Schooling and Professionalizing Society

Emphasis on empirical knowledge and objective standards changed the professions and raised their status. Growing numbers of middle-class doctors, lawyers, professors, and journalists employed solid information in their work. The middle classes argued that jobs in government should be awarded according to expertise rather than aristocratic birth or political connections. In Britain, a civil service law passed in 1870 required competitive examinations to ensure competency in government posts—a system long used in China. Governments began to allow professionals to determine rules for admission to their fields. Such legislation had both positive and negative effects: groups could set high standards, but otherwise qualified people were sometimes prohibited from working because they lacked the credentials. The medical profession, for example, gained the authority to license physicians, but it tried to block experienced midwives from attending childbirths.

Nation building required the education of all citizens, professional or not. “We have made Italy,” one Italian official announced. “Now we have to make Italians.” Education was one way of bringing citizens to hold common beliefs and values. Expansion of the electorate and lower-class activism prompted one British aristocrat to say of the common people, whom he feared as they gained influence, “We must now educate our masters!” Governments introduced compulsory schooling to reduce illiteracy rates, which were more than 65 percent in Italy and Spain in the 1870s and even higher in eastern Europe. As ordinary people were allowed to vote, books taught them about the responsibilities of citizenship and provided the practical knowledge necessary for contributing to industrial society. (See “Taking Measure: Literacy and Illiteracy in the Nineteenth Century.”)

Educational reform was not easy. At midcentury, religious authorities supervised schools and charged tuition, making primary education an option only for prosperous or religious parents. After the 1850s, critics questioned the relevance of religion in the curricula of modern schools. In 1861, an English commission on education concluded that instead of knowledge of the Bible, “the knowledge most important to a labouring man is that of the causes which regulate the amount of his wages, the hours of his work, the regularity of his employment, and the prices of what he consumes.” To feel part of a nation, the young had to learn its language, literature, and history. Replacing religion was a challenge for the secular and increasingly knowledge-based state.

Enforcing school attendance was another challenge. Although the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland had functioning primary-school systems before midcentury, rural parents in these and other countries resisted sending their children to school. Farm families depended on children to perform chores and believed that work in the fields or the household provided the best and most useful education. Urban homemakers from the lower classes needed their children to fetch water, tend younger children, and scavenge for household necessities such as stale bread from bakers or soup from local missions. Yet some of the working poor developed a craze for learning, which made traveling lecturers, reading groups, and debating societies popular.

Secondary education also expanded through the creation of more lycées (high schools) and technical schools, yet it remained even more of a luxury. In authoritarian countries such as Russia, advanced knowledge, including education in science and technology, was considered suspect because it empowered the young with information and taught them to think for themselves. Reformers pushed for advanced courses for young women to make them more interesting wives and better mothers of future citizens. In Britain, the founders of two women’s colleges—Girton (1869) and Newnham (1871)—at Cambridge University believed, and were later proved right, that exacting standards and a modern curriculum in women’s higher education would inspire improvements in the men’s colleges of Cambridge and Oxford.

Education also opened professional doors to women, who came to attend universities—in particular, medical schools—in Zurich and Paris in the 1860s. Women doctors argued that they could not only bring feminine values to health care but also get better results because women patients would be more open with them than with male doctors. The need for educated citizens also offered opportunities for large numbers of women to enter teaching, a field once dominated by men. Thousands of women founded nursery schools and kindergartens based on the Enlightenment idea that developmental processes start at an early age. Yet many men opposed the idea of women studying or teaching. “I shudder at philosophic women,” wrote one critic of female education.