Contrasting Models of State and School

Should education be a tool that states use to create national homogeneity by reducingcultural and religious dissension among citizens? Or should education be a toolthat individuals and groups use to educate their children how they see fit, even ifit means cultural heterogeneity? Should curricular and pedagogical decisions bemade on the national level, or should they be left to localities and cultural groups?Charles L. Glenn’s Contrasting Models of State and School is a comprehensive history>of how four different nations—Austria, Prussia/Germany, Belgium, and theNetherlands—have answered these questions. The Germanic nations Prussia andAustria have historically favored a strong state-run education system, whereas Belgiumand the Netherlands have leaned toward policies of educational decentralization, givingindividuals and groups significant educational choice.

This book elaborates on and furthers some of Glenn’s previous research,most notably The Myth of the Common School (Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 1988). There, Glenn traces the development of the idea of the common school(the idea that everyone should receive roughly the same kind of education, administeredor heavily regulated by the state) to Jacobin France and the nineteenth-centuryUnited States. The recent book, then, explores historically how the idea of thecommon school found form in the German countries of Austria and Prussia but didnot gain as much traction in the Netherlands or Belgium.

The book’s story begins largely at the turn of the nineteenth century, when allfour nations, in differing ways and for differing reasons, were struggling to fostertheir own national identities, and education policy would be used as a means towardthat end. By 1800, Austria’s commissioner of education had already decreed certainstandardization measures to govern Austria’s church-sponsored and private schoolsand had declared school attendance (at state-approved schools) to be mandatory.Invigorated by the German nationalism of Johann Gottleib Fichte, the Prussiangovernment established a national Ministry of Education, several teacher-trainingseminaries, and national oversight of curricular content by the year 1817. Althoughthe accrual of state power over education was slower and experienced more oppositionin the Netherlands and Belgium, both of these nations also erected models ofstate oversight of schools. These efforts were motivated largely by a desire to reducethe diversity of approaches to schooling that were thought to hinder a nation’scohesion. Referencing Austrian and Prussian educational reforms in particular, Glennnotes that “[t]he popular school of the nineteenth century was above all an instrumentof emerging nationalism, reflecting the Romantic concern with national unitybased upon cultural uniformity and requiring the engagement of peasants andworkers as loyal participants in that project. It was during this period that linguistic unity and thus the suppression of countless local dialects, became an urgent project for the theorists of nationalism and thus a mission of the school” (p. 40).

Using schools to create any kind of national homogeneity is bound to run upagainst objections from the religious. If education cannot be value neutral, and ifmany religious groups regard education without religious instruction as inadequate,can states really provide (or regulate) education in a way that will satisfy diversereligious groups? Glenn offers us a fascinating glimpse at how these four nations havenegotiated this issue. In the 1830s and 1840s, for instance, the Netherlandsattempted to include a generalized Protestantism in their emerging public schools(in a way very similar to the Protestantism being put into New England’s publicschools in the same decades). In 1850, Belgium’s Liberal government passed a law(over strong Catholic opposition) whereby secondary schools “would includereligious instruction given by or in consultation with the clergy, but schools wouldbe under control of the government” (p. 76). A similar trend of compromisepositions—public schools that allowed varying degrees of religious instruction whosecontent varied with the locality—occurred in the German nations (which formed aunified German confederation in 1848). Although religious opposition in Belgiumand the Netherlands was strong enough to check the Liberal and Socialist trendsof secularization (and hence government-imposed standardization of instruction),the religious opposition in Germany gradually weakened over time, making governmentalcontrol of education easier. By 1871, for instance, government control ofGerman education had “extended over the appointment and dismissal of teachers inthese schools, and this was used to purge them of teachers—especially members ofreligious orders—who were not considered loyal to German rule” (p. 105).

Glenn spends a great deal of time going over the totalitarian school system setup by Germany’s Nazi Party in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1938, the German governmentpassed a law creating a fully nationalized and centralized education system.Confessional religious schooling was abolished, and a system of national governmentallyadministered schools was ushered in. The new system was selective and hierarchal,wherein the government sent the most promising youth to government-run boardingschools whose intent was to mold future Nazi leaders. Glenn notes that educationunder the Nazi regime was fiercely anti-intellectual and more concerned with creatingloyalty to the Nazi ideology and regime than in educating in traditional subjects.As he writes of this period, “[T]he extension of direct and exclusive state control ineducation was an important element of the Nazi program of radical centralization andimposed uniformity, in which everything possible was done to eliminate competingsources of opinion and independent thinking” (p. 164).

Although the Western occupying powers did away with all hints of the Nazieducational model in post–WorldWar II Germany, they replaced it with a model closeto the American model of interdenominational schools with little religious instruction,which many Germans still found objectionable. A gradual secularization of theGerman populace over the next decades, however, meant less demand for religiousconfessional schools, thus allowing the state to play an increasingly large role inGerman education. Today, Glenn writes, “although educational freedom is explicitlygranted by the German Constitution, its actual exercise has been hedged about withrestrictions to such an extent that there is not the rich diversity of educational offeringsthat might be expected” (p. 181).

This experience contrasts with that of Belgium, where Liberals, Catholics, andSocialists—none commanding a large majority—found it necessary to make compromiseson education policy, often meaning a strong system of public education withstate subsidization of private-school tuition. In 1988, the Belgian Constitutionwas amended to federalize the public-education system, allowing local linguisticcommunities authority over their own public schools and retaining freedom ofeducational choice (at state expense) for families. Emphasis on decentralized educationand freedom of choice have likewise remained strong in the Netherlands,where the “[C]onstitution and laws give parents the right to insist upon educationconsistent with their own convictions—whether through establishment of a newschool if numbers justify that or through transportation to a school at somedistance” (p. 203).

Contrasting Models of State and School is a highly informative work of history,rich in historical detail regarding the educational policies of four distinct nations.A fair amount of European historical knowledge is necessary to truly make sense ofthe history Glenn tells. For instance, he touches on but does not go into much detailover how events such as the Napoleonic wars, World War II, and the struggle for aunified Germany affected each country’s choices on educational policy; the readermust connect some of those dots on his or her own. Although I believe that such explanations would have made for a more contextualized and richer historical account, it also would have made for a significantly longer book.

Glenn does an excellent job recounting the education policy histories of these four nations, but Contrasting Models of State and School is relatively short on analysis and discussion. What should readers take away from these four histories? What lessons are to be found in them that we can and should use when discussing education policyin our own countries? Glenn should not be faulted for this shortcoming; as a historian,his concern is more with laying out the history and letting readers form theirown conclusions. Yet readers who want analysis or commentary on the history will beslightly disappointed.

History has the remarkable power to show us that what currently is has a longbackstory, and understanding that backstory adds immensely to the understanding ofthe way policy currently looks. Charles Glenn has done those of us concerned witheducation policy a service by telling the often contrasting histories that led fournations to take different paths to educating their citizens in the midst of religiousand cultural diversity. (Interested readers should also read Glenn’s subsequent book,The American Model of State and School [New York: Continuum, 2012], where hegives the history of American educational policy and its similar struggles.) Anyoneconcerned with issues of educational policy, the current trends in American educationtoward increasing centralization, and school choice will come away from this bookwith a deeper appreciation of the hows and whys of educational centralization andschool choice.