Contrasting Models of State and School: A Comparative Historical Study of Parental Choice and State Control.

• Author: Currie-Knight, Kevin
• Position: Book review

* Contrasting Models of State and School: A Comparative Historical Study of Parental Choice and State Control

By Charles L. Glenn

New York: Continuum Press, 2011.

Pp. xii, 262. $29.95 paperback.

Should education be a tool that states use to create national homogeneity by reducing cultural and religious dissension among citizens? Or should education be a tool that individuals and groups use to educate their children how they see fit, even if it means cultural heterogeneity? Should curricular and pedagogical decisions be made 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 the Netherlands--have answered these questions. The Germanic nations Prussia and Austria have historically favored a strong state-run education system, whereas Belgium and the Netherlands have leaned toward policies of educational decentralization, giving individuals 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 Massachusetts Press, 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, administered or heavily regulated by the state) to Jacobin France and the nineteenth-century United States. The recent book, then, explores historically how the idea of the common school found form in the German countries of Austria and Prussia but did not gain as much traction in the Netherlands or Belgium.

The book's story begins largely at the turn of the nineteenth century, when all four nations, in differing ways and for differing reasons, were struggling to foster their own national identities, and education policy would be used as a means toward that end. By 1800, Austria's commissioner of education had already decreed certain standardization measures to govern Austria's church-sponsored and private schools and had declared school attendance (at state-approved schools) to be mandatory. Invigorated by the German nationalism of Johann Gottleib Fichte, the Prussian government established a national Ministry of Education, several teacher-training seminaries, and national oversight of curricular content by the year 1817. Although the accrual of state power over education was...