phase, was issued as an attempt to implement the comprehensive school and was the work of the Bund-Länder Kommission für Bildungsplannung, a joint committee of Federal and Länder governments. By the time the plan was published, it had been considerably diluted, not only because of compromises necessary to accommodate different political groups, but also because the zeal for reform had begun to wane in the face of debilitating disagreements about comprehensive education. The Federal government, in general, and six SPD-oriented Länder, were in favor of implementing a comprehensive school system, but the five other conservative Länder agreed only to do experiments with comprehensive education and were unwilling to implement such a school type. Rather, they opted for the “additive model,” which, in essence, would ensure the survival of the existing tripartite system (Hahn, 1998, 124). What was missing, according to Hardenheim (1974), was for Brandt and powerful cabinet politicians to channel their belief into a self-propelling “rolling” reform process (402). With the decline of Federal leadership, the main initiative returned to the Social Democratic Land education ministers, among whom support for comprehensive schooling had always varied considerably. Only
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in a few Länder, notably Lower Saxony and Hessen, was the movement carried further, but in several CDU Länder the development was halted and only few Gesamtschulen were established. West Germany had about 120 comprehensive schools by the end of 1972—most of them located in SPD Länder—which enrolled about 3 percent of the pupils in grades five through ten. These schools have proven rather controversial, and since 1974 no more of this kind of schools have been established. These figures are comparable to those prevailing during the Swedish “take off period” in 1950. The three plans for the integration of the German tripartite system failed almost completely. The only achievement was the introduction of the Orienteringsstufen, which postponed selection by two years, but the selective secondary education system prevailed. It was the persistent pursuit of Leistung (academic standards) at the expense of creating social equality through common schooling that consigned comprehensive education to oblivion. This was also the case when education again came to the fore in debates during the unification of East and West Germany in 1990. The former Eastern Länder adopted the Western German tripartite system more or less unchanged. The comprehensive polytechnic system of education that was established by the German Democratic Republic after the Second World War was fairly quickly transformed on the basis of the Western system, though some Länder managed to dilute the rigid selection by implementing just a bipartite system (Neather in Lewis and McKenzie, 1998). The meager results of the German education reform movement have been subject to much research. Heidenheimer (1974), for example, suggests that the movement was hampered by the setbacks German education suffered during the Nazi era. More important, he claims, was the incomplete secularization of the educational system, which reflected the lower level of social-cultural and religious homogeneity and retarded the modernization processes of both the elites and the masses. Because most German Länder maintained Catholic and Protestant school types, the vested organized interests attached to these caused far more divisive conflicts than, for example, in Scandinavia. In spite of liberal and socialist opposition to the denominational schools, the issue often became the core of educational discussion in many places in Germany during the 1960s, hampering any possibility of merger of the different school types. It has also been argued by Hahn (1998), among others, that the “non-reform” era is a result of the poor cooperation between SPD Federal and Land ministers and bureaucracies. This created serious obstacles for the German educational reformers in building a common front to advocate reform. He claims that “an examination of the federal nature of education in the FRG suggests that
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its constitutional framework was more of a bane than a blessing, in that it was instrumental in hindering the impetus towards reform and the individual committees charged with coordinating or modernizing the system have been—variously—unsuccessful in the implementation of fundamental reforms” (Hahn, 1998, 117). Moreover, it has been argued that the success of the Realschule in absorbing a new generation of youth from the 1960s onward and leading them to various vocational and professional occupations became an obstacle in integrating the tripartite system into a comprehensive school. As an illustration of the success of the Realschule, 18 percent of the youth cohort were enrolled in such a school by 1969. Caroline Benn and Clyde Chitty (1996) claim that the comprehensive school never took root in West Germany because “popular opposition to the divided system of ‘high road and low road’ did not materialize as it did elsewhere [and] because Germany’s vocational and technical education offered a rigorous and well developed alternative path to advancement” (7). The structural hindrances faced by the Federal government and the Länder and the popularity of the Realschule do, to some extent, explain why the German tripartite system was maintained. However, when seen in contrast to the Scandinavian experience, it is rather the absence of a powerful social democracy that can explain, comparatively, why comprehensive education failed in Germany. Had the Federal government and the majority of Länder been heavily influenced by social democracy, it is not difficult to imagine that the structural problems between the Federal and Land ministries would have been solved and a comprehensive school system introduced. However, the SPD did not hold power for very long and educational reform had less immediate appeal to the working-class sectors to which the SPD most catered. Moreover, the SPD failed to sustain a large, stable electoral support among the middle class. In Germany, argues Heidenheimer (1974), “the lack of elite reorientation caused reform proposals to entail the risk of alienating the very segments of white collar and professional strata which the SPD needed to attract in order to approximate the strong electoral support enjoyed by the Swedish Social Democrats. Under these conditions, reformers in the SPD were held back by the examples of the few innovative Land education ministers, whose political careers were badly set back when the electorate or party members refused to support carrying integration of the school system forward” (396). Educational reforms had already been achieved in Scandinavia in the 1950s, because large voter groups, mobilized not only by the Social Democrats but also by the Agrarian and liberal parties, could ideologically accept arguments favoring reform that the school system should
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be a vehicle for achieving greater social equality. From a comparative perspective, it is the powerful appearance of social democracy in Scandinavia that lead to comprehensive education, and the weakness thereof in Germany that resulted in the maintenance of the three-partite school system.
England England presents a different case, where a comprehensive education system emerged only falteringly and was never fully implemented. The Labor Party was not originally in support of comprehensive education and did not begin to come around to this policy until the late 1950s, when academic selection, and the intelligence tests on which it was based, came under increasing attack. When in the 1960s they did begin to advocate it, their campaign ran into serious impediments from the Conservative Party and Conservative Local Education Authorities, and the Labor government from 1964 only introduced comprehensive education in a gradualistic and voluntarist manner. Until then, Labor had supported the tripartite system. They had also tacitly accepted the private schools, which gave the upper and upper middle classes privileged access to positions of power and influence, rather than pursuing equality of opportunity through an egalitarian school system. The party did support the principle of meritocracy, but this, the party believed, could easily be achieved through selection in which children were transferred to different secondary school systems according to ability. This belief was sufficient to hinder the development of comprehensive education in its initial stage. In the final stages of the war, the British coalition government had introduced far-reaching changes in the education system. For the first time, Butler’s 1944 Education Act introduced free secondary education for all, also proposing that the compulsory school leaving age should be raised. It was not entirely clear how secondary education should be organized, but the Act seemed to legitimize a tripartite structure, comprising grammar, technical, and secondary modern schools. With the change of government in 1945 it fell to Clement Attlee’s postwar Labor government to implement this. Even though a door had arguably been left open by the Act for common secondary education, the Labor government did not take this up and instead set about establishing a selective tripartite system. Selection to secondary education was to be done on the basis of an intelligence test, the Eleven Plus, which psychologists
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such as Cyril Burt believed could measure the given quota of intelligence that each child had inherited from birth and that would remain constant throughout life. Rejecting the idea that intelligence might be shaped by education, a minority of children were thus allocated to the grammar schools on claims of scientific evidence, while the majority were consigned to the secondary modern schools. The technical schools, in contrast to the German Realschule, never became as popular, catering to less than 4 percent of the secondary age group in 1958. During the Labor government, several local authorities submitted plans to introduce comprehensive high schools based on the American model, but the government rejected most of them, arguing that they adversely affected grammar schools (McCulloch, 1998). It was only after Labor left office in 1951, with criticism of selection mounting and public support for comprehensives growing, that the Labor Party abandoned the selective, tripartite education system and eventually adopted a policy of promoting comprehensive education. A public furor was ignited when new research indicated that intelligence testing was fallible. Increasingly the experts argued that intelligence could not be attributed solely to genetics, and certainly was not fixed, since it was also shaped by social and cultural circumstances. IQ tests were therefore a very arbitrary and probably biased way of assessing academic potential. Children could develop intellectually at different rates and testing at the age of eleven could consequently underrate the potential of late developers. This meant that many children might be wrongly assessed through the Eleven Plus, and much talent might be wasted, with potentially capable young people being denied access to an academic secondary education that would lead to university education and professional occupations (Simon, 1978). The tide was turning. The first moves came at the local level. By 1960, the number of pupils being educated in comprehensive schools were less than 5 percent of the secondary school population. However, between 1960 and 1964, one-quarter of all Local Education Authorities made major changes in their selection procedures (Chitty, 2004, 29). So when Harold Wilson’s Labor Party took office in 1964, though only with a small majority, it promised to abolish the Eleven Plus and establish comprehensive education. However, it did not manage to introduce an Act that with one stroke would abolish the old, divided secondary education for good. Instead, under Secretary of State for Education and Science Anthony Crosland, it was decided to issue a circular, the so-called “circular 10/65,” which requested, not required, the Local Education Authorities to submit plans for the reorganization of secondary education along comprehensive lines.
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In a move that echoed the characteristic voluntarism of old liberal traditions, the government issued guidance suggesting not a single model but rather several models of comprehensive reorganization. The favored model was clearly the all-through 11–18 comprehensive school that had already been pioneered in London and elsewhere, but this was by no means pressed on the Local Education Authorities. Consequently, the implementation of comprehensive education followed a very uneven course during the following years due to the variety of reorganization plans that were suggested by the Local Education Authorities and accepted by government. Some Conservative authorities tried to halt the reorganization, especially when it involved grammar schools, while many Labor authorities went straight ahead with radical plans. This made the process appear inconsistent. Even though an increasing number of pupils became enrolled in comprehensive education—up to 70 percent in 1975—the comprehensive education system as such resembled a patchwork of irregular types of organization, including those with integrated 11–18 comprehensive schools, others with middle schools and high schools, and yet others where comprehensive schools coexisted with remaining grammar schools (Benn and Chitty, 1996). The opportunity for the state to harmonize the development of a comprehensive system under central control was apparent when Labor won the election of 1966 with a large majority, but this opportunity was not utilized. No single structure of comprehensive schools was introduced, and no new comprehensive secondary schools curriculum adopted. The development continued at local level but lost its momentum toward the end of 1970s. As Benn and Chitty have pointed out, the movement was hampered by the fact that the government only requested, but did not mandate, comprehensive education, which allowed some authorities to postpone development until 1979, and fifteen of the authorities to retain selective schooling into the 2000s (1996, 29). As Benn and Chitty sum up: “in all its years as government from 1924 to 1979 Labour has never implemented a major education act—nor introduced any major new academic qualifications. All such changes have been implemented under coalition or Conservative governments” (Benn and Chitty, 1996, 9). During the Conservative government of 1970 to 1974, when Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education, comprehensive schooling was no longer a pivotal policy issue in the reorganization of British education. Thatcher’s first action as Secretary of State for Education was to cancel Circular 10/65 and issue 10/70, which left LEAs free to choose whether or not to adopt a comprehensive school system. However, ironically, by the end of her tenure as Education Secretary the number of
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comprehensive schools had doubled and over 60 percent of pupils were enrolled in them. But the retention of grammar schools in some areas meant that only half of the schools were genuinely comprehensive, since in the other cases there were competing grammar schools that creamed off many of the most able pupils. A Labor government was elected in 1974 and, despite economic problems, did adhere to an egalitarian agenda to some extent. The LEAs were now required to reorganize along comprehensive lines. The Education Act of 1976 decreed that admission to secondary schools was to be nonselective. In 1975, the 154 direct grant schools were abolished, but two-thirds of them went private. According to Tomlinson (2005), “the political left had never managed to develop the democratic egalitarian ideals that were inherent in extended secondary education in common schools, an equalizing of opportunities and resources, and progressive education. Instead, as had been observed, the Labour leadership was until the 1960s content with a version of meritocracy which was consistent with selection, and indulged in scapegoating the education service when it became apparent that comprehensive education was neither fulfilling its egalitarian ideals, nor preparing a modern work force” (27). In the 1970s, although there was still a commitment to comprehensive ideals, there were no coherent plans for taking the education of the working class to higher levels, or for dealing with a private sector that sustained division and privilege. During 1979–1988, with a Conservative government in office, numerous education Acts were passed that signalled a break with Labor politics. The new Conservative government passed these Acts in an attempt to return to selection in state schools, to support private education, to introduce market forces into education via parental choice and school diversity, and to reduce the cost of education altogether. As Tomlinson (2005) has pointed out, “the vision underpinning the Acts was that of nineteenth-century liberal individualism, in which ostensibly free consumers embraced the laws of the market and the values of self-interest and personal and familial profit. This vision was supplemented by a traditional conservative appeal to moral authoritarianism and a nostalgic imperialism in which individuals were expected to accept a hierarchical understanding of class, gender and racial position” (32). The movement toward comprehensive schooling was decisively rolled back during the 1980s. Thatcher’s first Education Secretary, Mark Carlisle, declared that comprehensive education was no longer national policy, and various forms of selection and specialization crept in over the decade. During the period of 1988 to 1994, the Conservative government
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increased its activity in education legislation as a part of a longer-term strategy to remake the entire education system along the lines of market ideology. The end of the long run of Conservative governments hardly changed the prospects for comprehensive education. In 1997, the Labor Party won the general election with a landslide, but instead of revitalizing their former education agenda of comprehensive reform, they largely continued the policies established in the era of Thatcherism. Under the rhetoric of “standards, not structures,” they maintained the divided school structures and funding mechanisms of the education market. Prime Minister Tony Blair supported the provision of education as a market commodity driven by consumer demands and parental choice as well as greater teacher accountability and the publication of league tables of test and examination performance. These agendas were carried forward with the Labor government of 2001, but this stressed school diversity even more strongly. New Labor believed that comprehensive education was in need of modernization and that this should be achieved by promotion of diversity between the secondary schools, by the extension of “autonomy” for “successful” schools, and through the private and voluntary sector sponsors playing a greater role in the provision of secondary schooling. Unlike the Scandinavian Social Democrats, Labor had never believed strongly in the comprehensive education principle, either as a means of social mixing leading to greater social cohesion, which was the principle that motivated the Scandinavians, or as a means of enhancing social equality. The Labor Party had never managed to trench the power of the private schools, which represented the greatest barrier to increasing equality among the population, and many in the party remained doubtful about whether comprehensive schools would enhance opportunities for workingclass students. Indeed many in labor circles had clung tenaciously to the grammar schools as a means offering mobility for bright working-class children. When the Labor Party did finally come around to comprehensive reform in the 1960s, it was less due to egalitarian idealism than to the politics of an increasing number of frustrated middle-class parents who resented their children being consigned to what was seen as a second-rate education in secondary modern schools (Lowe, 1997). The implementation of comprehensive reform, when it came, was half-hearted, as we have seen. The vestigial liberal traditions of voluntarism in the Labor Party argued against any sweeping systemic reforms, which would have required bucking long historical traditions of decentralization and “freedom” in education. A Universal approach may have been tolerable for Social Democrats elsewhere, but it was a problem for Labor. In the event, then, Labor failed
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to create an overarching system of comprehensive schools with its own ethos and distinctive curriculum. When New Labor came to power, after years of market-oriented education policies, there was no commitment at all to having a universal school system. On the contrary, New Labor’s own neoliberal agenda argued for increasing diversity and choice, which left no place for the comprehensive principle of common education. Labor certainly had its political chances to create a more egalitarian education system in England. But its ideology lacked the strong social democratic commitment to equality and social cohesion that was needed to bring this about.
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Chapter 7 Conclusion
The previous chapters have tested various historical hypotheses about the factors that may have promoted or retarded the development of educational ladders, and thereafter comprehensive school systems, in five European states. On the basis of these analyses it is possible to put forward a comparative explanation of the uneven development of comprehensive education in Scandinavia, on one hand, and Germany and England, on the other.
State Formation The first hypothesis concerned the impact of the state on the early attempts to integrate various school types into a school system on more egalitarian lines during the nineteenth century. Since the Scandinavian states were amongst the earliest to initiate the process of establishing public elementary and secondary schools in Europe, and were, at the same time, also amongst the first to link these schools together into a ladder system of education, it seems that state involvement in education may have been a decisive factor. State involvement in education was intimately linked to the statebuilding process itself. Countries such as Prussia and France, which were involved in intensive state formation, usually precipitated by social upheavals such as revolution or war, were also the ones where government intervention in education was most pronounced. Scandinavia is no exception to this. The state-building process in Sweden and Denmark-Norway was caused by external pressures from rival countries, often involving military
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defeats. This propelled an intense state-building process in which state institutions, such as the civil service, the military, and education, were developed and expanded. The Scandinavian countries were united in the fifteenth century in the so-called Kalmar Union, but as soon as the union broke apart, wars were fought between Denmark-Norway and Sweden in their quest to establish dominance over the Nordic and Baltic countries. It was the power struggle between these two countries that sparked a long process of state formation in the region. However, the process of state formation followed different paths in Denmark-Norway and Sweden, marked as it was by the effects of different forms of absolutism, and by a different social structure of nobility and peasants in the two countries. Denmark-Norway introduced a long-lasting, stable, and powerful absolutism (1660–1848), which radically curbed the influence of the nobility. However, the nobility was able to maintain a powerful position over the semi-servile peasantry on their landed estates. Sweden also introduced absolutism, but it was weak and short-lived since a system of governance based on the different estates was retained. This allowed the Swedish nobility, unlike its Danish counterpart, to remain powerful in the parliament, military, and civil administration until 1920. In contrast to Denmark, the Swedish aristocracy never constituted a powerful force over the peasantry. The peasantry here was free of feudal ties and was the only such class in Europe represented in parliament. Because of the peasant estate, neither royal absolutism nor noble constitutionalism could claim sole power in Sweden. Both Denmark-Norway and Sweden relied heavily on education to provide qualified civil servants for the growing state bureaucracies. At the outset, the states became particularly involved with higher education and secondary education as well as with technical and vocational schools, but later also intervened in elementary education for the lower classes. Prior to the introduction of absolutism, the states in both countries were involved in various ways in the provision of education, but there was a renewed interest after absolutism had been established, albeit with a time lag. Sweden had established absolutism at an earlier point than Denmark, and a number of education initiatives were taken that had no parallel in Denmark at the same point in time. However, both countries during absolutism laid the foundation of a national system of education that was expanded and consolidated during the early nineteenth century. This expansion gained momentum in the wake of the Napoleonic wars in which both DenmarkNorway and Sweden were involved. Defeat against Napoleon in 1814 was not the main cause of the development of mass education in Denmark, but it provided impetus to it. As part
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of the agricultural reform movement, which aimed at turning farming into a modern liberal business, a school commission was established in 1789 to propose a national plan for education. The work of the Commission eventually resulted in the School Act of 1814, which made schooling compulsory for all regardless of social class. The war had negative impacts on economic growth, causing rising inflation, bankruptcy, and the destruction of the overseas trade for years. The School Act was implemented as a means of national revitalization. In Norway, military defeat did not immediately propel a move toward national schooling either. It was not until 1827 that an Act was passed mandating compulsory education for all. Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon had caused an acute national trauma that led to the rapid development of mass education, but in Norway the defeat was not so humiliating, and the educational reaction was not so rapid. Norwegian social conditions were relatively stable and thus the development of mass schooling took a slower pace. In Sweden the crisis brought about by the war was more acute, and numerous proposals for a state-controlled, universal system came to the fore quite rapidly and resulted in extensive legislation. However, because of resistance from conservative factions, it was not until 1842 that compulsory schooling was instituted. In each of the Scandinavian countries, state action led to the consolidation of national systems of elementary and secondary schools during the first half of nineteenth century. During the remainder of the century, legislation was introduced that sought continuously to improve the system. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, over half of the secondary schools had been subsumed by the state. The rest of the schools were not completely independent, as they came under the aegis of state legislation and were provided with public financial support. By this time most of the elementary schools were also public, as private schools, mainly located in the cities, had been gradually phased out. Through the promulgation of education laws, the state had enhanced the quality of the public schools to such an extent that they were able to compete with private schools. Had the elementary schools not been improved through systematic state intervention, the effort of making them the foundation of a system of education upon which secondary education could be built would presumably have encountered more serious obstacles than was the case. And had the secondary schools remained primarily private institutions, they would probably have been able to muster sufficient resistance to avoid becoming attached to the public elementary school. But since the public elementary schools were relatively good and the secondary schools were in the public sector, it became relatively easy to link them together by the means of a middle school.
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The English experience gives added weight to this argument about the importance of state control in education as a precondition for the development of educational ladders. In England, a state education system was not built before the end of the nineteenth century due to the liberal aversion toward state control. Instead, a voluntary system prevailed for most of the century, which was characterized by a great diversity of schools controlled by bodies such as Anglican Church’s National School Society and the British and Foreign Schools Society that was allied to the nonconformist churches. The foundation for a state education system was not laid until 1870, and even then only in the form of a compromise with the old voluntary tradition. It was not until 1902 that a state secondary school system was established. National education developed slowly in England because of the lack of any intensive pressures for state formation during this period, and also because of the dominant laissez-faire liberal ideology that militated against it. The British liberal state was the outcome of a uniquely precocious process of nation-building that was sufficiently complete by the late eighteenth century to allow industrialization to occur from the bottom up, and without the concerted orchestration of an inflated state apparatus. British state formation had been aided by the country’s insular geography that had largely kept out foreign invaders and promoted territorial integrity, and from which flowed their maritime strength and colonial trade, which provided the basis for its early capitalist growth and consequent industrial supremacy. By the nineteenth century Britain no longer needed the kind of intensive process of state formation, without which many continental powers were unable to industrialize. A relatively compact and efficient state administration, operating under the sign of a liberal regime, was sufficient for this leading industrializing nation to progress further. Lacking the need for intensive state formation, Britain also lacked the incentive for the development of a state education system. The negative case of England, compared with the positive Scandinavian cases, would seem to suggest that an intensive process of state formation, and consequent precociousness in state intervention, was in some sense a condition of the educational reforms that would establish ladders of educational opportunity. However, the case of Prussia demonstrated that this factor was in no way a sufficient cause of the outcome we are investigating. Over several centuries, the Prussian state was deeply engaged in building an education system, but it never achieved the same level of vertical integration in its educational system as the Scandinavian states. The first moves toward creating a national education system in Prussia had occurred during the late absolutist period, and reached a crescendo after the conclusion of the Napoleonic war. Prussia launched an intensive programme
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of educational reform after the end of the French occupation in order to revitalize national pride, which had been so damaged by the humiliating defeat to Napoleon’s armies at Jena in 1806. By the 1830s there was a full national system of education in public elementary and secondary schools. Schools were mostly public institutions, controlled by a complete state educational bureaucracy and financed largely through the state. By then, private schools were already numerically inferior. Prussia had the same, or perhaps even better, preconditions than Scandinavia for creating a ladder system of education. Yet this did not happen. Rather, a divided system was maintained. Hence, state involvement in education can only be seen as a necessary factor and not as a sufficient causal condition.
Class Structure The second hypothesis concerned the nature of the class structure and the proposition that the relative homogeneity of Scandinavian societies was propitious for the development of a ladder system of education. Societies consisting mainly of dispersed rural peasant populations, with only small and relatively weak bourgeois and noble classes, lacked the sharp social cleavages and sheer dominance of elite power that sustained the classdivided education systems such as existed in England. What singles out Scandinavia from the rest of Europe is that here the peasantry, the backbone of the social class structure, already constituted a socially and economically independent class by the first part of the nineteenth century, and their peasantry subsequently acquired such political power that it could play the role assumed elsewhere by the bourgeoisie. We can see a similar process, with small variations, across each of the Scandinavian countries. In Denmark, the peasant class had begun to come into its own after the 1780s, but only after a protracted struggle over feudal rights and obligations. After the introduction of absolutism in Denmark, the monarchs had diminished the influence of the nobility through the leveling of their economic, legal, and political privileges. However, the nobility’s power as landowners had been strengthened through the right to exact dues and services from the peasantry. A bond of conscription was enforced in 1733, which weakened the social and legal position of the peasantry considerably. It was not until the great agricultural reforms in the 1780s, in which conscription was abolished (1788), and peasants gained the right to acquire their own arable land, that the peasantry, freed from their feudal ties, could coalesce into an independent rural middle class. By around
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1835 they owned more than half of the total land. The reforms had, in other words, an immense effect on the rural class structure as they raised the peasantry to a level—socially, economically, and politically—that far surpassed that of their counterparts on the continent. Norwegian society, in contrast to Denmark and Sweden, was unusually cohesive. The near total absence of nobility here virtually assured that a manorial system of agricultural production could not be formed. Moreover, the exploitation of the peasants was minimal even under middle-class rural landowners. Land was transferred to the peasantry at a much earlier time than in Denmark—in 1816 peasants already owned half of the total land. In Sweden the nobility had achieved a unique social position with significant privileges, but their superior social and political status was not mirrored economically, since they only owned a small fraction of the land. This preempted the possibility of developing large estates like those east of the Elbe, where the peasants were severely exploited. Conscription was never introduced in Sweden, not even in the mild form that existed in Denmark between 1733 and 1788. Since feudal ties did not have to be abolished first, the peasants could acquire land much earlier than their counterparts in Denmark, as a result the peasantry more quickly consolidated into a rural middle class. However, as in Denmark, it was not until around the mid-nineteenth century that more than half of the land was owned by the peasantry. In both Norway and Sweden, in contrast to Denmark, a large landless peasantry emerged, which was either absorbed into the new industries or emigrated to the United States. The large-scale emigration substantially alleviated the problem of rural poverty and eased the difficulty of transforming the peasants into a distinct new class. The strength and impact of the Scandinavian peasantry were due to the high level of solidarity and cohesion they were able to maintain, precisely because their material circumstances and lifestyles were so similar. This gave them a powerful sense of equality in their villages. Thus they had the necessary basis to continue to act collectively, and were able to pull together when the open field system vanished in the wake of agrarian reforms at the end of the eighteenth century. This was all in sharp contrast to the situation in Germany, where the large landowners—the Junkers—were able to maintain their power with little resistance from the peasants who were bound under tight feudal ties that prevented them from emerging as an independent class until very late in the nineteenth century. Whereas the Danish nobility, as a distinct class with political power, finally met their demise after the abolition of absolutism in 1848, the Junkers remained powerful, in spite of the 1848 revolution, throughout nineteenth century. Absolutism was not able to
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unravel the domination of the Junkers; rather the state granted them a preferential position in the state bureaucracy and military, as well as guaranteed their monopoly over estate ownership and allowed them expanded rights of conscription over their peasants. Conscription, which had been enforced in Germany since the Middle Ages, was abolished through agricultural reform, but at a later time than in Denmark and with significantly different consequences. Instead of supporting the peasants in acquiring the land that would have made them materially independent, the state allowed nonviable farms—both small and medium sized—to be absorbed into large estates, which consequently were cultivated by an increasingly property-less rural proletariat. The social cohesion of the peasantry began to weaken, as a widening chasm developed between the wealthier peasants, who were able to survive the reform, and those who were absorbed into the rural proletariat. This was is in stark contrast to the developments in Denmark, where the tenure system made cultivation by peasant families both feasible and profitable. The consequence of the German situation was that peasant ownership of land diminished and a large, landless, agricultural proletariat was formed. This prevented any steps the peasantry could have taken toward organizing their own political party, consequently, when they were enfranchised the peasantry supported parties in which the Junkers played a prominent role. In England also the aristocracy and large landowners were able to retain immense resources and influence, so that by the mid-Victorian period, from 1850 to 1868, they represented the greatest large landowner class in Europe. The aristocracy and landed gentry together dominated in both the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and formed the majority in the Cabinet throughout the century. The material wealth supporting the political power of the aristocracy was vast, based on enormous land ownership, substantial interests in mining and canals, and investments in urban property, and the aristocracy maintained close ties to the urban business elite. In contrast to the Junkers, the English ruling class was not solely “agrarians” but were just as much business entrepreneurs as they were landowners. The lower class in Britain did not consist mainly of the peasantry, as was the case on the Continent and Scandinavia, since the peasantry had long before been converted into landless rural laborers by the enclosure movement; instead, by the mid-nineteenth century, Britain had the largest wage-earning working class in Europe, with a predominant proportion of them working in manufacturing and living in towns. By 1881, for example, only around 10 percent of the working population was in agriculture. One of the assumptions investigated here has been whether the relative absence of strong class cleavages in Scandinavia, by comparison with the situation in Germany and England, was a contributory factor in the
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development of school systems with higher levels of integration in the Scandinavian countries than in the latter two countries. The assumption was investigated in terms of social recruitment in the secondary school. If the relatively homogenous class structure in Scandinavia was expressed in the nature of social recruitment to education, with, for instance, the public elementary school increasingly enrolling children from the bourgeoisie and the secondary school gradually admitting children from the peasantry, then this could be seen as a causal factor in enabling the creation of a ladder system of education. As demonstrated, the bourgeoisie, not surprisingly, did dominate the secondary school, but the children from the peasantry were also present in substantial numbers. In addition, by the end of the nineteenth century, the lower class-dominated state elementary school, which was able to compete with the private schools, enrolled the majority of children, including those from the bourgeoisie. Seen in contrast to England, where elite grammar schools only enrolled around 1 percent of the children of the working class, and which had their own private preparatory schools feeding into them, it seems even more plausible that the relatively egalitarian Scandinavian class structure was a vital condition for the development of an egalitarian education system. However, Prussia again poses a challenge, as the children of the peasantry here were, surprisingly, almost as well-represented in the secondary school as in Scandinavia. However, in contrast to Scandinavia, the elementary school was not able to become a recruitment base for the Gymnasium, as public and private preparatory schools feeding into the Gymnasium were not abolished until late in the twentieth century interwar period. The difference between the levels of representation of children of the peasantry in the secondary schools in Scandinavia and Germany was not large enough to claim that the Scandinavian case, in this respect, represented a unique situation. Hence, it is only possible to conclude that the relatively egalitarian class structure in Scandinavia was a contributory factor in the development of the ladder system of education, but is not a sufficient condition in itself.
Liberalism Another unique circumstance that the Scandinavian countries had in common was that the liberal parties stood behind the introduction of the middle school, which created the ladder system of education. The Scandinavian liberal parties were formed during the 1860s and the 1880s and achieved governmental power after the introduction of parliamentary sovereignty by the turn of the twentieth century. Having the mass support
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of the peasantry, comprising the overwhelming majority of the population, they were able to crush the Right almost completely, and since then the Right was never able to regain the power it once had. However, it would be wrong to argue that liberalism was particularly powerful in Scandinavia, let alone by comparison with liberalism in Britain. On the contrary, the liberal parties in Scandinavia were often quite weak electorally. However, their brand of social liberalism differed fundamentally from the laissezfaire liberalism of the Liberal Party in mid-Victorian Britain, and it was certainly ideologically more conducive to integrationalist education reform than was the British variety. The liberal parties were able to gain their strongest foothold in Denmark and were weakest in Norway and, especially, in Sweden, where the party had hardly any significance during the late nineteenth century and was soon bypassed by the Social Democrats. The reason liberalism as a political movement was weaker in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark was mainly because the Norwegian and Swedish Liberal movement was marked by stronger conflicts—especially between urban and rural interests—than in Denmark, which made it very difficult for Liberals in those countries to function as a united political force. By contrast, the Danish liberal movement was based on a rather homogenous mass of the rural middle class that made it possible to sustain a stronger political influence. The explanation of the successful introduction of the ladder system of education in Scandinavia therefore does not depend mainly on the strength of liberalism as an electoral force, but rather on the nature of its class base and on the character of its particular ideology, both of which differed significantly from liberalism elsewhere. The liberal parties were not defined by the urban middle class as they tended to be in other countries, but almost entirely by the peasantry. Unlike the abjectly subordinated peasantry in Germany, which usually acted politically as a conservative and reactionary force, the independent small and medium farmer class in Scandinavia sought above all to reject the dominance of the urban bourgeoisie and to improve its own social, cultural, and political standing. In respect to education, the farmers argued against the elitist system of the bourgeoisie in order to induce democratic measures that would enhance “social mixing” and social solidarity in society. They strove to break down the parallel system of education, and the middle school was to be the means to achieve this end. The urban bourgeoisie had, in fact, much more in common with the continental Liberals than the peasant Liberals, who were more shaped by social-liberal values. The middle school was introduced at different times in the different Scandinavian states: first in Norway in 1869, then in Denmark in 1903,
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and finally in Sweden two years later in 1905. The rural-urban conflict that to a large extent determined the level of liberal power was also expressed in education politics, and this can ultimately explain the time difference in the introduction of the ladder system of education. Liberalism in Norway was torn apart by debilitating rural-urban conflicts, and it may therefore seem strange that the middle school was introduced here so much earlier than in Denmark and Sweden. In fact, educational development was impeded when school issues became increasingly embroiled in these conflicts, which deepened toward the end of the century. However, the middle school was largely unaffected as it was introduced in the 1860s by the agrarians—later the Liberal Party, and the largest and most powerful group in parliament—well prior to the time when these conflicts gained momentum. In Denmark, the middle school might have been introduced in 1876, when the Liberal Party had sufficient electoral power to do it, but the reform became caught up in the urban-rural conflict, which delayed its introduction. The urban-rural divide within the party was simply too deep to allow any consensus to be reached. The rural contingent in the party was much more influenced than its Norwegian counterpart by the national romantic ideology. This proclaimed that the different school types, expressing different academic traditions, should not be linked together until the entire system was imbued by Danish culture, the mother tongue, and national history. This brought them into contention with the urban wing, which was eager to organize the school system on the basis of social concerns rather than cultural identities. The entire issue was resolved in 1903 when the national romantics lost ground to the more socially inclined rural members and urban radicals. The middle school was introduced last in Sweden, where the Liberal Party was weaker and more short-lived than in Denmark and Norway. Only at the peak of its power was it successful in using the middle school to break down the parallel system of education, and then too only partially. The incapacitating urban-rural divide was evident within the party, but the most destructive rural-urban conflicts were those between the rural Liberals, concentrated in the Second Chamber, and the urban state bureaucrats and large landowners who dominated the First Chamber. For most of the last half of the nineteenth century, the First Chamber succeeded in defeating almost all bills put forward for approval by the Second Chamber Liberals. It was only when the representation of the urban state bureaucrats and large landowners in the First Chamber was in decline that the Second Chamber Liberals were able to gain the necessary power to introduce the middle school.
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In Germany political liberalism failed almost completely. This may to a large extent explain why vertical integration was not obtained in the German education system. Whereas the Scandinavian parties, especially the Danish Liberal Party, were able to gain mass support from the peasants, the German Liberals only managed to garner support from the urban, protestant middle class. In the quest for mass support, the party did try to forge alliances with the peasantry, but without success. The peasants chose to support the Conservatives who were more adept at implementing a political programme of agrarian capitalism. Unable and unwilling to construct their own political platform, the German peasants retreated behind the political leadership of the Junkers. This alliance blocked any potential movement of the peasantry toward the political left. After unification in 1871, the German Liberals faced severe problems in creating a mass electoral base. With universal suffrage already in place, the lack of political support from massed ranks of the rural peasantry inevitably posed a serious problem. The essential dilemma for the Liberals had arisen from the old religious conflicts between Catholics and anticlerical Protestants, which was now enhanced by the inclusion of the Catholic Länder in the South into the newly unified Germany. The 1870s and 1880s saw a great surge in support for the Catholics who, in 1871, established their own party. The Catholic Party’s vote had devastating consequences for the Liberals, who received support almost exclusively from the Protestant middle class. At the critical time when German politics entered a period of mass mobilization, they were unable to expand their electoral base. The deepening of religious conflicts and the formation of the Catholic Center Party contributed to the durability of the authoritarian regime and the continuing inability of the Liberals to gain a firm political foothold. The inherent weakness of liberalism no doubt had its effects on educational reform in Germany. It may have undermined the possibilities for progressive reform, although it remains an open question as to what extent the Liberal Party would have pursued more egalitarian reforms even if it had the necessary political power. In any event, it is certain that the absence of political liberalism allowed conservative politics to dominate. The Conservative Party and the Catholic Party dominated politics throughout the last part of the nineteenth century and, supported by the reactionary Bildungsbürgertum, were able to act as an ultraconservative bulwark against any democratic reform of education. Hence, the Gymnasium was kept apart from other forms of secondary education and maintained as a bastion of the educated elite.
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The English case appears to represent something of a challenge for this argument as political liberalism here was immensely powerful and yet the divided school system was not only maintained but even strengthened. The explanation lies in the different class base and ideological temper of British liberalism. Liberalism has its roots in the freedoms and civic rights that were the legacy of the 1688 settlement in Britain and which gained in strength during the eighteenth century, not least with Adam Smith’s espousal of the free market and liberal political economy. Initially the political standard of the Whig aristocracy, and their allies amongst the landed gentry and the merchant and financial interests, liberalism by the mid-nineteenth century had become a bourgeois political creed, par excellence, supported by the manufacturers and the majority of the middle classes, as well as by substantial sections of the landed class that were won over to free trade in the 1840s. The liberal political economy, which dominated the policies of governments through the mid-century, supported free trade, free markets, and civic freedoms, and regarded the state as a necessary evil whose powers should be confined as far as possible to the protection of private property and the state and the maintenance of law and order. Aside from the rather small groups of Benthamite radicals and utilitarians, who argued for interventionist reforms, the vast majority of Liberals stood by the principles of laissez-faire and wished to see as little increase in state interference and taxes as possible. Their aversion to state intervention usually also extended to education. Unlike their Scandinavian counterparts, who had their mass base amongst the rural farmers, British Liberals had no peasant base to draw on, and until the 1870s remained a party of the bourgeoisie, the progressive landowners whose interests were allied to their interests and those of the middle class who had been enfranchised by 1832 Reform Act. Their representatives in Parliament were mostly landowners (deeply connected to industry through canals, mining, and city interests) and big industrialists. Together, these ruled on behalf of the middle class, for whom the interests of manufacturing had trumped those of agriculture. It was not until the incremental extension of the franchise to sections of the skilled working class in the decades after 1867 that popular political demands began to make a major impact on electoral politics. It was with the skilled industrial working class that the Liberals made their alliances, not, as in Scandinavia, with the rural farmers. After the defeat of Chartism in the mid-1840s, when bourgeoisie liberal ideology was triumphant, British liberalism had little to fear from popular radicalism. It was only after 1870, with the extended franchise and the radicalization of sections of the skilled working class, that they were forced to entertain more radical social reform, which deviated from the laissez-faire
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principles of political economy. In terms of education, this entailed a gradual shift away from the pure laissez-faire liberal principles of voluntarism, and a recognition that the state had to play a larger role in education. Hence the Foster Act was adopted in 1870, which initiated a partial framework of state elementary schools under the local school boards. However, Liberals were still not so advanced in their ideas about reform as to entertain the abolition of the old class-based, divided education system. On the contrary, Liberals still thought education should be organized according to the needs of the different classes, with working-class children making do with only an elementary education, although gradually some school boards allowed this to be extended in years through the creation of the so-called “higher tops” to the elementary school. When the idea took root that secondary education might also be made available for the working class, it was only to be for a very few—for the most able children who were able to gain scholarships to go to the new state grammar schools created after the 1902 Act. The parallel system still remained essentially intact. Grammar schools were not systematically connected to the system of public elementary schools and there was still no integrated educational ladder. The English case clearly shows that it was not solely the strength of liberalism per se that determined progress toward democratization in education. Equally important was the particular form of liberal politics that dominated. Laissez-faire liberalism in British politics did not promote educational integration in England, in fact it did quite the opposite. On the other hand, the Scandinavian form of social liberalism was certainly a factor in the progress toward educational democratization in the Scandinavian states. In these states, progress did vary partly in accordance with the electoral strength of the liberal parties. The relatively greater electoral power of liberalism in these countries made democratic reform more achievable than in Germany, where liberalism was weak. But it was the ideological caste of their liberalism, based on particular social foundations, that best explains their differential development with respect to England. The importance of the ideological differences between Scandinavian social liberalism and British laissez-faire liberalism becomes clearer as we examine the effects of their successor ideologies, social democracy in Scandinavia and Laborism in Britain, in the next sections.
Social Democracy The final realization of comprehensive education in Scandinavia, involving the abolition of the middle school to make way for a seven-year—and
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later nine-year—comprehensive school system, was the work of social democracy. Political mobilization of the social democratic parties was highly successful in all the Scandinavian countries during the interwar period. Scandinavian societies were still predominantly agricultural well into 1950s, and an important reason for the success of the social democratic parties was their ability to weld alliances with the rural liberal parties, which allowed them to gain a political foothold in those areas. Had the parties relied only on support from the emerging working class, they would not have been able to obtain the mass support necessary for power. This alliance with the rural Liberals, more than anything else, can explain the successful mobilization of the Social Democrats. It was possible because the peasants, whose political mobilization had come early, were steeped in social-liberal values, and because the Social Democrats rejected radical socialism in favor of pursuing pragmatically political aims within the framework of democracy. In terms of education, the fundamental political beliefs of the parties were not so far apart as to render cooperation impossible. Consensus-seeking politics led to coalitions that were as broadly based across the Left and the Right as possible. It is very hard to find a piece of legislation during this period that was not a product of this unique political tradition of inclusive agreements. The Liberals, though, were no longer the major driving force behind comprehensive education; the Social Democrats took over and added more radical beliefs to the Liberals’ original ideas about educational democratization. In Norway, the Social Democratic Party came to power in 1933. Even though the party went through some turbulent years—it was a member of the Comintern for a few years—it had almost nothing to fear from the Right being allied, as it was, with the Liberals. The Social Democrats decided in 1920, on the basis of a broad political consensus, that the middle schools could only receive state financial support if they enrolled pupils who had completed primary schooling in a seven-year comprehensive school. In effect, in order to make room for the new extended comprehensive school, the middle school was reduced to two years. In 1936 the last remnant of the middle school was finally abolished. It was also during the interwar period in Sweden that the Social Democratic Party became the largest single party. However, it was an unstable time politically, because a durable government could not be formed either by a single party or a coalition of parties. The Social Democratic and Liberal Coalition that was formed in 1917 had difficulties introducing an extended comprehensive school. The Swedish Social Democrats were not as well supported by the Liberals as their counterparts in Norway. In 1927, the Social Democrats and what was now the two liberal parties,
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the so-called Frisinnade and the Bondeförbundare, came to a compromise, called the “double attachment.” It required, on one hand, a six-year comprehensive school followed by a four-year middle school (mostly in small towns) and, on the other, a four-year comprehensive school followed by a five-year middle school (mostly in the cities). This compromise upheld the parallel system that the Social Democrats tried to demolish. However, the parallel system was gradually broken down anyway especially due to the abolishment of state financial support to the private preparatory schools of the middle schools. In Denmark, the Social Democratic Party did not enjoy a similar high level of power as the Norwegian and Swedish Social Democrats, therefore it had to cooperate to a larger extent with other parties, and mainly the Liberals. In spite of the rising power of the Social Democrats during the interwar period, it is a rather surprising fact that the middle school was not, as in Norway and Sweden, abolished in order to create a seven-year comprehensive school. Instead, a new type of middle school was established in 1937 in parallel to the old middle school of 1903. The middle schools were finally abolished in 1958, paving the way for a seven-year comprehensive school, as in Norway and Sweden. These developments were in stark contrast to those in Britain and Germany, where social democracy either had no party to represent it, as in Britain, or had a major party, as in Germany, but one that did not control government during this period. At one time, it seemed probable that the German SPD, with the backing of the working class, might dominate the electoral landscape of the great European industrial power. However, the party faced massive internal and external obstacles that nearly caused it to disintegrate. The political mobilization of the SPD during the late nineteenth century was severely hampered by Bismarck’s suppression of socialists through the “Socialist Laws.” However, during the 1880s, after the ban had been lifted, the party was able to organize into quite a powerful force. It was not, however, able to sustain this power, as it had adopted a radical, Marxist revolutionary programme that thwarted alliance building with groups other than the working class. During the interwar period, the party expressed strong antipathy toward welding alliances in general and with the farmers in particular. This drastically reduced the party’s ability to exert major influence on politics. Nor did it help that the agrarian interest groups, such as the Bund der Landwirte, were communicating strong antilabor and antisocialist messages to the rural population, which dampened the farmers’ interest in an alliance with labor. Hence, the SPD failed to form a government, although it did become part of the Weimar Coalition that led several short-lived interwar cabinets. In spite
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of opposition from coalition parties, the Catholic Center Party, and the Liberals, the SDP did initiate in 1920 a reform of the school system. This required that public as well as private preparatory schools for the secondary school be abolished in order to make the four-year elementary school the foundation of the secondary school system. Achievement of this goal was protracted as the preparatory schools fought for their existence and could only be gradually phased out. The broad coalition government may have been sufficiently strong to carry out further reforms on education, but the coalition parties’ education policies were so far removed from each other that it was almost impossible to make compromises. Hence, the divided secondary education system remained unaltered throughout the interwar period. In Britain, popular mobilization started first through the Liberal Party, and consequently an independent party of the labor was established comparatively late. The Labor Party, when it was formed, was never the type of Social Democratic Party found on the Continent and in Scandinavia, as it was deeply rooted in the trade union movement and saw itself more as an heir to liberalism rather than to socialism. Whereas the SPD was sweepingly radical and Marxist, Labor was pragmatic rather than ideological, and limited, even conservative at times, in its aims. Any understanding of the weakness of the British labor movement must be grounded in an analysis of the politics of Britain’s particular brand of trade unionism, with its often factious splits between the unions of the craftsmen and general workers. Before the turn of the century, the unions, such as the ILP, consistently sought to obstruct, isolate, and enfeeble independent movements that attempted to define politics mainly in terms of class and class alliances rather than in sectional and union interest. In this the unions were successful and, as it turned out, their success defined the character of British working-class politics. British politics never endorsed a socialistic programme, not even in its pragmatic form as seen in Scandinavia. The political vision the Labor Party was cautious, influenced strongly by Christian notions of justice and the ethical society, as well as Fabian reformism, but decidedly lukewarm, for most of the time, toward more ideological brands of socialism. The power that the Labor Party accumulated in the interwar period was, therefore, not used to carry out reforms in education that would create even a moderately comprehensive school system. Instead, Britain retained parallel education systems in the state sector, as well as a separate system of private independent schools. State-funded secondary schools had been created by the 1902 Balfour Act and middle-class access to these was often gained through the separate system of private preparatory schools. Only a very small number of children from working-class families could
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climb the ladder into the secondary school by transferring, at eleven years of age, from the elementary school into the grammar school with the aid of a scholarship. The system was designed so that this was the exception rather than the rule, and so the educational ladder for the working class was largely kept separate from that of the middle class. The working-class ladder was still largely limited to the elementary school where children typically finished their schooling at fourteen, and the 1902 Act capped these schools so that they could not educate children beyond fifteen years, thus effectively barring most from anything that might be properly termed secondary schooling. The creation of a Scandinavian-style seven-year comprehensive school system in Britain would have required that primary level education in Britain first become unified. This would have meant abolishing the private preparatory schools in order to allow the elementary schools to become the chief precursor to secondary education. This was not even a remote possibility at the time. The 1918 Fisher Act, which officially included a component of “secondary education for all,” did make education compulsory to fourteen years of age, but for the majority of children this was no more than extended elementary education in the elementary school. The reality was that working-class children received elementary schooling while secondary schooling was reserved primarily for the middle classes in the Grammar and Public schools, largely accessed through a separate system of private Primary schools. Despite the commitment of leading figures such as R. H. Tawney to secondary education for all, the Labor Party did not seriously seek to change the status quo at this time. The party’s ambitions did not go far beyond the existing system, which offered secondary education only to academically able children from the working class through a scholarship scheme. After the Second World War, social democratic parties remained dominant in Scandinavia and were much more powerful than their counterparts in England and Germany. The power of the social democratic parties was still largely made possible by their alliance with the Liberals. It was this renewed alliance with the farmers more than anything else that gave the Scandinavian social democracy a degree of power unmatched elsewhere. This accrued social democratic power permitted the development of a welfare regime in which full employment policies and social reforms flourished as well as major education reforms, which eventually resulted in the radical comprehensive school system we know today. Moreover, when the worker-farmer alliance had begun to wane as a result of a decline in the population of farmers, the social democratic parties maintained their power because they were successful in forging a new alliance with the merging white-collar middle class. The Scandinavian Social Democratic
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parties differed in their capacity to forge this new wage-earner alliance. The Norwegian party and especially the Swedish party were more successful than their Danish counterparts, for whom alliances with the Liberals continued to play a more central role. The social democratic parties in Norway and Sweden were much more independent of the support from liberal parties and were therefore able to pass their own major reforms during the 1940s and 1950s. The Norwegian Social Democratic Party remained unusually powerful from the 1940s until the early 1960s, when its total monopoly on government was brought to an end. Enjoying absolute parliamentary majorities for almost twenty years, the party was spared the necessity of constant compromise with the bourgeois bloc. Yet, a remarkable feature of Norwegian postwar politics was the extent to which the bourgeois parties embraced social democratic policies and programmes. The Swedish Social Democratic Party entered the postwar period with political strength similar to its Norwegian counterpart. However, unlike the latter, it was unable to maintain a majority government and, during the period 1953–1957, was forced to reestablish an alliance with the Liberal Party, Bondeförbundet, to stay in power. It had to moderate its ideology and programmes in order to make the alliance work, but collaboration with the Liberals did bring about educational reforms. The Danish Social Democratic Party was even more dependent on coalitions, as both the Liberal Party and the Radical Liberals retained their relatively strong political positions in Danish politics. As a consequence, the Social Democratic Party could not maintain the electoral strength it once had in the interwar period and was only able to govern in minority or coalition governments. So the Scandinavian countries did vary somewhat in the independent strength of their social democratic parties, but, nevertheless, social democracy still dominated. Conservative parties continued to be weak and could not play any important role in the politics of education. The different levels of social democratic power can explain the differences in timing in the consolidation of comprehensive education in Scandinavia. Sweden and Norway introduced the nine-year comprehensive school first, in 1962 and 1969, respectively. Denmark did so considerably later, in 1975. This was due to the reluctance of the still powerful Danish Liberal Party to support Social Democratic school policy fully. It took time before a compromise could be reached that would finally usher in the nine-year comprehensive school. Subsequently, during the period 1980–1993, the development was geared toward abolishing the remnants of setting and streaming in favor of mixed-ability classes.
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This history is in vivid contrast to what happened in Germany and England. In Germany, the SPD did not emerge from the war as a new, ideologically reformed party, but was still rooted in the traditional version of Marxist ideology and, as a matter of course, failed to sustain large, stable electoral support among the middle class. In contrast, the Conservative Party, the CDU, was able to break with the past and became a broad-based, non-confessional, popular party of the Center-Right, intent upon ensuring individual rights in a social-market economy. As such, they attracted immense middle-class support and were able to become a potent party in German politics. It was not until the appearance of Willy Brandt that the SPD embarked on a renewal of the party’s ideology, ultimately resulting in the SPD-led governments of the 1960s and 1970s. However, the success of revisionism did not guarantee that the party would continue to stay in government. Since then, with the exception of the Schröder’s government in the 1990s, politics in Germany has been dominated mainly by the Conservatives. The absence of a powerful social democracy in Germany, at both the Federal and Länder levels, provides the key to understanding why the tripartite system was never reorganized on comprehensive lines. During the height of social democratic power, plans were indeed launched to integrate the three different secondary schools into a single common school. However, because of intense conservative resistance, these efforts failed completely. The only achievements were the introduction of the “orientation stage,” which postponed selection by two years, and the creation the nonselective Gesamtschule in some, mainly Social Democrat, Länder. However, the latter were additional schools, merely added on to the three existing secondary schools, and consequently never formed part of a comprehensive system. The selective secondary tripartite system prevails to this day in Germany. Postwar Britain has tended to favor Conservative governments, just as in Germany, but the Labor Party had more time in office than the SDP, forming the government for a substantial twenty-seven out of the sixty-three years from 1945 to 2008. Attlee’s first postwar Labor government brought radical social reform, but in the long run the Labor Party failed to achieve a sustained social democratic dominance in postwar politics along Scandinavian lines. The party never quite succeeded in consolidating the cross-class alliances, or in comprehensively annexing the middle class, in the way that had given social democracy its power in Scandinavia. This lack of a durable ideological dominance would certainly have held back what they could have achieved in educational reform. But it is debatable, in any case, how far the Labor leadership was ever committed to radical school reform along comprehensive
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lines. Unlike the Scandinavian Social Democrats, the British Labor was always equivocal about egalitarianism in education, comfortable enough with vague notions of equality of opportunity, so long as they weren’t seen to conflict with “excellence,” but often resistant to radical measures that would actually equalize educational outcomes, as occurred in Scandinavia. Nor was the Labor leadership ever particularly committed to the vision, which animated Scandinavian Social Democrats, of comprehensive education as a vehicle for social mixing and for the promotion of social cohesion. The Labor Party had never, for instance, managed to trench the power of the private schools, the greatest barrier to the creation of a genuine comprehensive school system. When the Labor Party leadership did finally come around to comprehensive reform in the 1960s, they were probably motivated less by any egalitarian idealism than by political pragmatism. Political pressure had mounted from increasingly frustrated middle-class parents who resented their children’s consignment to what was seen as a second-rate education in secondary modern schools. Harold Wilson’s vision was for grammar schools for all, but there was little sense that the comprehensive type of school was actually what inspired the Prime Minister or his Cabinet. The implementation of comprehensive reform, when it came, was therefore half-hearted and partial, and Labor never quite managed to finish the job before the Conservatives returned to power with Margaret Thatcher’s new neoliberal agenda. The educational reforms that followed were directed toward increasing choice and diversity in the market, which were substantially at odds with the comprehensive ideal. When New Labor came to power, there was no commitment at all to reverse the effects of years of market-oriented education policies. On the contrary, New Labor continued where the Conservatives had left off, arguing for increasing diversity and choice and excluding the philosophy of comprehensive education altogether. Labor certainly had better political chances than the German Social Democratic Party to create a more egalitarian education system. However, its ideology lacked the strong social democratic commitment to social cohesion and equality that was required to engender it. In the end, it was only the unique Scandinavian tradition of consensusseeking politics between Social Democrats and Liberals that allowed a radical comprehensive school system to be introduced. The structural origins of this enabling political configuration lay in the early transformation of the Scandinavian peasantry into an independent class with social-liberal views and sufficient political mobilization to crush the Conservatives, thus paving the way for social democracy. But it was the long political and ideological dominance of social democracy, forged through years of effective
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alliances with the Liberals, that allowed the consolidation of an exceptionally radical and egalitarian form of comprehensive education in the Scandinavian states. For various reasons, Germany and Britain failed to achieve a comparable social democratic ascendancy in the postwar period and thus lacked the political basis for such radical reform. It was ultimately the nature and strength of social democracy that explains the divergent development of comprehensive education in Scandinavia, on one hand, and Germany and England, on the other.
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Author Index
Adenauer, Konrad 182 Altenstein, Karl von 46 Anderson, Perry 22, 24, 26, 27 Archer, Margaret 20
Jørgensen, Jørgen 149, 150, 185–187
Bebel, August 139, 140, 178 Bentham, Jeremy 144 Berg, Fridtjuv 75, 154 Bismarck, Otto von 78, 80, 91, 92, 139, 140, 177, 225 Blatchford, R. 144 Brandt, Willy 178, 200, 201, 229 Burt, Cyril 163, 205
Lasalle, F. 139 Luebbert, G. 77
Christensen, I.C. 75, 82, 103
Ragin, Charles 11, 13 Ringer, Fritz 65, 72, 116, 158, 159 Ryden, V. 153, 154, 155
Dokka, H.-J. 36
Kautsky, Karl 140, 178 Kold, Christian 35
Mill, John Stuart 12, 144 Moore, Barrington 15, 63, 64, 238 Morant, R. 124, 125, 160 Nissen, Hartvig 105, 106
Gjörstein, Johan 151, 152 Gladstone, Herbert 95, 120, 123, 145, 146 Green, Andy 2, 3, 20–24, 40–45, 122 Grundtvig, N.F.S. 13, 35, 97
Simon, Brian 121, 125 Skocpol, T. 11, 12, 14 Skovgaard-Petersen, V. 49, 98 Smiles, Samuel 120 Snowden, P. 144, 145 Somers, M. 11, 12, 14 Spencer, Herbert 120 Staff, Karl 87, 88 Sverdrup, Johan 75, 83, 84, 103–108
Hardie, Keir 144 Hobsbawn, E. 41 Humboldt, William von 45, 99
Tawney, R.H. 227 Thatcher, Margaret 181, 190 Tilly, Charles 22, 23, 26, 27, 41
Engberg, A. 155, 156, 194 Esping-Andersen, G. 131–138, 168–177
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Subject Index
absolutism 21–31, 41–44 academic standards 3, 79, 148, 149, 156, 162, 163, 186, 194, 196, 199, 202 agricultural reform 31, 34, 213, 217 aristocracy, see nobility Bondeförbundet 155, 175, 196, 228 bottonskola 109, 112 Catholic Center Party 91, 114, 157, 158, 221, 226 classics, see Greek; Latin comparative method 11–17 comprehensive schooling in England 9–11, 118–125, 159–165, 204–209, 229 in Germany 8, 9, 113–118, 157–159, 198–204, 229 in Scandinavia 4–8, 96–113, 147–157, 184–198, 228, 229 Confirmation 33, 36 educational inequality 2 Einheitschule 117 elementary education, see comprehensive schooling enclosure movement 53, 58, 63, 64, 93, 217 Erfurt Program 140 Folkpartiet 75, 86, 109, 196
Gesamtschule 9, 199, 202, 229 Gotha Program 139, 140 grammar schools 4, 9–11, 40, 70, 121, 124, 125, 205–208, 218, 223, 230 Greek 102, 104, 116, 118 Hadow Report 163, 164 Hauptschule 9 higher grade schools 124, 125 individualism 120, 207 industrialization 42, 43, 54, 72, 85, 88, 158, 214 intelligence testing 11, 163, 204, 205 Junkers 60–62 Kalmar Union 24, 212 Kulturkampf 72 Labor Party, see social democracy laissez-faire liberalism 43, 120, 121, 214, 222, 223 Lantmannapartiet 86, 109, 137 Latin 102, 104, 105, 109–113, 116, 118, 122, 195 Latin schools 32–35, 37, 39, 97–106 liberalism, political in England 16, 17, 93–96, 222, 223 in Germany 16, 17, 88–93, 220 in Scandinavia 16, 17, 78–88, 218–220
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Subject Index
middle school in Scandinavia 5–8, 96–113, 147–165 mixed ability classes 2, 4, 7, 8, 127, 187, 190, 192, 193, 195, 197, 228 modern languages 109, 116, 117 natural sciences 104, 109, 116, 117 nobility 51–64 Oberrealschule 8, 116, 117 OECD 2 Orientierungsstufe 9 parallel system of education 5, 6, 10, 219, 220 peasantry 5, 16, 22, 24, 27, 28, 37–39, 51–64 Pietism 32 PISA 2, 3 preparatory schools 7–10, 35, 46, 100, 106, 108, 117, 155, 157, 218, 225, 226 primary education, see comprehensive schooling private schools 4, 35, 38, 40, 46, 66, 71, 101, 121, 204, 208, 213, 215, 218, 230 Public School 43, 121, 160, 161, 227 Radikale Venstre 82, 228 Realgymnasium 8, 116–118 Realschule 9, 46, 114, 116, 118, 203, 205 Reformation, Lutheran 32, 35, 37, 38, 52
secondary education, see comprehensive schooling secondary modern school 11, 114, 204, 205, 208 secondary technical schools in England 11, 37, 155 in Germany, see Realschule in Scandinavia 6, 7, 112, 113, 153, 195 setting 7, 8, 10, 11, 21, 26, 36, 101, 157, 188–192, 196, 197, 228 skills 1, 3, 7, 39, 42, 192 social class 3, 5, 28, 46, 49–73, 114, 119, 124, 125, 137, 163, 213, 215 social democracy in England 16, 17, 142–146, 179–182, 226, 227 in Germany 16, 17, 139–142, 177–179, 225, 226 in Scandinavia 16, 17, 129–138, 167–177, 223–225 social equality 3, 153, 187, 194, 202, 204, 208 Socialist Laws 139, 140, 225 social recruitment 16, 64–73 SPD, see social democracy state formation 15, 16, 19–31, 211–215 streaming 7, 8, 10, 11, 192, 196, 197, 228 tripartite school system 2, 4, 9, 11, 44, 117–119, 199–205, 229, 234 Venstre 75, 78, 228 Vorschulen 9
