Middle-class formations and the emergence of national schooling: A historiographical review of the Australian debate

Abstract

In Education and State Formation Andy Green provided an account of the rise of national education systems in England, France, and the United States. Rejecting earlier views based on either a "Whig" view of progress or other more functional or economic explanations, Green has argued that the key issue in the timing and development of education systems is the nature of the state and state formation. Centralized states such as post-1789 France created centralized bureaucracies; decentralized states such as the United States created more decentralized public systems, often based on local communities. Allied to the forms and content of education was the nature of class relations in different national contexts. Green sees the case of England as representing the relative weakness of state or public forms of education. The English retained a "Liberal Tradition" that delayed and then limited state intervention.1 As a result, England retained a gentrified and antiquated system of secondary education dominated by the English public schools, while more genuine middle-class schools emerged in Europe and the United States.