The Primary Education System in Imperial Austria: Vice or Virtue? A Review of Schooling under Control by Tomáš Cvrček

Abstract

Schooling under control, written by Tomáš Cvrček, is an ambitious and stimulating book. It offers a quantitative reconstruction of the diffusion of mass education in Imperial Austria, from the landmark Theresian school reform (1774) up to the liberal school reform passed in 1869. The evolution of the school system and of primary education is analysed through a variety of dimensions: the institutional foundations of the system (chapter 1), the quantitative expansion of enrolments and attendance (chapter 2), the financing (chapter 3), the teachers (chapter 4), and the pupils (chapter 5). Chapter 6 includes an aspect that is often neglected in this type of studies, which is a focus on the quality of education provided – meaning whether more schooling led to more actual learning. Chapter 7 then explains the way that the Liberal school reform of 1869 came into place. Such broad issues are, in turn, further dissected into other dimensions, like gender educational inequality, differences in schooling across different linguistic groups, and the rural-urban divide, among others. This impressive research effort, which involves thorough quantitative as well as qualitative analysis, is sustained by an extensive knowledge of the subject and of the literature and historiography on schooling reforms within Imperial Austria. Indeed, one of the main declared goals of the book is to challenge existing views on the legislation that first introduced mass education in this area of Central and Eastern Europe. While previous scholars, Cvrček maintains, have seen the 1774 legislation as a landmark reform that gave a decisive impulse to the rise of mass education in Austria, the data and evidence presented in the book show that the Theresian reform – far from prompting an abrupt acceleration in primary-schooling rates – actually held back the development of a modern school system in the region. The author clearly possesses in-depth understanding of the subject and commands the relevant literature within both history and economics. Given its aims, the book mainly targets historians of education who have focused on the political history of the Theresian reform and assumed that mass education would not have taken off without this legislation. The author, instead, argues that the development of mass education was mainly demand-driven during the century analysed within the