Professor Agustina Paglayan (University of California, San Diego) examines the origins of universal primary education in the West, offering an unsettling answer: governments were motivated by their fear of the masses and the desire to turn the “savage,” “unruly,” and “morally flawed” children of the lower classes into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws. Drawing on unparalleled evidence from two centuries of education provision in Europe and the Americas, she shows that countries invested in primary schools when internal threats heightened political elites’ anxiety around mass violence and the breakdown of social order. Paglayan argues that the objective of disciplining children remains at the core of how most public schools operate today. She concludes that the future of education systems—and their ability to reduce poverty and inequality—hinges on coming to terms with this troubling history.
