Adrian Matus reviews Agustina Paglayan’s Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education (Princeton University Press, 2024, 384 p.)
The state’s intervention in education is rarely an innocent enterprise. Some approaches have an optimistic undertone: they favor the provision of mass education as a policy tool to improve the skills of the population. The reasons that led to the development of primary education, in this regard, are democratization, industrialization and military rivalry. Other intellectuals are more suspicious about the altruistic premise of mass education. Instead of approaching mass education as a tool for expanding democratic values, they believe that mass education was created by choosing values and beliefs and leads to what Benedict Anderson famously named an imagined community. Therefore, any consensus on this topic has yet to be reached. Still, from Michel Foucault’s well-known comparison of schools to prisons to Émile Durckheim’s insistence that moral regulation underpins any pedagogy, most of the philosophers and social scientists alike highlighted how mass education was a vehicle of mass discipline.
Following this scholarship, Agustina Paglayan’s Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, published in 2024, argues that far from a democratic gift, primary education in the West emerged from the need of the modern states to control their citizens. Paglayan provides a strong background for the unfolding of this argument. As an expert in education policy and politics, the author teaches courses on Latin American education and politics at the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego. While the thesis of the book seems straightforward, Paglayan’s main contribution is in demonstrating her argument using various datasets, enrollment statistics, and analysis. The claim, as the title Raised to Obey suggests, is that education did not spread for social mobility or building skills, but because education mellowed people, made them easier to govern. More specifically, the question that the book answers is: to what extent did the state-regulated mass education gain political traction solely to maintain social order?
Paglayan insists that the key to understanding modern primary education lies in the need of modern states to control their citizens. Conversely, she acknowledges other reasons for the expansion of primary education, namely ”social demands for improvements in the standards of living”, “increase the skills of the population”, “shape the moral character”, or “promote a common language.” Yet, as Paglayan implies, these factors obscure the main issue at hand: the direct causation between mass education and the need to maintain social order. As she claims,
“national elites’ fears of social disorder played a central role in giving political traction to the educational ideas.” (30)
But why did states feel such an urgency for population control? What prompted them to use mass education to create social discipline? To address these questions, we need to draw connections, as Paglayan does, between the changes in school enrollment rates and the political and social shocks the states faced over the past two centuries. These factors, not industrialization or democratization, influenced the expansion of primary schools. Paglayan claims that the numbers from the dataset are particularly revealing. For instance, while in the 1850s, only a small segment of the world’s children attended primary school, by the 1940s the majority did, and by the year 2000 nearly all children were admitted to primary school. This trend might imply linear progress, but Paglayan observes an anomaly in the timeline. In some areas, such as Latin America, this expansion of education did not coincide with the rise of industrialization or democracy. The reason? Mass schooling were influenced not only by civil wars and conflicts, but also by other internal tensions, from food riots to peasant revolts.
As chapter two continues the argument, tensions and unrests shaped education more than we assume. Internal conflicts were more consistent indicators of the changes and expansion of curricula than industrialization, democratization, or interstate wars. To reinforce the argument, chapter three explains the ways in which education could support state-building through obedience. The choice is to follow the historical evolution, from the eighteenth-century religious environments (particularly Pietist) to the late nineteenth-century primary school mass development. The idea of using schools for moral training met its supporters quickly. France, Chile, and Argentina passed laws that bore the same blueprint, using schools for social discipline. Chapter four tracks these reforms in detail, showing governments turning to education policies when they perceived that societal breakdown was around the corner.
State intervention in primary education is a modern affair. For centuries, this role was traditionally assigned exclusively to the Church and parents. Parents provided the moral compass, whilst the Church, especially in Protestant countries, provided the literacy tools for people to be able to read the Bible. Additionally, until the mid-nineteenth century, most of the states simply lacked the funds to promote education for all their citizens. At the same time, the monopoly of the Church over education was replaced by a modern government with an international and colonial administration. Chapter five discusses this precise topic: Paglayan argues that both the government elites and the Church considered that education should shape the moral character of their future citizens. Yet, the disagreement between the two was on the issue of the inclusion of religious teaching as the new moral education. Chapter seven moves from the focus of the nineteenth century to shed light on the more recent cases in which governments, fearing uprisings, invested in education for indoctrination purposes.
These arguments are extremely familiar to anyone who has read Foucault or Bourdieu, but Paglayan provides the empirical pillars to build a solid demonstration. This consists of the school enrollment statistics from forty-two countries in Europe and the Americas from 1828 to the present (33). As Paglayan states, this dataset is the broadest so far:
“This effort yielded a new dataset that covers a longer time period for Europe and the Americas than any other previously assembled cross-country dataset” (33)
By using the impressive primary sources, Paglayan brings nuanced and fresh perspectives to Ernest Gellner or Benedict Anderson’s reflections about the links between nationalism and educational standardization. As she observes,
“each of these theories makes predictions that do not align well with the general timing of the rise and spread of primary education systems, or with the characteristics of these systems in Western countries” (26)
Paglayan deconstructs Gellner’s argument that industrialization required education. Her observations from both Latin America and Europe reveal that the curriculum at the beginning of the industrial revolution did not focus on technical or numerical skills, but rather on the moral component. What Paglayan recovers from Gellner’s argument is the need for a docile working class, which was created through education. On broader terms, the emphasis is that we should not rush to claim that there is a consistent link between industrialization, nation-building, and the rise of primary education in the nineteenth century.
The insistence on the top-down approach, in which governments simply design curricula to be diligently followed by the citizens, of course, comes with limits. According to Paglayan, this process took away the agency of social reformers, teachers, parents, and pupils themselves, reducing them to mere mitigatory roles towards state intervention. Other cases might provide nuances. For instance, in Central Europe, Czech-language schools became an instrument of cultural revival under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and provided a parallel educational framework to the official Austro-Hungarian one. In Romania, the teachers resisted Spiru Haret’s visionary reforms. Such cases show that whilst elite anxiety was a crucial factor in designing primary education, they often faced resistance from other educational stakeholders.
Despite Pagalyan’s seemingly comprehensive coverage, the most glaring omission in her work is the missing agency of the teachers in primary schools. Chapter five implies they were mere functionaries. Yet, as Gogol’s 1836 The Government Inspector shows, there are nuances to this point. The schoolmaster, called to present before the government inspector, trembles and stutters. On one hand, this can be interpreted as the teacher indeed was a fragile intermediary who was terrified by bureaucrats and, therefore, simply obeyed and imposed authority. At the same time, the reaction of the students is worth taking into account. The students laughed and ignored the teachers, which reinforces the argument that certain ideas and attitudes escaped surveillance even in the face of direct power. Described as “hidden transcripts” by James C. Scott, such attitudes and ideas offer a different perspective. Every authority performance was shadowed by murmurs, jokes, and evasions that built an alternative discourse to the dominant narrative of elite control of education. In public, students bowed before the teachers, whilst privately, they ridiculed, ignored or sabotaged them. Gogol’s depiction of the students laughing at the trembling schoolmaster destabilized the image of school as a fortress of obedience.
Despite its limitations, Raised to Obey irrefutably demonstrates a point that historians and philosophers alike have stated for a long time: the expansion of primary education cannot be separated from the politics of law and order. The substantial contribution of this work lies in the numerous datasets, which clearly deconstruct Gellner’s claim that education was a direct result of industrialization. In this regard, educators, curriculum designers, educational policy makers, and historians alike will find this book particularly revealing. Yet, the daily negotiations, small resistances, “hidden narratives” of teachers, pupils, and parents matter. Such interactions rarely leave an archival trace, as the reports of misbehavior, quiet subversions, and micro tensions were recorded in a less systematic way. Paglayan could use this more human story of education to enrich her study. James C. Scott’s “hidden narratives” escape from the official records on which Raised to Obey precisely relies on.
Adrian Matus is editor at the Review of Democracy.
