In this paper, secondary education graduation age is proposed as a way of measuring the obstacles students had to face to acquire education in historical contexts. Using a novel historical source, I find that students from rural areas bore increasingly larger obstacles than those from cities. The size of the municipality of origin exerts a larger negative effect on students who graduated later in life—that is, those who bore larger impediments to study. These results suggest that a phenomenon of spatial isolation from knowledge created a problem of access to secondary education.

The development of modern educational systems radically altered the way knowledge and skills were transmitted. Yet, while elementary schooling rapidly expanded in late 19th and early twentieth centuries, secondary education struggled to find its way. This was also the case in Spain where, despite a growing demand, the provision of public secondary education during the second half of the 19th century was rather limited. As a result, private education, and especially that promoted by the Church, rushed to fill in the gap. Using a new database with municipal-level data, we examine what drove the expansion of private schools. As expected, demand-pull factors were critical. Still, the interplay between local forces and private agents should not be overlooked, especially as the State lacked the financial muscle and political will to broaden access to secondary education, whereas the Church was searching for a niche from which to consolidate its position in the nascent liberal society.

Historians of economic thought have carried out detailed studies of classical and marginalist approaches to value based on production cost and utility respectively, not to mention about the fusion of both interpretations by the neoclassical school. This is not the case with rareness value, a theory commonly attributed to Léon Walras, although Aristotle surely had rareness in mind when he first attempted to explain chrematistics. This article focuses on how our understanding of rareness has evolved from the earliest economic formulations to those of Auguste and Léon Walras, contesting Rothbard’s thesis that there is only one way in which the transmission of the utility theory of value can be tracked from scholasticism to the Austrian school. On the contrary, the concept of rareness continued to figure in some theories of value of the French Enlightenment, especially those that emerged within Calvinist circles, and was recovered in times of reaction against the dominant classicism.

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