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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

Most of the time, in order to serve the long-range vision of state-controlled schooling in a worker-controlled state, the program was reduced in effect to that of the liberals. Schooling should be secular, free, and egalitarian—workers should have equal access to higher education.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

Again, the function of these autonomous educational facilities in furthering a radical consciousness and culture during the early phases of the workers' movement is striking. In the associations, workers could use libraries, attend classes, and hear lectures on subjects of interest to them. Popular topics included not only work-related subjects like machine technology and technical developments pertinent to the various trades, but also aspects of the natural sciences and themes directly pertinent to the evolution of social relations, especially historical subjects. For example, the members of the Leipziger Arbeiterverein organized lectures during 1875 on the uprising of enslaved workers during antiquity and on the French Revolution, as well as discussions of political economy and literature.

On the other hand, the bourgeois-influenced Vereine generally espoused a different view. Subscribing to a self-help philosophy, they emphasized the role which these kinds of associations could play in improving the lives and prospects of individual workers. The bourgeois associations maintained their focus on education, avoiding political entanglement, and formed one branch of the program of the liberal sectors within the German Bürgertum to enlighten workers and improve their condition.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

Although it might be argued that increased education for women was an integral part of the dynamics of the emergence of the women's movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is also clear that in those countries where social historians have begun to examine educational policies with respect to women, such consequences occurred despite official intentions to the contrary. Thus, as in other realms of education reform there is at least a suggestion that the reform backfired. Some women clearly used their education as a stepping-stone to further challenges to the male-dominant system. (Indeed, by the first decade of the twentieth century, women comprised 6 percent of the matriculants at German universities, and also had begun to take professional degrees elsewhere in Europe.) In a similar manner, it might well be argued, some children of common origins did work their way through the educational system despite the obstacles in their path. These exceptions must be taken into account in any assessment of the ultimate impact of the school reform, but that they were exceptions should not be forgotten. By and large, intentions and structures seem to have corresponded to a great degree: The schools could not, and were not intended, to alter the constraints which class and gender placed upon an individual's ambitions and options. And parents were well aware of the constraints of gender and class in planning their children's schooling and vocations. Primary schooling may well have had its uses, but to regard it as a stepping-stone to the collège, or Gymnasium, or ''public school" and eventually to the university and the world of power and property, would have been alien to the experience and probably even the imagination of the average working-class family of the nineteenth century. And as social-historical investigation has suggested, succeeding at such a strategy was also beyond the realm of probability as well.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

Furthermore, the scholarship system which was instituted to comply with the claim to theoretical accessibility, was restricted enough to assure that the basic functions of the collèges to serve the education of the bourgeoisie would not be threatened. This was not always the result of conscious planning, but the assumptions behind their establishment were not far below the surface. The Minister of Education, Villemot, for example, commented in 1887 that:

The girls who attend the lycées and the collèges nearly all belong to well-off parents, from whom they have received a good education. Their bearing, their manners, their language leave nothing to be desired; the young girls who come to join them [in the secondary schools] thus need not fear any pernicious contacts. The director is therefore armed by regulation with the right to refuse absolutely the enrollment of any pupil when the evidence is unfavorable.

Thus, in the guise of protecting the daughters of good families from pernicious influences, school principals could turn down applications from girls from poorer backgrounds. And the limits on scholarships and exemptions from fee payment were even more effective deterrents. Jules Ferry himself, the guiding spirit behind the reform of girls' higher education, forbade the policy of fee exemptions in cases of hardship except for daughters of officials and professors, and scholarship pupils. The number of these was kept quite low: Villemot presented it as a success of the program in his report of 1886-87 that the proportion of the exempt was only 6 percent of the total number of pupils enrolled. The point of this policy of restriction was clear—in the words of Ferry:

In acting thus we will not expose ourselves to the danger of admitting into our lycées, beside the regularly appointed scholarship pupils, a large number of young girls of modest conditions who won't receive the practical and professional training that they really need.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

Furthermore, the scholarship system which was instituted to comply with the claim to theoretical accessibility, was restricted enough to assure that the basic functions of the collèges to serve the education of the bourgeoisie would not be threatened. This was not always the result of conscious planning, but the assumptions behind their establishment were not far below the surface. The Minister of Education, Villemot, for example, commented in 1887 that:

The girls who attend the lycées and the collèges nearly all belong to well-off parents, from whom they have received a good education. Their bearing, their manners, their language leave nothing to be desired; the young girls who come to join them [in the secondary schools] thus need not fear any pernicious contacts. The director is therefore armed by regulation with the right to refuse absolutely the enrollment of any pupil when the evidence is unfavorable.

Thus, in the guise of protecting the daughters of good families from pernicious influences, school principals could turn down applications from girls from poorer backgrounds. And the limits on scholarships and exemptions from fee payment were even more effective deterrents. Jules Ferry himself, the guiding spirit behind the reform of girls' higher education, forbade the policy of fee exemptions in cases of hardship except for daughters of officials and professors, and scholarship pupils. The number of these was kept quite low: Villemot presented it as a success of the program in his report of 188687 that the proportion of the exempt was only 6 percent of the total number of pupils enrolled. The point of this policy of restriction was clear—in the words of Ferry:

In acting thus we will not expose ourselves to the danger of admitting into our lycées, beside the regularly appointed scholarship pupils, a large number of young girls of modest conditions who won't receive the practical and professional training that they really need.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

This was to be instruction "crowned by moral concerns but separated from religion," in tune with the ideological orientation of progressive men of the Third Republic. There was a smattering of sciences, but the general orientation was to give the girls a domestic and aesthetic education, to prepare them to be proper wives and intellectual companions to the liberal men of their class, but not deflect them from their "true" profession in the home.

This education, limited as it was, was designed primarily for the daughters of the bourgeoisie. Careful attention was paid, as in the case of boys' secondary schools, as to who was to be recruited into these new schools.

Caution was employed to assure that inappropriate aspirants would be directed elsewhere. The girls' collège program was made long enough in duration and expensive enough to repel all but the well-off. Local municipal councils often opted to open up alternative advanced classes for girls who might aspire to some post-primary schooling but who were not likely candidates for the collèges.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

It is interesting to note in this connection that the expansion of primary schooling was itself a contributing factor. As the corps of public schoolteachers expanded at an increasing rate in the nineteenth century, and the costs of salaries for them skyrocketed, a perceptible trend toward "refeminization" of the teaching profession began to occur. This reversed, of course, the opposite trend toward masculinization that had characterized the early decades of reform, and seems to have largely resulted from the search for less expensive labor pools from which to recruit teachers as educated men followed other options. The early female schoolteachers formed a corps from which professional women's organizations, and even proto-feminist groups, were recruited, groups which in turn became advocates for the improvement of women's education. Educational demands were a central feature of the bourgeois women's movements in Germany, France, England, Holland, and elsewhere in the last decades of the nineteenth century. All over Europe, feminist demands for equal access to the schools and universities ran up against ideas and institutions based on principles of inequality.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

In the middle-class circles all over Western Europe, the issue of female higher education began to be raised with new vigor in the 1870s or 1880s. In part, concern for the ideological unity of the nuclear family, so central to the bourgeois lifestyle, helped to generate new concern for the style of female education. In France, the problem was especially intense since the ideological polarization between the bourgeois men educated in the state secondary schools and the bourgeois women taught at home or schooled "chez les bonnes soeurs" intensified in the political atmosphere of the Third Republic. As Francoise Mayeur has suggested, concern for the quality of middle-class family life was central to the extension of secondary education to girls during the 1870s and 1880s. Jules Ferry, for example, who was the Minister of Education when many of the Third Republic reforms were passed, saw in the extension of equal educational opportunities to girls "the reestablishment of the unity of the family." Camille Sée, who presented a plan for girls' secondary schools to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1879, pointed to the ill effects upon children of the unequal education of their parents:

“The mother speaks the language of superstition; the father, that of reason. When these contradictory ideas enter the mind so malleable and impressionable, and begin to germinate, the child, not knowing whether to believe his mother or his father, will commence to doubt."

But to a large extent, especially outside of France, concern for secondary education for girls seems to have been a product of the new conditions for middle-class women themselves. Throughout Western Europe, middle-class families worried about the difficulty of marrying off daughters respectably, a problem that intensified because of the demographic imbalances created by migration and age differentials at marriage, and by the rising costs associated with the establishment of a middle-class household. More and more women found themselves in need of respectable employment (as schoolteachers or professionals, one hoped), but for access to an independent career they needed education. The increasing number of middle-class women who toward the end of the nineteenth century were looking outside the confines of their homes was a natural clientele for secondary and even higher education.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

In the middle-class circles all over Western Europe, the issue of female higher education began to be raised with new vigor in the 1870s or 1880s. In part, concern for the ideological unity of the nuclear family, so central to the bourgeois lifestyle, helped to generate new concern for the style of female education. In France, the problem was especially intense since the ideological polarization between the bourgeois men educated in the state secondary schools and the bourgeois women taught at home or schooled "chez les bonnes soeurs" intensified in the political atmosphere of the Third Republic. As Francoise Mayeur has suggested, concern for the quality of middle-class family life was central to the extension of secondary education to girls during the 1870s and 1880s. Jules Ferry, for example, who was the Minister of Education when many of the Third Republic reforms were passed, saw in the extension of equal educational opportunities to girls "the reestablishment of the unity of the family." Camille Sée, who presented a plan for girls' secondary schools to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1879, pointed to the ill effects upon children of the unequal education of their parents:

“The mother speaks the language of superstition; the father, that of reason. When these contradictory ideas enter the mind so malleable and impressionable, and begin to germinate, the child, not knowing whether to believe his mother or his father, will commence to doubt."

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes

Indeed, until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, gender role expectations were so ingrained among officials that higher education for girls was not even an issue. Subterranean fears and occasional debates about the possibility of social mobility or social dislocation through male higher education bore witness to the possibility, if undesirable, of such potential for boys. The very idea of higher education for girls, however, remained unexamined. The same ideology which rebuked the working-class mother for her neglect of her family, and which called for the school to substitute for her, exalted the domestic virtues of proper mothers who stayed home. If schools were the only salvation for the children of the people and the only possible source of moral guidance for those children deprived of proper mothering, the children of the better-off classes could expect to find such guidance at home. A "proper" home environment was every bit as desirable as a proper school. The evolving ideology of sexual difference which accompanied the separation of home and workplace, so marked in the nineteenth century, singled out the mother as the bearer of virtue and the prime moral educator of her children. To be sure, boys needed the kind of training for their active professional futures that few middle-class homes could provide, but daughters could certainly be educated privately, preferably under the close supervision of their mothers, for their own domestic futures, as wives and mothers.

Thus, if schooling was prescribed for all the children of the people—boys and girls both—in part as an antidote to their inadequate home life, the implications of dominant gender expectations consigned middle-class girls to a pattern of socialization that was quite different from that which their brothers received. The great education reforms of the early nineteenth century touched and reshaped primary education for boys and girls of the popular classes and secondary education for the sons of the more comfortable classes. But virtually no public provision was made anywhere during the first half of the nineteenth century for the advanced education of upper- or middle-class girls. The bourgeois and aristocratic reformers of France, Britain, and Germany were all prepared to leave their daughters in the hands of domestic, private, or religious instructors, even as they built or completely overhauled a system of public education for their sons.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes