Compulsory education refers to a period of education that is required of persons, imposed by law. In some countries the education needs to take place at a registered school. Other countries allow the education to happen outside of school, for example via homeschooling.
Antiquity to Medieval Era
Although Plato's The Republic is credited with having popularized the concept of compulsory education in Western intellectual thought, every parent in Judea since ancient times was required to teach their children at least informally. Over the centuries, as cities, towns and villages developed, a class of teachers called Rabbis evolved. According to the Talmud (tractate Bava Bathra 21a), which praises the sage Joshua ben Gamla with the institution of formal Jewish education in the 1st century AD, Ben Gamla instituted schools in every town and made formal education compulsory from the age of 6 or 7.
The Aztec Triple Alliance, which ruled from 1428 to 1521 in what is now central Mexico, is considered to be the first state to implement a system of universal compulsory education.
Early Modern Era
The Reformation prompted the establishment of compulsory education for boys and girls. Most important was Martin Luther's text 'An die Ratsherren aller Städte deutschen Landes,' (1524) with the call for establishing schools. Especially the Protestant South-West of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation with cities like Strassburg became pioneers in educational questions. Under the influence of Strasbourg in 1592 the German Duchy Pfalz-Zweibrücken became the first territory of the world with compulsory education for girls and boys. The South German Duchy Wuerttemberg installed a compulsory education already in 1559, but for boys only.
In Scotland the Education Act of 1496 had obliged the children of noblemen and freeholders to attend school, but the School Establishment Act of 1616 commanded every parish with the means to establish a school paid for by parishioners. The Parliament of Scotland confirmed this with the Education Act of 1633 and created a local land-based tax to provide the required funding. The required majority support of parishioners, however, provided a tax evasion loophole which heralded the Education Act of 1646. The turmoil of the age meant that in 1661 there was a temporary reversion to the less compulsory 1633 position. However, in 1696 a new Act re-established the compulsory provision of a school in every parish with a system of fines, sequestration, and direct government implementation as a means of enforcement where required.
During the Reformation in 1524, Martin Luther advocated compulsory schooling so that all parishioners would be able to read the Bible themselves, and Palatinate-Zweibrücken passed accordant legislation in 1592, followed by Strasbourgâ€"then a free city of the Holy Roman Empireâ€" in 1598.
Prussia implemented a modern compulsory system in 1763 which was widely recognised and copied. It was introduced by the Generallandschulreglement, a decree of Frederick the Great in 1763-5. The Generallandschulreglement, authored by Johann Julius Hecker, asked to educate all young citizens, girls and boys, to be educated from the fifth till at age 13 or 14 and to provide them with a basic outlook on (Christian) religion, singing, reading and writing based on a regulated, state provided curriculum of text books. The teachers, often former soldiers, were asked to cultivate silk worms to make a living besides contributions from the local citizens and municipalities. Funding and training of the teachers was slowly expanded and received funding till teachers gained full academic status in the 20th century. This provided a working model for other states to copy; the clearest example of direct copying is probably Japan in the period of the Meiji Restoration.
In Austria, Hungary and in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Czech lands), mandatory primary education was introduced by Empress Maria Theresa in 1774.
Modern Era
Europe
Compulsory school attendance based on the Prussian model gradually spread to other countries. It was quickly adopted by the governments in Norway and Sweden, and also in Finland, Estonia and Latvia within the Russian Empire, but was rejected in Russia itself. France and the United Kingdom did not, until the 1880s, introduce compulsory education: France due to conflicts between a radical secular state and the Catholic church, and the UK due to the upper class defending its educational privileges and turfs.
One of the last areas in Europe to adopt a compulsory system was England and Wales, where the Elementary Education Act of 1870 paved the way by establishing school boards to set up schools in any places that did not have adequate provision. Attendance was made compulsory until age 10 in 1880. The Education Act of 1996 made it an obligation on parents to require children to have a full-time education from the age of five to the age of sixteen. However, attendance at school itself is not compulsory; Section 7 of the Act allows for "education otherwise" than at a school i.e. home education
United States
Following Luther and other Reformers, the Separatist Congregationalists who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620, obliged parents to teach their children how to read and to write so that they were able to read the Bible for themselves. In Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded by Puritans in 1628, a law obliged parents to teach their children reading and writing in 1642. Five years later, the first steps were taken to require free elementary instruction in the towns. The Puritan zeal for learning was reflected in the early and rapid rise of educational institutions. Harvard College was founded in 1636. The American Commonwealth of Massachusetts was the first state to pass a compulsory education law which occurred in 1852. These laws continued to spread to other states until finally, in 1918, Mississippi was the last state to enact a compulsory attendance law. Massachusetts had originally enacted the first compulsory education law in the American colonies in 1647. In 1852, the Massachusetts General Court passed a law requiring every town to create and operate a grammar school. Fines were imposed on parents who did not send their children to school and the government took the power to take children away from their parents and apprentice them to others if government officials decided that the parents were "unfit to have the children educated properly".
Compulsory education was not part of early American society; which relied instead on church-run private schools that mostly charged fees for tuition. The spread of compulsory attendance in the Massachusetts tradition throughout America, especially for Native Americans, has been credited to General Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt used techniques developed on Native Americans in a prisoner of war camp in Fort Marion, Augustine, Florida, to force demographic minorities across America into government schools. His prototype was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
Variation in countries
Some kind of education is compulsory to all people in most countries, but different localities vary in how many years or grades of education they require and in whether it needs to be in a school or can be provided at home. Due to population growth and the proliferation of compulsory education, UNESCO calculated in 2006 that over the subsequent 30 years more people would receive formal education than in all prior human history. It is possible in many countries for parents to provide education for children by homeschooling, although this is often monitored for adherence to national standards.
Criticism
Compulsory education has been criticized on various grounds:
- The belief that it encroaches on the rights of children
- The belief that it encroaches on the rights of parents
- The belief that, historically, compulsory education is not guided by altruism
- The belief that it implicitly teaches authoritarianism
- The belief that the variety of children's individual growth cannot be supported within an imposed structure
See also
- Education Index
- Public education
- Public school (government funded)
- Child Labor
- Homeschooling
- Home education in the United Kingdom
- Unschooling
- Anti-schooling activism
- Raising of school leaving age
- Workforce
- Home School Legal Defense Association
- Democratic education
References
Further reading
- Coleman, J. S., et al. (1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.
- Dunlap, Knight. "Is Compulsory Education Justified?," The American Mercury, February 1929.
- Epstein, R. (2007). Let's abolish high school. Education Week. Retrieved April 18, 2007, from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/04/04/31epstein.h26.html
- Gatto, J. T. (2003). The Underground History of American Education. New York: The Oxford Village Press.
- Holt, J. (1974). Escape from childhood. In Noll, J.W. (Ed.), Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues (pp. 25â€"29). Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill.
- Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.
- O'Keeffe, D. (2004). Libertarian Alliance. Compulsory education: An oxymoron of modernity. Retrieved April 16, 2007, from http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/educn/educn036.htm
- Rothbard, M. (1978). Public and compulsory schooling. In For a New Liberty (chap. 7). Retrieved April 12, 2007, from http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty6.asp
- Van Horn Melton, J. (1988). Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- West, E. G. (1974). The economics of compulsion. In The Twelve-Year Sentence. Retrieved April 11, 2007, from http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/pdfs/economics%20of%20compulsion.pdf
- http://www.nhliberty.org/bills/view/2011/HB542
External links
- The Principle and Practice of Compulsion in Education
- A discussion of compulsory education as a human right (Right to education Project)
- From enforced schooling to self-directed learning A survey and a critique of compulsory education.
- Why Education is Broken Author Isamu Fukui shares his thoughts on the educational system and why it doesn't work.
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