Agustina S. Paglayan
Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education
Order on Amazon. Princeton University Press, The Princeton Economic History of the Western World book series.
How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state’s desire to control its citizens
Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey, Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or fueled by democratic ideals, or even aimed at eradicating illiteracy or improving skills. It was motivated instead by elites’ fear of the masses—and the desire to turn the “savage,” “unruly,” and “morally flawed” children of the lower classes into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws.
Drawing on unparalleled evidence from two centuries of education provision in Europe and the Americas, and deploying rich data that capture the expansion of primary education and its characteristics, this sweeping book offers a political history of primary schools that is both broad and deep. Paglayan shows that governments invested in primary schools when internal threats heightened political elites’ anxiety around mass violence and the breakdown of social order.
Two hundred years later, the original objective of disciplining children remains at the core of how most public schools around the world operate. The future of education systems—and their ability to reduce poverty and inequality—hinges on our ability to understand and come to terms with this troubling history.
Praise
“This marvelous book addresses a central paradox in economic development: human capital is central to prosperity, but state efforts at primary schooling often have hugely disappointing payoffs. Agustina Paglayan’s resolution of the paradox is that states did not primarily intend schooling to increase worker skills. Their motivation for schooling was to indoctrinate citizens to accept the political status quo. This empirically compelling research will forever change thinking about education.”
—WILIAM EASTERLY, author of The Tyranny of Experts, The White Man's Burden, and The Elusive Quest for Growth
“A profound and path-breaking book. Primary education systems emerged fundamentally as a state-building tool to increase the state’s capacity to forge social order through indoctrination. Using original data collection across the world, statistical analyses, archival evidence, and carefully crafted case studies, this masterful analysis is an essential book for scholars of comparative politics and policymakers alike.”
—BEATRIZ MAGALONI, Stanford University
“The creation of mass education is not about economic productivity, but about state formation and social control. You will never think about human capital the same way after reading this path-breaking and iconoclastic book.”
—JAMES A. ROBINSON, University of Chicago, coauthor of The Narrow Corridor and Why Nations Fail
“This sweeping and impressive work forces us to rethink well-accepted ideas about the relationship of the state, democracy, and modern education. A major contribution to the study of state-building and comparative politics generally.”
—DANIEL ZIBLATT, Harvard University