ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that placing schools into the context of a comparative history of social welfare enables us to better understand the history of social welfare and state-making in two respects. First, commitment to schooling can be an important aspect of enhancing state capacity, which has implications for other aspects of social welfare. This is particularly true for the United States, where, because public education expenditures are social transfers, the American consensus about public education has been critical. In a country with a weak sense of public responsibility, the American attitude surrounding the importance of public education has stood out as a long-standing exception. Second, paying attention to the history of mass schooling forces us to think carefully about the issues of centralization and decentralization in the making of the welfare state. Scholars of the welfare state have generally assumed that growing centralization of democratic governments proceeded rapidly in Europe in comparison to the United States, advances in social benefits.
