ABSTRACT
Respect for education had for long been a characteristic of the ruling classes of Europe, no matter what their political convictions or the constitutional régimes under which they lived. In Austria and Prussia in the age of Metternich a great deal of intellectual energy was lavished on academic work, energy which in Britain or France was spent on political speculation and parliamentary activity. Even in tsarist Russia the government and the aristocracy had, since the days of Catherine the Great, regarded scholarship and literature with great reverence. Slowly in the course of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment the belief had emerged that everyone down to the poorest peasant should be provided with an education, at least to the level of literacy. In countries moving towards democracy, where an ever wider section of the population was securing representation in the political system, it became a matter of vital concern that the people should be educated. Opinion may have differed as to whether literacy should be a requisite for the vote, but most thinking people by the mid-nineteenth century agreed that if the vote had been granted, then at least literacy, and if possible a further stage of education, should quickly follow. The ruling representatives of the people were beginning to feel the need, as Robert Lowe put it, to ‘educate their masters’. The nineteenth century is thus important in the history of education because it witnessed the development of systems of state education in most European countries.
