Westberg, Johannes

English

Sandin's dissertation made a key contribution to the first wave of the so-called new history of education, which questioned previous celebratory accounts of progress and instead critically examined the relationship between education and society. In the introduction to his dissertation, Sandin clearly positioned himself by introducing American revisionists to the Swedish field, acknowledging Michael Katz, Carl Kaestle, David Tyack, and the aforementioned Bowles and Gintis. The introductory chapter also contained a healthy dose of Michel Foucault's analysis of discipline. As a result of this updated theoretical framework and the extensive empirical exploration of early modern schooling that stemmed from this, Sandin's dissertation remains a self-evident reference for Swedish research on early modern as well as nineteenth-century schooling

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   University of GroningenSchooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden by Bengt SandinWestberg, JohannesPublished in:The Journal of the History of Childhood and YouthIMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite fromit. Please check the document version below.Document VersionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordPublication date:2021Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research databaseCitation for published version (APA):Westberg, J. (2021). Schooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden by Bengt Sandin. TheJournal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 14(3), 483-486.CopyrightOther than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of theauthor(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons).The publication may also be distributed here under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license.More information can be found on the University of Groningen website: https://www.rug.nl/library/open-access/self-archiving-pure/taverne-amendment.Take-down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons thenumber of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum.Download date: 08-06-2022Schooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden by Bengt Sandin (review) Johannes WestbergThe Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 14, Number3, Fall 2021, pp. 483-486 (Review)Published by Johns Hopkins University PressFor additional information about this article[ Access provided at 10 Jan 2022 08:14 GMT from University of Groningen ]https://muse.jhu.edu/article/804287Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 483working-class women, who had long been stuck in the factory and domestic service. The share of women wage earners in office and sales work rose from 5 percent in 1880 to 40 percent by 1930.The downside of this success story was that by the 1930s, clerical work was coming to be defined as a pink-collar occupation, largely filled by working-class women, while the upper-level, white-collar jobs were largely populated with middle-class men. And that process of occupational segregation was the result of the other great educational success story of this period, the rise of business education in American colleges. Traditionally, young people had worked their way into business positions through on-the-job training rather than formal schooling. But in the early twentieth century, charting a path through college business programs offered advantages to both employers and employees. Companies relished the idea that recruiting college graduates shifted training costs to the student; this served as a social class filter for prospects and gave business the aura of a profession. In addition, prospective employees gained a credential that buffered them against competition from upwardly mobile high school graduates. Once again, American education was demonstrating its skill at both providing opportunity and protecting privilege.By the 1930s, the enormous expansion of American secondary and college education had created a lot of social mobility into white-collar work but did nothing to promote social equality. Laborers became clerks and clerks became professionals, so relative positions were unchanged. The difference was that educational credentials now patrolled the border between social classes. As Groeger notes, it was not the growth of education but the growth of industrial unions in the 1930s that finally created a real redistribution of wealth and power.David F. LabareeStanford UniversitySchooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden.By Bengt Sandin.Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xxvi + 420 pp. Cloth €99.99,  e-book €85.59.A lthough historian of education Gunnar Richardson just a few years earlier had provocatively asked whether the history of education had been forgotten in Sweden, the mid-1980s proved to be extremely fertile years for the field. Inspired by a wide range of scholars applying critical conflict perspectives on 484  Book Reviews society—including Louis Althusser, Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, Samuel Bowles, and Herbert Gintis—a new generation of Swedish researchers (and future professors) examined education and its history in fresh and innovative ways. The most influential publications included Tomas Englund’s exercise in Swedish curriculum theory, Curriculum as a Political Problem: Changing Educational Conceptions, with Special Reference to Citizenship Education (1986), Christina Florin’s exploration of professionalization and feminization among nineteenth-century primary school teachers in Kampen om katedern (1987), and, not the least, Bengt Sandin’s dissertation on early modern schooling: Hemmet, gatan, fabriken eller skolan [The Home, Street, Factory or School], published in 1986.Sandin’s dissertation made a key contribution to the first wave of the so-called new history of education, which questioned previous celebratory accounts of progress and instead critically examined the relationship between education and society. In the introduction to his dissertation, Sandin clearly positioned himself by introducing American revisionists to the Swedish field, acknowledging Michael Katz, Carl Kaestle, David Tyack, and the aforemen-tioned Bowles and Gintis. The introductory chapter also contained a healthy dose of Michel Foucault’s analysis of discipline. As a result of this updated theoretical framework and the extensive empirical exploration of early modern schooling that stemmed from this, Sandin’s dissertation remains a self-evident reference for Swedish research on early modern as well as nineteenth-century schooling.That this landmark dissertation now is available for a wider English-speaking audience is thus a great service to the field. In this edition, the intro-ductory chapter has been fundamentally revised. While Foucault’s concept of discipline remains central to Sandin’s analysis of what he terms a fundamental transformation of governance in the early modern era, the revised introduc-tory chapter places a stronger emphasis on the concepts of family, space, and childhood. The empirical chapters remain, however, largely as they were. Chapter 2 presents popular education in the seventeenth century and includes an insightful analysis of the debate on education at the diocesan synod of Uppsala. Chapter 3 explores the case of Stockholm during the late seventeenth century, chapter 4 deals with urban education during the eighteenth century, and chapter 5 urban schooling in the first half of the nineteenth century, using examples from Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. The last empirical chap-ter—chapter 6—addresses nineteenth-century schooling from the perspective of families and the schools. The concluding chapter 7 has been revised and extended. Here, early modern schooling is linked both to the needs of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 485laboring poor and to the government’s intentions to control the moral condi-tions of lower-class families.Since the publication of Sandin’s dissertation in 1986, both our world and research on the history of education have changed drastically. In Sweden, the field has shown remarkable signs of expansion: my dataset of dissertations on the history of education includes about 290 dissertations published 1990–2019, and during the twentieth century, a Nordic educational network, a Nordic journal, and seven Nordic conferences in educational history have been held. Although one cannot expect Sandin to address the avalanche of research pub-lished nationally and internationally during this period—consider, for example, classics of the 1980s such as R. A. Houston’s Literacy in Early Modern Europe (1988), James van Horn Melton’s Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria and John Boli’s New Citizens for a New Society: The Institutional Origins of Mass Schooling in Sweden (1989), but also more recent publications, including Daniel Lindmark’s Reading, Writing and Schooling: Swedish Practices of Education and Literacy, 1650–1880 and Jeroen Dekker’s Educational Ambitions in History (2011)—the usefulness of this book would have increased by a more active engagement with this new literature, not least that examining Swedish conditions. It would certainly be interest-ing to link Sandin’s findings to those of Christian Lundahl’s dissertation on early modern assessment (2006), Gunilla Klose’s work on early modern school finance (1992/2011), Björn Norlin’s publications on early modern school spaces (2017, 2018, etc.), and Christoffer Åhlman’s dissertation on early modern female literacy (2018).Although it might be perceived as greedy, I would also have enjoyed further reflections on the theoretical perspectives employed. Despite that the general framework of educational institutions, families, and changing structures of gov-ernance remains valuable, I would have loved a discussion of its possibilities and limitations thirty-five years down the road. How should we now approach Bowles and Gintis’s social control thesis on urban schooling, and Mary Jo Maynes’s classic argument in Schooling for the People (1985) that “[s]chooling campaigns spawned in this [early modern] era bear the mark of fear, of the need to moralize and manage the poor”?I would also have been interested to learn how Sandin relates his choice of theoretical framework to the widening range of perspectives employed on schooling and literacy, linking education to determinants such as wealth, inequality, land ownership, political voice, but also to taxation, local school organization, teachers’ salaries, and the modernization of credit markets. How 486  Book Reviews does the analysis that he presents relate to such studies? While that question cannot be expected to fit the scope of this book, it remains intriguing and also leads to a set of valuable questions that this landmark dissertation poses: How has the field of educational history changed since the mid-1980s? What have we gained, and what have we lost?Johannes WestbergUniversity of Groningen, the Netherlands

Schooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden by Bengt Sandin

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Schooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden by Bengt Sandin

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