Papers Relative to Codification and Public Instruction

Bentham, Jeremy; Schofield, P. R.; Harris, Jonathan

doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00089251

Cited by 7 publications

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“…Whereas in the ancien regime education was a religious, moral, and above all else, a private endeavor (Cressy 1976), in nineteenth-century social theories, it centrally functioned as the rationalized means of societal progress, touching on nearly every aspect of personal, social, political, and economic life. So much was quite explicit in the works of Condorcet (1976 [1791]) and Comte (1968 [1855]) but also in the works of prominent British social-scientific thinkers such as Robert Owen (1969: 69–148), Jeremy Bentham (Bentham 1988), Herbert Spencer (1859), Francis Galton (1873), and Karl Pearson (1905: 94). For example, in contrast to earlier arguments about state-sponsored education made by Adam Smith (1986: 307) and Thomas Malthus (1890: 497) emphasizing sparing state intervention for the poor to maintain moral and social order, nineteenth-century British theorists saw secular state schooling as the chief means of greater happiness and progress (Owen 1969: 99); especially important in understanding self and society (Spencer 1859); and particularly critical in struggles of national survival on the world stage (Pearson 1905: 21; 94).…”

Section: Social Scientization and The Expansive Political Purposes Of...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Visions of deliverance: Social scientization, functionalism, and the expansive purposiveness of state schooling in nineteenth-century British parliamentary politics

Smith

2023

Soc. sci. hist.

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Early in the nineteenth century, members in the UK Parliament (MPs) hardly ever debated education. When they did, it was nearly always in the context of aid for the religious instruction of the poor. Indeed, even by 1850, nearly two decades after the first Great Reform Act (1832), the Prime Minister Lord John Russell made the case that a system of compulsory state schooling would be immoral and un-British. Yet, by the ‘80s, MPs debating in Westminster routinely drew connections between schooling and the most critical social issues of the day: social-class mobility and equity, child welfare, national development, emigration, and the civil service, among others. What explains the expanding, and expansive, political uses that elite policymakers put to schooling? How did schooling and education take on such an aggrandized role in society for British statesmen? To address these questions, this paper combines natural language processing techniques, semantic network, discourse, and regression analyses to read and interpret the ∼1.1 million political speeches given in the UK Houses of Parliament during the long nineteenth century (1804–1913). In contrast to explanations emphasizing the direct role that economic, social, and political development as well as conflict played in the UK state’s historic expansion, this piece demonstrates how social scientization, the sweeping international epistemic movement that institutionalized and diffused functionalist social theory, created the context that made it possible for political elites to see and promote schooling as an effective policy instrument of greater cultural rationalization supporting the development of capitalist industrial society.

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Section: Social Scientization and The Expansive Political Purposes Of...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Visions of deliverance: Social scientization, functionalism, and the expansive purposiveness of state schooling in nineteenth-century British parliamentary politics

Smith

2023

Soc. sci. hist.

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“…State schooling became entrenched in the polity’s order of business, broadly relevant to an ever-wider gamut of political issues pertaining to societal progress and civilizational advance: the need for a consolidated national society, social and economic development, and the reduction of poverty and crime, among others (Smith 2023). In fact, both Robert Owen and Jeremy Bentham at the beginning of the century consciously and explicitly promoted modern secular national education as the state’s chief means of achieving greater cultural rationalization: making people, and the systems organizing them, more rational and more efficient [Bentham (1811–1817) 1988, (1816) 1983; Owen (1824) 1969]. Karl Pearson, at the century’s end, similarly saw state schooling as the central survival mechanism in a Hobbesian (and white supremacist) world of civilizational clash [Pearson 1905].…”

Section: Education Social Scientization and The Nation-state Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Making of the Modern State: Social Scientization and Education Legislation in the United Kingdom, 1800–1914

Smith

2023

Arch. eur. sociol.

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Until the 19th century, the UK state stayed out of education. Only in 1833 would Parliament first pass an act that subsidized education for the poor. By 1914, 160 education acts had been passed, consolidating into the state schooling system we recognize today. This paper seeks to explain this remarkable progression. I argue that the emergence of social-knowledge institutions across the West was a powerful force of cultural construction. What I term social scientization, this process was multidimensional and translocal, entailing the elaboration, reification, and diffusion of functionalist theories of the nation-state that centered national education as means to greater cultural rationalization. Longitudinal analyses on comprehensive population data comprising over 10,100 UK parliamentary acts support the core historical insight of this piece: increasingly routine and aggressive forms of state intervention in education were the progressive instantiation of the 19th-century nation-state model, which was fundamentally epistemic in character and inextricably linked to the expansive cultural content of the ascendant social sciences.

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Centralization versus Decentralization as a Risk‐Return Trade‐Off

Arcuri

Dari‐Mattiacci

2010

The Journal of Law and Economics

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Papers Relative to Codification and Public Instruction

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Visions of deliverance: Social scientization, functionalism, and the expansive purposiveness of state schooling in nineteenth-century British parliamentary politics

Visions of deliverance: Social scientization, functionalism, and the expansive purposiveness of state schooling in nineteenth-century British parliamentary politics

The Making of the Modern State: Social Scientization and Education Legislation in the United Kingdom, 1800–1914

Centralization versus Decentralization as a Risk‐Return Trade‐Off

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