Other Countries

The story of compulsory education in the other countries of Europe is quite similar, with the added element of compulsory languages in most of them. The Austro-Hungarian Empire strove for a uniform, centralized absolute monarchy, with the language to be solely German, while the Hungarian segment of the empire attempted to “Magyarize“ its minority nationalities and abolish all languages except Hungarian within its borders. Spain has used its compulsory school acts to suppress the Catalan language and to impose Castilian. Switzerland has a system of compulsory schooling ingrained into its Constitution. In general, every country in Europe had established compulsory education by 1900, with the exception of Belgium, which followed by 1920.24

To Herbert Spencer, China carried out the idea of compulsory education to its logical conclusion:

There the government publishes a list of works which may be read; and considering obedience the supreme virtue, authorizes such only as are friendly to despotism. Fearing the unsettling effects of innovation, it allows nothing to be taught but what proceeds from itself. To the end of producing pattern citizens, it exerts a stringent discipline over all conduct. There are “rules for sitting, standing, walking, talking, and bowing, laid down with the greatest precision.”25

The Imperial Japanese system of compulsory state education is worth noting carefully, because of the many similarities which it displays with modern “progressive” education. As Lafcadio Hearn observed:

The object has never been to train the individual for independent action, but to train him for cooperative action…. Constraint among us begins with childhood, and gradually relaxes [which would be the best for the child as his reasoning powers develop and he could be allowed more freedom and less guidance]; constraint in Far Eastern training begins later, and thereafter gradually tightens…. Not merely up to the age of school life, but considerably beyond it, a Japanese child enjoys a degree of liberty far greater than is allowed to Occidental children…. The child is permitted to do as he pleases…. At school, the discipline begins … but there is no punishment beyond public admonition. Whatever restraint exists is chiefly exerted on the child by the common opinion of his class; and a skillful teacher is able to direct that opinion…. The ruling power is always the class sentiment…. It is always the rule of the many over the one; and the power is formidable.

The spirit inculcated is always the sacrifice of the individual to the community, and a crushing of any individual independence. In adult life, any deviation from the minutiae of state regulation was instantly and severely punished.26

• 24For a detailed tabulation of the compulsory education laws in each country of Europe at the turn of the century, see London Board of Education, Statement as to the Age at Which Compulsory Education Begins in Certain Foreign Countries (London, 1906). The vast majority had compulsory schooling from the ages of 6 or 7 until 14.
• 25Spencer, op. cit., pp. 297 — 98.
• 26Quotations from Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Interpretation, (New York: Macmillan, 1894), in Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1964).