Schooling in Western Europe

A Social History

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Mary Jo Maynes: Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press)

177 pages

English language

Published Jan. 1, 1985 by State University of New York Press.

ISBN:
978-0-87395-976-6
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OCLC Number:
10998098

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4 stars (1 review)

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance of early ideas about schooling for understanding contemporary society. She presents the competing perspectives on issues such as the identity and motivations of school reformers, the broad societal changes that made educational reform seem imperative toward the end of the eighteenth century all over the West, the connections between educational change and economic development, the role of schools in the evolution of class relations, the impact of reform on family strategies in the context of early industrialization. The work concludes by assessing historical data on the social impact of school reform and addressing the social meaning of schooling in the past and in the present.

2 editions

reviewed Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

This feels like a rare find.

4 stars

Finding books about the history of schooling is difficult, especially because many of them seem to take the position of the school as an inherent good that is necessary for society to continue. It is because this book challenges that idea that I find it so intriguing, especially as it has provided me with a range of directions to explore (both in terms of things I already knew and things I hadn't really thought about).

It is definitely something that I'd recommend people genuinely engage with, especially if the readers are willing to question beliefs (their own or society's) about the necessity of schooling, the conflation between schooling and education, the importance of literacy (and the moralising society has around illiteracy), and how the more radical elements of the left essentially dropped schooling and ignored its importance in favour of "acquiring the state."