Imagine All the PeopleLiterature, Society, and Cross-National Variation in Education Systems

Introduction

HAS there ever been a more winsome protagonist in a coming-of-age story than David Copperfield? Charles Dickens’ David remains plucky against victimization by unjust social structures and triumphs through perseverance and unflagging optimism. In contrast, young Valdemar is the architect of his own undoing in H. F. Ewald’s Danish novel, The Youth of Valdemar Krone. Unlike David, the hapless Valdemar has only himself to blame for his youthful transgressions, but life improves when he submits to the moral strictures of God, society, and the Danish fatherland. These stories illustrate the tendency in many British novels for the hero’s personal struggle to enable eventual triumph while Danish novels more frequently locate success in interventions that guide youth back to societal duties. Authors in both countries write novels of accountability (protagonists confront internal limits) and empowerment (they battle repression).¹ But even in British novels of accountability, personal struggles with morality rather than acquiescence to societal norms enable coming of age.

These seemingly innocuous stories of young boys forging their way to maturity have profound implications for the counterintuitive trajectories of modern education systems in Britain and Denmark. Despite their nineteenth-century political economies, poor, agricultural Denmark became a leader in public, mass primary education (1814) and secondary vocational training, while rich, industrial Britain did not create public, mass schooling until 1870, and embraced unitary, academic secondary education.

I suggest that differences in literary narratives about education, the individual, and society influence education policy choices in Britain and Denmark. British narratives helped to construct an individualistic educational culture (initially for upper- and middle-class youth) by portraying schooling as essential to individual self-development. Reformers later sought general, rather than vocational, secondary schools to assure equality of educational opportunity across classes. Conversely, Danish narratives nurtured a collectivist educational culture that posited schooling as crucial for building a strong society. Early mass education constituted social investment, and differentiation of secondary education tracks was necessary to meet diverse societal needs.

Writers are political agents in this story. They collectively debate issues in their works and thereby convey their views to political leaders in predemocratic regimes prior to reform episodes. They rework cultural symbols and themes from an earlier age to address new challenges, and embed assumptions about education, the individual, and society in their stories. Authors’ narratives contribute to cognitive frames about social and economic problems and help other elites to formulate preferences regarding education options. Fiction is particularly well-suited to imbuing issues with emotional salience, as readers are moved by the suffering and triumphs of protagonists in ways that scholarly essays find difficult to achieve. Thus fiction may enhance the emotional commitment to schooling and influence assessments of marginal groups. Writers’ depictions are not deterministic, but like political policy legacies, the cultural touchstones of these created worlds constrain political institutional development.

I engage two methods to substantiate these claims. First, I analyze corpora of 562 British and 521 Danish works of fiction from 1700 to 1920 with computational linguistics techniques to show how narratives, through their reading, may have provided meaning to policymakers developing education options. I document cross-national and temporal differences, and discuss their association with diverse education system choices. Quantitative analyses show significantly higher frequencies of individualism, feeling, and upper-class words in British text surrounding education words than in Danish text, supporting the idea that education in Britain is geared to individual self-development. Danish education snippets have significantly higher frequencies of words referencing societal goals than the British snippets.

Second, I use case studies to show that writers are crucial political actors in important reforms, and suggest mechanisms by which literary narratives contribute to policy paths. For example, Ludvig Holberg, the father of Danish literature, depicted a model education system in his popular eighteenth-century utopian novel, Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground.² He gave his fortune to the Sorø Academy, a school for elite Danish children, which hired his former students as teachers and then implemented his educational ideas. The academy educated the future ministers...