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Education and Social Integration: Comprehensive Schooling in Europe

Article in European Educational Research Journal · March 2011

DOI: 10.2304/eerj.2011.10.1.160

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European Educational Research Journal
Volume 10 Number 1 2011
www.wwwords.eu/EERJ

REVIEW ESSAY

Education and Social Integration:

comprehensive schooling in Europe

MARKUS MAURER
Institute of Upper Secondary and Vocational Education,
University of Zurich, Switzerland

Education and Social Integration:

comprehensive schooling in Europe
SUSANNE WIBORG, 2009
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
256 pages, ISBN 978 1 40398 371 8, £55

The Larger Comparative Education Context

Since the early days of what has become to be known as comparative education, authors of this
discipline have tried to understand how and why educational systems change. Their key
assumption has been that the respective evidence can be more convincingly produced if different
systems are compared in order to find, on the one hand, factors that are common to many systems
and that allow for the explanation of similarities in educational systems, and to trace, on the other
hand, underlying factors that differ between cases, thus accounting for different trajectories of
educational systems (Schriewer, 2000). At the time, when debates in the discipline were probably
most controversial, the theoretical perspectives underlying many important contributions to
comparative education were strongly influenced by grand, macro-sociological theories, generally
referring to either functionalist or neo-Marxist frameworks that stood quite in opposition to each
other but shared a common focus on endogenous – i.e. intra-societal – factors driving educational
change (see, for example, Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Smelser, 1985). Given the relative homogeneity of
the strands of research, many of these contributions added value to theoretical debates, even
though they often focused on single cases only. With the declining importance of the grand
sociological theories in the social sciences in general (Menzel, 1991), and in comparative education
more specifically, the dominance of single case studies became, however, more problematic, given
that there was no framework to help researchers aggregate the evidence produced at a higher level.
At the same time, theories that emphasised the role of exogenous – i.e. extra-societal –factors
gained in prominence, with neo-institutionalist contributions, based on large macro-quantitative
evidence, probably becoming the single most important theoretical account of educational change
(Ramirez & Boli-Bennett, 1982; Meyer et al, 1992; Meyer & Ramirez, 2009). Thus, comparative
accounts that systematically examined similarities in endogenous processes underlying educational
change across countries became comparatively rare, even though much has been achieved in better
understanding the processes underlying the borrowing and lending of global models in education
and the modification of these models when being implemented in specific national contexts
(Schriewer, 2009; Steiner-Khamsi, 2009).

160 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.1.160
Review Essay

With her book on the emergence of comprehensive schooling in Europe, Susanne Wiborg
presents a study that puts endogenous factors underlying educational change at the centre of her
analysis. It is thus the aim of this book to develop a theory on the genesis of comprehensive
schooling – i.e. to explain why this model of schooling emerged in some countries (Denmark,
Norway and Sweden) and developed in a less marked way in two other countries (England and
Germany). The book certainly rises to its ambitious challenge. In fact, it has the potential to inspire
other work in comparative education aimed at avoiding the determinism of previous grand
sociological approaches to comparative education and insists, at the same time, on the necessity to
develop theories that are valid across countries, thus underlining similarities, and not
idiosyncrasies, in the process of educational change. Furthermore, the book is well written and
grounded in rich historical evidence. However, a critical reader may also find a couple of important
weaknesses. This article will address some of these issues. First, however, an outline of the book
and its key hypotheses is given, which is followed by a more detailed overview of the arguments of
the book.

Outline of the Book

Wiborg argues that the emergence of the comprehensive school model in the three Scandinavian
countries has been characterised by three decisive historic events, the totality of which was lacking
in the cases of the other two countries. The first of these three distinct events was the formation of
the middle school in the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the
twentieth century, which enabled the three countries to link together elementary and secondary
schools, which were initially catering to quite different social groups. The second historical event
was the abolition of the middle school on the grounds of social equity, a development which was
the immediate precondition for the comprehensive school to be established from the beginning of
the 1960s until the mid 1970s. The third historical event was the strengthening of the
comprehensive school model with the introduction of mixed-ability classes, thus overcoming
streaming into vocational and academic programmes and the setting of students according to
school results. In England and Germany, some of these reforms were implemented as well, but
never in a way that transformed the entire primary and lower secondary cycles. Whereas it was the
strong position of the grammar schools and their respective preparatory schools that was a barrier
for a primary/lower secondary ladder and a comprehensive national curriculum to be established
in England, it was the Gymnasium that hindered the implementation of the comprehensive school
model in Germany.
Wiborg’s study aims, however, to go beyond giving a descriptive account of these
developments. Rather, the major part of the book is dedicated to a causal analysis of the political
and social factors underlying educational change, thereby employing what has been termed the
‘macro-causal comparative method’, an approach that is – along the lines that have been described
by Mill in his seminal work on comparative methods – commonly applied in comparative historical
sociology (Ragin, 1987; Mahoney & Rueschemeyer, 2003). The key of the method is to trace
‘interrelated common causes that may have had a decisive effect on these outcomes’ (p. 13) – i.e. to
look for factors that can be found within the three – positive – cases where comprehensive
schooling has been introduced and that seem to be lacking in the two – negative – cases where
comprehensive schooling was not introduced. With the help of this method, causal factors can be
excluded that have only been important for single cases, such as the role of specific individuals in
the process of the formation of comprehensive schooling. Given the fact that, according to Wiborg,
no previous studies have theorised about the factors underlying the development of
comprehensive schooling across countries, she develops, on the basis of historical evidence, the
four following hypotheses to suggest why comprehensive schooling has developed in the three
Scandinavian countries:
• the respective educational systems, already in the nineteenth century, were experiencing a high
degree of integration as a result of comparatively high state involvement;
• the class structure in the three countries has been relatively egalitarian, thus allowing a higher
degree of children from the lower socio-economic strata to enter secondary schools;

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• political liberalism in these countries has been decisive for the establishment of a ladder system
of education, thereby undermining parallel systems of education;
• Social Democrats have, in these three countries, had sufficient political leverage to implement
egalitarian educational reforms.
In each of the main chapters of the book, Wiborg then tests one of the hypotheses. In the first
section of each of these chapters, a brief outline of the political development – for example, of state
formation or of the role of social democracy – is given for all five countries; in the second section,
the hypotheses are tested as such by analysing the consequences of the political preconditions for
educational changes in both the positive (the Scandinavian countries) and the negative cases
(England and Germany). The book ends with a concluding section that summarises the findings.

The Arguments in Detail

State Formation and Education
In the first analytical chapter of the book, Wiborg assesses the hypothesis that one important
condition for countries to develop comprehensive school systems was that their respective
educational systems underwent, as a result of comparatively high state involvement, a high degree
of integration in the nineteenth century. Largely following the lines of Green’s (1997) work on state
formation and education, it is argued that in the three Scandinavian countries, the establishment of
a unified national educational system was the result of intensified nation-building, which not only
required rulers to strengthen national identity and the competitiveness of their economies in the
context of rising nationalism in Europe, but also to build up strong central administrations, which
relied on a skilled intake. Particularly in Denmark and Sweden, where the upper socio-economic
strata had already been sending their offspring to schools for a long time, this development also
involved limiting the role of private schools and making public schools the core of educational
provision. In one of the negative cases (England), educational development in the eighteenth and
the nineteenth centuries was, however, very different, suggesting that the lack of reforms in this
period would cause barriers for the emergence of comprehensive schooling reforms later on. Given
that state institutions had been established in previous centuries and that the Industrial Revolution
had strengthened both the political and economic power of the ruling classes, there was no base for
a more unified national educational system to develop; a legacy that influences the structure of the
English educational system up to the present day. In contrast to the case of England, which
corroborates the hypothesis, the second negative case (Prussia/Germany) is illustrated as having
established, in the context of its nation-building efforts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a
strongly centralised and state-led educational system. The unification of the school system in
Prussia, Wiborg argues, could have been a fundament for more egalitarian reforms. However,
other factors, the role of which is theorised in the following hypotheses, were lacking in the
German case, thus hindering the emergence of a comprehensive school model.

Social Class Formation and Education

Wiborg’s second hypothesis suggests that one of the important preconditions for comprehensive
schooling to emerge in the three Scandinavian states was that their class structure was
comparatively egalitarian in the nineteenth century, thus allowing a greater number of children
from the lower socio-economic strata to enter secondary schools. The core argument is that, in
these countries, notably the rural population improved its social and political standing, and
subsequently obtained access to schools that were previously reserved for the upper socio-
economic strata – i.e. the nobility and emerging bourgeoisie. Certainly, there were very different
reasons for the development of a more egalitarian rural society in the three Scandinavian countries.
Whereas in Norway foreign rule by the Danes and the Swedes had never allowed rural elites to
develop, thus leaving the task of nation-building in the nineteenth century to a relatively socio-
economically homogenous society, the political and socio-economic status of the rural population
in Denmark was improved as a result of political reforms, which particularly affected the
distribution of land to the peasant population. In Sweden, the development of a relatively

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Review Essay

homogenous and comparatively better-off social stratum in the rural areas was, however, rather
the result of considerable overseas migration from rural areas, as the powerful nobility acted as a
barrier for egalitarian reforms. Against the backdrop of changes in the social structure of these
three countries, an increasing number of children from rural areas started to enter secondary
schools, a development which was paralleled by the fact that the public elementary schools, given
the considerable investments by the governments to improve their standards, were used by more
privileged socio-economic groups, notably by the bourgeoisie.
Whereas the societies in the three Scandinavian countries, argues Wiborg, became more
egalitarian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was no such development in England
or Germany. In England, the dominant political and social position of the nobility was – despite the
tremendous economic changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of
bourgeois entrepreneurs – hardly challenged, a process which was paralleled in Germany by the
unabated dominance of the landed nobles (Junkers) over the rural population. Whereas, however,
the comparatively inegalitarian social structure in England was reflected by unequal distribution of
access to schools, particularly at the secondary level, educational development in Germany was,
again, more akin to that of the Scandinavian countries. In fact, secondary schools, particularly in
the case of Prussia, were not only open to the most highly privileged classes but to sections of the
comparatively more disadvantaged rural population as well. Nevertheless, a lack of other
important factors in Germany would hinder, according to Wiborg, the emergence of a more
egalitarian school system.

The Role of Liberalism in Educational Change

A third important precondition for the development of comprehensive schooling in Scandinavia
was the role played by political liberalism in these countries. Wiborg points out that its influence
has been decisive for the establishment of a ladder system of education and for the parallel systems
of education to be undermined. In fact, in all three positive cases, liberalism developed to be one of
the core political movements in the nineteenth century and thereby had the support not only of the
bourgeoisie but also of a considerable part of the rural population. The key aim of the political
movement was, principally, to equalise the rights for political participation, but similarly important
was its critique of the missing link between elementary and secondary schooling. Thus, in all three
countries, the middle school was introduced, which would facilitate the transition of socio-
economically less advantaged groups from elementary to secondary school. The first country to
introduce this reform was Norway in 1869, with Denmark and Sweden, where the political
influence of the Liberals was considerably weaker, following in 1903 and 1905, respectively.
The middle-school reform never took off in Germany and England. According to Wiborg, the
lack of reform may not be very surprising in the case of Germany, where the Liberal Party never
managed to become a powerful political force, notably in the aftermath of German unification in
1871, during which time the political atmosphere was characterised by struggles between the
central government and the Catholic areas of the country, and by Bismarck’s suppression of social
democracy. In the case of England, however, the Liberals had become one of the key political
movements, but still there were barriers for egalitarian educational reforms. The reason for this can
be found in the fact that English liberalism focused mainly on economic – rather than on political –
freedom, thus advocating low state intervention into both economic and social development, a
position that ran, of course, counter to any attempts that would have strengthened the role of the
state in education. Thus, Wiborg argues in a modification of her original argument, it was mainly
liberalism in its social liberal form that facilitated the slow transition from segregated to more
egalitarian school systems in the three Scandinavian countries.

Social Democratic Parties and Egalitarian Educational Reforms

The fourth hypothesis suggested by Wiborg is certainly the one that is most commonly agreed
upon in the literature on the egalitarian educational systems of Scandinavia: laws for
comprehensive schools have, Wiborg argues, finally been enforced in the Scandinavian countries in
the twentieth century as their Social Democratic parties have been sufficiently long and

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comparatively unchallenged in power. The comprehensive school model was, however, not
introduced overnight; rather, it was the result of a sequence of changes in education policy that
were rooted in social democratic egalitarian ideology. The first important event in this regard was
the abolition of the middle school. As noted above, the school had been introduced to create a
bridge between the previously strongly separated elementary and secondary schools, but it was,
after a couple of decades, seen as a barrier for mass access to secondary schools by many involved
in education policy. The first country to abolish the middle school was Norway, where the Liberal
Party, in association with the Social Democrats, passed an Act providing for a seven-year
comprehensive school in 1920. In both Sweden and Norway, the process was somewhat
protracted, even though the Social Democratic Party became the leading political force in both
countries in the interwar period. In Sweden, the idea of the comprehensive school was slow to get
the backing of the majority of the Social Democratic Party; accordingly, the respective laws were
only passed at the end of the 1960s, though the reform was then, compared even to Norway,
radical in the sense that it laid the legal foundation for a comprehensive school of nine years and
was soon followed by reforms that abolished the streaming and setting of students. Similar to
Sweden, the middle school in Denmark was only abolished after the Second World War, in 1958,
with the introduction of a comprehensive school of seven years, which was extended to nine years
in 1975. In contrast to Norway and Sweden, however, the setting of students into classes of
different academic ability was retained in Denmark.
In both England and Germany, egalitarian education reforms were discussed by the key
political parties but never introduced to an extent that would have comprehensively transformed
the elementary and secondary school system. In England, the Labour Party, only partly inspired by
social democratic values, argues Wiborg, was never fully committed to undermining the privileged
position of the grammar schools and their respective preparatory schools. In fact, the growth of
comprehensive schools in the 1960s was rather the result of initiatives at the local level than of
reforms by the central government, which, even in its years under the control of the Labour Party,
never managed to issue anything more than unbinding guidelines for Local Education Authorities
on how best to organise secondary schooling along egalitarian lines. Once the government was,
from the early 1980s onwards, again controlled by the Conservatives, any reforms along egalitarian
lines were blocked, with the focus now being on increasing the role of market forces in education,
a policy which, according to Wiborg, was basically continued by the Labour governments after
1997.
In Germany, the situation was quite similar. The Social Democrats emerged, indeed, to
become an important political factor in the period after the Second World War but never managed
to implement national-level laws that would have paved the way for comprehensive schooling; a
problem which was, of course, complicated by the strongly decentralised nature of the post-war
German educational system. The only national-level education reform that was inspired by
egalitarian values (and somewhat like the idea of the middle school in the Scandinavian countries)
was the introduction of the Förderstufe (later to be renamed the Orientierungsstufe), which was
designed as a two-year comprehensive stage at Grades 5 and 6, and was aimed at smoothing the
transition from elementary to secondary school, the latter of which continued to consist of strongly
segregated tracks. Of course, neither this reform nor the fact that some regions (Länder), where
Social Democrats controlled the respective governments, decided to open a number of
comprehensive schools undermined the strongly selective nature of the German educational
system in general and the unchallenged position of the elitist academic schools (Gymnasien) at the
upper secondary level in particular. Thus, Wiborg argues, had Social Democratic governments
ruled both England and Germany, the comprehensive school model would certainly have gained
more ground in these two countries.

Praise and Critique

With Education and Social Integration, Wiborg presents a rich and genuinely comparative study that
focuses on the political and social causes of the emergence of comprehensive schooling in three
Scandinavian countries. She thereby employs a very original, inductive approach that puts forward
a number of well-elaborated hypotheses, which are also reflected in the simple, and therefore very

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transparent, structure of the book. One important aspect of the book is that the hypotheses are
tested by using causal reconstruction and process-tracing methods – i.e. methodological
instruments that are commonly used in comparative historical sociology in general and in historical
institutionalism in particular (see, for example, Pierson & Skocpol, 2002) – thus linking
methodological debates in comparative education to debates in the social sciences, which could be
key to comparative educationists who are engaged in theorising about the role of different
endogenous factors in the process of educational change. This approach allows Wiborg to focus on
similarities and differences between different trajectories of educational change and to thus find an
ideal balance between abstract, cross-case comparison and thorough case-specific historical analysis
(see Schriewer, 1999, pp. 83ff.) The book is thus an important contribution to comparative
education, a discipline that, today, is characterised by a bifurcation between macro-quantitative,
large-n studies and a high number of single-case studies that lack a common theoretical framework
and have therefore only a limited impact on the development of theory.
Beyond these methodological strengths, the book is particularly convincing in its argument
that the introduction of the comprehensive school model was not only a result of Social
Democratic rule. It thus points out that a number of similarly important preceding educational
reforms, some of which were also enacted because of the role played by the Liberal Party in the
Scandinavian countries, were not directly inspired by an egalitarian ideology but would, later on,
facilitate the model to be implemented with comparatively little political resistance.
Despite the obvious strength of the study, there are a number of weaknesses, some of which
are directly related to the high claims in terms of theory development. Certainly, theories on
educational change with a focus on comprehensive schooling are in short supply, but still the book
surprises with a lack of references to past and current debates in comparative education in which
some of the issues raised by Wiborg have been, and are being, discussed, with the work by Green
(1997) being the only one that is given particular prominence. A higher valuation of past research in
the field may also have facilitated positioning the findings of the book in the comparative education
discourse, a task which the reader is expected to do him/herself, given that the book ends with a
mere quasi-introspective summary of the findings.
Broader references to other work on educational change would also have helped the author
to briefly point out a number of factors which other authors have argued were important for the
development of modern educational systems. Therefore, the model of educational change as
elaborated by Wiborg seems somewhat oversimplified, suggesting that educational change can be
understood as a straightforward top-down process that is orchestrated and controlled by state
authorities, provided that the parties in government have sufficient political power and
commitment to plan and implement reforms. Other actors and stakeholders involved in education
policy are thus not, or hardly, part of the analytical framework, which leads to actor dynamics
being ignored, as has been discussed by authors who have a less exclusive focus on the state (see,
for example, Archer, 1979). It is, however, not only other actors who are ignored but also other
aspects of educational and social policy, elaborations that could have been accommodated by
reducing the somewhat overdetailed accounts of changes in the power balance between the
different political parties. Particularly problematic are missing references to developments in higher
education policy that leave, for instance, the German quest for increased access to upper secondary
and tertiary education beyond the focus of the book, even though these reforms are quite
important to understanding how the country’s governments reduced pressure to comprehensively
address inequalities in the educational system. With regard to the Scandinavian countries, it is
important to refer to reforms in fields as diverse as the labour market and tax policy, just to show
that the establishment of the comprehensive school was only one aspect of a political mission to
overhaul Scandinavian societies along more egalitarian lines.
Given the current importance of accounts of the role of exogenous factors in educational
change, the reader may have been glad to also see some brief notes on the comprehensive school
model becoming a point of reference in the international educational policy discourse; a fact which
may have played a role quite early on, when Scandinavian countries began to contemplate the
respective reforms in their neighbouring countries. From a methodological point of view, it could
also have been interesting to briefly address the Galton problem – i.e. the challenge to assess
endogenous factors underlying social processes that have, to some extent, been influenced by
international trends and discourses (Schriewer, 1999, p. 73; Jahn, 2003).

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A further considerable weakness of the book certainly is its lack of scientific distance from the
topic. Wiborg herself points out very clearly that she is a staunch supporter of the comprehensive
school model and therefore justifies the importance of the book, in the first paragraphs of the
introduction, by pointing out that the idea of comprehensive schooling was still alive in times
when educational reforms the world over were characterised by an overt focus on market forces.
This lack of scientific distance is not only evident in much of the wording and many of the
expressions used, but also in the use of similarly clearly positioned citations from previous accounts
of education policy in the respective countries, some of which also refer to theoretical concepts, on
which the author does not further elaborate. Furthermore, this leads to the glorification of certain
actors, notably of the Social Democratic parties in the Scandinavian countries. In fact, their efforts
in the education policy arena are suggested to be the result of disinterested ‘egalitarian idealism’,
which stands not only in contrast to the motives of Conservative parties but also to those of other
Social Democratic parties that seem to be less genuine and to engage in social reform partly in
order to attract voters. The fact that the book entirely lacks references to primary sources and far
too rarely makes references to secondary sources is quite in line with the political inclination of the
text, somewhat blurring the borders between essayistic and scientific writing.
Despite these weaknesses, however, the book is a genuinely comparative and original
contribution, and the critique above is meant in no way to question the authoritative character of
the study. In fact, comparative education work that systematically, and on the basis of a sound
methodology, analyses endogenous factors underlying educational change is currently rare, and it
is along the lines of Wiborg’s work that future comparative studies on educational development
may be written.

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Correspondence: Markus Maurer, Institute of Upper Secondary and Vocational Education, University
of Zurich, Beckenhofstrasse 35, CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland (markus.maurer@igb.uzh.ch).

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