 The making of a liberal education: Political economy of Austrian school reform, 1865 - 1875Tomas Cvrcek () and Miroslav Zajicek No 2017-3, UCL SSEES Economics and Business working paper series from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) Abstract: The rise of mass schooling is an important contributor to modern economic growth. But its form, content, scale and manner of provision are all matters of public policy that are subject to politics. The rise of modern schooling is frequently cast as a product of broadened suffrage and stronger political voice of the masses, which overcame the political opposition from old ruling elites. We investigate this hypothesis, using the case of a school reform undertaken in Imperial Austria in 1869. We show that while landowners were less likely to vote for school modernization than urban and business interests, the strongest opposition came from the rural areas where the suffrage was in fact most numerous. The reform passed in spite of their opposition but, interestingly, post-reform developments suggest that passive resistance to it continued in the countryside in spite of the alleged benefits that education was billed to bring the masses. Keywords: mass schooling; political economy; Austria-Hungary (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:see:wpaper:2017:3 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in UCL SSEES Economics and Business working paper series from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.