The record of the development of compulsory education is a record of State usurpation of parental control over children on behalf of its own; an imposition of uniformity and equality to repress individual growth; and the development of techniques to hinder the growth of reasoning power and independent thought among the children.

We need not linger long over the status of education in ancient Greece and Rome. In Athens, the original practice of compulsory state education later gave way to a voluntary system. In Sparta, on the other hand, an ancient model for modern totalitarianism, the State was organized as one vast military camp, and the children were seized by the State and educated in barracks to the ideal of State obedience.

It is hardly coincidence that the most notoriously despotic State in Europe — Prussia — was the first to have a national system of compulsory education, nor that the original inspiration, as we have seen, was Luther and his doctrine of obedience to State absolutism. As Mr. Twentyman put it: “State interference in education was almost coincident with the rise of the Prussian state.”

Universal compulsory education, like compulsory military service, was ushered into France by the French Revolution. The revolutionary Constitution of 1791 decreed compulsory primary instruction for all. The Government could not do much to put these principles into effect at first, but it tried its best. In 1793, the Convention prescribed that the French language be the sole language of the “republic, one and indivisible.” Little was done until the advent of Napoleon, who established a comprehensive state education.

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.

The tradition of voluntarism was at its strongest in England. So strong was it that, not only was there no compulsory education in England until the late nineteenth century, but there was not even a public school system. Before the 1830s, the State did not interfere in education at all. After 1833, the State began to make ever-increasing grants to promote indirectly the education of the poor in private schools. This was strictly philanthropic, and there was no trace of compulsion.

Since recent events helped socialist parties to obtain power in Russia, Hungary, Germany and Austria, and have thus made the execution of a socialist nationalization program a topical issue, 17  Marxist writers have themselves begun to deal more closely with the problems of the regulation of the socialist commonwealth.

The problem of responsibility and initiative in socialist enterprises is closely connected with that of economic calculation.

The Reverend George Harris described the effects of compulsory education in imposing uniformity and enforced equality (soon after the establishment of compulsion):

Are we really dealing with the necessary consequences of common ownership of the means of production? Is there no way in which some kind of economic calculation might be tied up with a socialist system?