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But despite frequent references to their own assiduous efforts to pursue learning for religious or political or economic ends, early modern memoirists from the general populace rarely regard lack of learning as a stigma. Only when schooling had become the norm and the gospel of literacy had begun to spread, do we begin to get reports of a sense of shame associated with illiteracy, as, for example, the late nineteenth-century Parisian weaver who "was embarrassed and suffered because of her ignorance."

In a similar vein, Laqueur has argued that in England by the mid-nineteenth century, literacy:

came to be associated with the process of individual self-improvement that was an integral part of radical political and social change; it was part of the working class's rise to political power and its defense against oppression [but at the same time] it came ... to be a mark distinguishing the respectable from the non-respectable poor, the washed from the unwashed. It served to sharpen a division which was far less clear in the eighteenth century.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

But despite frequent references to their own assiduous efforts to pursue learning for religious or political or economic ends, early modern memoirists from the general populace rarely regard lack of learning as a stigma. Only when schooling had become the norm and the gospel of literacy had begun to spread, do we begin to get reports of a sense of shame associated with illiteracy, as, for example, the late nineteenth-century Parisian weaver who "was embarrassed and suffered because of her ignorance."

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

But if the evidence is mixed concerning the spread of a myth of meritocracy, it does seem true nonetheless that parents across a broad social spectrum were accepting the idea that schooling endowed their children with a certain moral superiority—and even power—that distinguished them from the uneducated. This new place of learning and literacy in popular settings marks a departure from the relative nonchalance about formal education that apparently marked popular cultures throughout most of Europe in earlier periods. Furthermore, the school movement played a role in the dissemination of a culture which endowed the act of reading with moral as well as practical significance.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

It is easy for the modern observer to misconstrue the historical process that made schooling the norm. The value and impact of schooling remain subjects as politically, socially, economically and emotionally charged as they were during the reform era. Our current controversies and hopes about schooling are bound to affect our accounts of the origins and social consequences of mass schooling. On the one hand, contemporary assumptions (whether or not founded in fact) about the social functions of schools—especially as agents of career determination, social mobility, or individual self-improvement—cloud our vision of their function in the past. Our contemporary expectations have often ascribed to historical reform movements and their extension of formal schooling to the working classes with intentions and consequences that are anachronistic at best, masking the actual character of the historical development of schooling. On the other hand, because schooling is so much taken for granted today, and is so much a part of our understanding of what it means to grow up, we tend to overlook many changes associated with school expansion which European families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must have experienced as profound.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

It is easy for the modern observer to misconstrue the historical process that made schooling the norm. The value and impact of schooling remain subjects as politically, socially, economically and emotionally charged as they were during the reform era. Our current controversies and hopes about schooling are bound to affect our accounts of the origins and social consequences of mass schooling. On the one hand, contemporary assumptions (whether or not founded in fact) about the social functions of schools—especially as agents of career determination, social mobility, or individual self-improvement—cloud our vision of their function in the past. Our contemporary expectations have often ascribed to historical reform movements and their extension of formal schooling to the working classes with intentions and consequences that are anachronistic at best, masking the actual character of the historical development of schooling. On the other hand, because schooling is so much taken for granted today, and is so much a part of our understanding of what it means to grow up, we tend to overlook many changes associated with school expansion which European families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must have experienced as profound.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

To some extent, then, the current faith in the economic benefits of education is a restatement of a philosophy commonly expressed, if not wholly unchallenged, during the era when modern European schools systems were created. What distinguishes the current form of the argument is the effort to specify and measure the contribution of schooling to economic growth, and to replicate in the developing world the European experience by exporting its school.

Given the vagaries and methodological problems inherent in human capital theory, it is perhaps surprising that its claims have become so commonplace. Part of the explanation for the current revival of the theory, its opponents have argued, lies in its political implications. The favorable response in many Western countries to human capital theory "attested both to its optimistic tone and the political legitimacy it evoked as the preferred development strategy." Two German critics, D. Hinrichsen and K. Köhler, also found the impetus for theoretical development in this direction in larger political trends. Both neoclassical and Keynesian models, they point out, took technological progress as a given, a function of time. But the newer theories, developed more explicitly in defense of the capitalist system per se, had to connect technological progress with capital. These theories emphasize the parallel and connected growth of capital and laborforce skills and argue that overall economic well-being is dependent on the latter as well as the former. The net result is to legitimate the general system that supposedly produces both, as well as the specific and temporal inequalities which characterize its operation. The lower productivity of Third World economies, for example, can be accounted for in terms of historical patterns of underinvestment in education.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

But, for the most part, the abandonment of popular schooling to the existing state apparatus, on the assumption that the state would eventually become a vehicle of the workers' movement, was a serious strategic error resulting from a misunderstanding of the dynamics of change. The abandonment of the refusal to be ''educated by their rulers" that marked working-class strategies everywhere in Western Europe in the late decades of the nineteenth century represents a turning point in working-class consciousness, strategy, and, it would seem, potential to act as the agent of revolutionary transformation.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

The chronological development of working-class political attitudes seems telling as well. Wherever it has been traced, the evolution in attitudes took working-class strategists from a period of creative, if somewhat utopian, planning of genuine alternative visions of the meaning and purpose of education to at least a tacit acceptance of the bounds of the school system created by the states, beholden to interests contrary to those of the emergent working classes. Not surprisingly, this evolution paralleled a more general shift in the demands and organizational strategies of working-class movements as well. In the early part of the nineteenth century, artisans and early factory workers still often struggled to challenge the very system of industrial capitalism which threatened to undermine their way of life. By the century's end, the working-class movement fought instead to secure for workers the best possible situation within a world dominated by industrial capital. Whatever their degree of opposition vis-à-vis those dominant powers, workers' organizations nonetheless accepted the new ground for the struggle.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

Furthermore, even if in France the imagination of some working-class theorists remained more open to alternatives than did those of their English and German counterparts, the failure actually to implement any alternative national educational policies there was equally apparent. Despite the evidence that class-conscious workers all over Western Europe were aware of the class character of the education their children were receiving in the public schools, the fact remains that organized political movements acting on behalf of the working classes rarely went beyond asking for higher budgets for and more equal access to the very schools they criticized.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

Although the overall tendency was for the workers to slip into the demand for equality within the existing educational system, as was true elsewhere, the Proudhonian influence as well as the vitality and importance of the artisan sector in which it flourished helped to keep alive the alternative tradition in France emphasizing both "self-education" and maternal domestic education. This is reflected, for example in the plan presented by Emil Aubry of the Rouennais chapter of the International at its meeting in 1869. His emphasis was on the educative role of the mother (who was, in fact, assigned the task of teaching her children how to read and write), on the necessity of openness of the school system to parental influence and parental visits, and on the undermining of monopolistic claims by the state. Similarly, a critique in the working-class newspaper La Réforme Sociale of the reform program of the radical bourgeois deputies to the Legislative Assembly also reflected this distrust of simply allocating to the state the role of educator. "Free and obligatory schooling," wrote the editor Rilbourg, "if it became an institution, would only produce unsatisfactory results. The people, if it wants to liberate itself, must organize its own education, it must not rely either upon bourgeois parliamentarians or religious congregations."

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

But, Duveau argues, it was the anarchist Proudhon who was the most influential thinker of the French workers' movement in its early years, and his ideas come up again and again in educational proposals of working-class militants. Like Cobbett in England, Proudhon valued an education that would reflect the values and interests of working-class families; but like many of the British radicals, his thinking was explicitly patriarchal. He claimed in one essay that "the single essential thing, is that the school-teacher please the fathers of families, and that there are teachers for them to send or not to send their children to...." He insisted on domestic education, the training of young children at home by their mother reflecting both his suspicion of the state and his rigid gender role stereotyping.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

For [Clara] Zetkin, home teaching was a necessary component of critical education. A minority within the SPD thus advocated the development of an alternative educational vision more in line with socialist principles, but they remained a minor and ineffectual voice within the socialist movement as a whole in Germany. The incorporation of the working-class movement into the political system, and the priority it placed on political goals, served to stifle any real challenge to the schooling process and education generated by an essentially bourgeois impetus. And even though, as recent research demonstrates, working-class culture was not reducible to SPD culture, no alternative proletarian educational vision emerged.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes