For most of history, most people never went to school. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia trained scribes; Greek cities and Rome educated the sons of families who could afford teachers; Chinese families prepared boys for the imperial examinations; monasteries, mosques and temples taught reading to future clergy. Literacy was a specialist skill. Estimates compiled by economic historians suggest that in 1820 only about one adult in eight worldwide could read. Today the figure is close to nine in ten. How did that happen?
Religion and reading
One early push came from religion. The Protestant Reformation taught that believers should read scripture for themselves, and in 1524 Martin Luther urged the councilmen of German cities to found and maintain Christian schools, for girls as well as boys. In New England, a 1647 Massachusetts law, known as the Old Deluder Satan Act after its opening words, required towns of fifty households to appoint a teacher of reading and writing, and towns of one hundred households to keep a grammar school. Its stated reason was that ignorance of scripture served the devil. In the seventeenth century the Czech educator John Amos Comenius went further. In his Great Didactic he argued that all children, rich and poor, boys and girls, should be taught, and that teaching should follow the natural order of a child's growth.
States take charge
The second push came from states. Prussia issued school decrees early in the eighteenth century, and its General School Regulations of 1763 required rural children to attend school for several years, from about age five until they could read and knew their catechism, usually around thirteen or fourteen. Prussian rulers wanted literate, pious, loyal subjects and better soldiers. Enforcement was patchy at first, but by the nineteenth century Prussian schools, with trained teachers and graded classes, drew visitors from abroad.
One visitor was Horace Mann. He toured Prussian schools in 1843 and praised their teacher training in his report the next year, while warning against copying their obedience to the crown. Mann's campaign for common schools, free public schools paid for by taxes and open to all children, spread across the northern United States. In 1852 Massachusetts passed the first general compulsory attendance law in the United States; by 1918 every state had one. England's Elementary Education Act of 1870 set up board schools where church schools were lacking, and attendance became compulsory a decade later. France's Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882 made primary school free, compulsory and secular. Japan's government announced a national school system in 1872, early in its rapid modernization.
Why nations built schools
Historians debate the motives, and they were mixed. Rulers wanted loyal citizens. Reformers wanted to rescue children from mines and mills. Churches wanted believers who could read. Industrial employers wanted punctual, literate workers. Parents often wanted the doors that reading opened. Some historians argue that ordinary families drove much of the early growth, paying for local schools before any law required them. In many countries mass schooling spread alongside nation building, as governments used schools to teach a standard language and a national story to children who grew up speaking many dialects. At the time of the French Revolution, a large share of French people did not speak standard French at home; a century of schooling changed that.
Who was left out
The spread was never even. Several American slave states made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read, which is why so many saw literacy as a path to freedom. Girls in many countries got less schooling than boys, or a different curriculum aimed at the home. Colonial governments often educated a small local elite to serve the administration while leaving most children without schools. Indigenous children in Canada, the United States and Australia were sent to boarding schools designed to strip away their languages and cultures; Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2015 on the harms done by its residential schools. Mass schooling could open minds, and it could also be used to control them.
Worked example: were schools built to make factory workers?
A popular claim online says modern schools copy a Prussian model designed to produce obedient factory workers, with bells, rows of desks and fixed periods. The claim deserves a fair test. It is true that Prussia was an early leader and that Mann and others borrowed from it. It is also true that some industrialists favored schooling for punctual workers. But the dates fit poorly. Prussia's 1763 regulations came long before German industrialization took off in the middle of the nineteenth century, and their stated aims were religious and political, not industrial. The Massachusetts law of 1647 came earlier still. Many reformers also pushed schooling to get children out of factories, not into them. A more careful summary is that schools were shaped by many aims at once: religion, nation building, citizenship and work. The bell and the row of desks have a history, but no single cause explains them, and a slogan that names one cause hides the others.