Preliminary Programme

In 1799 teachers in Switzerland got different parts of salaries in diverse measurements and currencies, and additionally the variety of funding was very high. In most regions the church, the community, school fees and school funds were very important, but the funding and the teachers’ incomes were individual and varied from village to village and from one town school to the other. The income and the funding depended mainly on the financial resources of the villages or towns, the region the teacher belonged to, organizational structures of the village or town, the political background of the region and on the school type. Later on the salaries became more standardized within a county and with it also the funding; but still differences of funding can be observed. Furthermore, changes in the different regions did not come at the same time and not all school types got affected in the same manner.
In the Helvetic Republic (1798-1803) the abolition of the tithes was decided. A lot of the literature on this topic mentions how this tax change affected teachers and the clergy. Upon consultation of the different sources it can be demonstrated that regional differences occurred and dependency on the tithes was actually much less than mentioned in the literature. Different political changes of Switzerland in the 19th century affected the schools and with it their funding, but the educational sovereignty stays within the cantons. However, various school laws got implemented in the cantons of Switzerland and debates about teachers’ salaries were held in the parliaments and in newspapers. These and other facts lead to the questions: Who financed the teachers’ salaries in the time period between the end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century? Which kind of changes can be observed over the decades? What’s about the distinction between private and public? How dealt the parliament and other political representatives with the financing of schools? These questions shall be answered with examples of different cantons from Switzerland.
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Different factors have been put forward to explain the widening of Italy’s regional economic disparities since the late 19th century. Geography certainly favoured Northern regions before and after the unification of the Kingdom of Italy (Fenoaltea 2011, A’Hearn and Venables 2011). However, agglomeration economies, access to water resources and the proximity of European markets can hardly justify the persistence of regional inequalities to the present day. An important role was played by the different pace of human capital accumulation across Italian regions (Felice 2012) – possibly due to differences in the fiscal capacity of municipalities under the country’s decentralized education system (Cappelli 2013, Felice and Vasta 2012). Yet, the way local institutions shaped investment in education has been under researched to a great extent. Did local access to policy making differed across Italian provinces, and why?
This paper draws on the work of Engerman and Sokoloff in order to explore the relationship between land fractionalization, access to policy-making and the provision of primary schooling in Italy’s Liberal Age (c. 1871 – 1911). According to the hypothesis it put forward, the concentration of land reduced political voice because of the electoral system in place, which had established a very limited suffrage after 1861 (mainly based on wealth). There where fewer wealthy citizens had access to policy-making, grassroots efforts to provide education for all might have failed, because of the misalignment between the costs and benefits to the ruling class. Instead, the more people participated in the decision-making process the more investment in mass education was likely to be promoted.
A variety of new primary sources is explored in order to investigate this mechanism. Preliminary results confirm that a relationship between political voice and the supply of schooling characterized Italian provinces at the end of the 19th century. Yet, the link between fiscal capacity and policy-making needs to be further explored. It remains unclear to what extent fiscal capacity was a result of decisions concerning the investment in education or, inversely, a constraint on the amount of resources municipalities could actually invest (beyond their preferences). This is crucial in order to understand and evaluate the impact of major reforms affecting primary schooling throughout the 19th century and prior to the Great War. This work will provide a substantial contribution in that sense, by assessing the role of both factors within the same conceptual and theoretical framework. By contrast, the link between land fractionalization and access to policy-making is more difficult to uncover, given the poor suitability of historical sources concerning landholding before the Interwar period. However, the use of different and complementary evidence may contribute to the understanding of the way land fractionalization shaped the investment in public schools through political voice.
The present contribution might provide a different interpretation of what Antonio Gramsci initially called a “riforma agraria mancata” (missed agrarian reform). According to a large body of literature, the lack of land reforms after the unification of the Kingdom of Italy hindered economic growth because of lacking primitive accumulation of capital and weak domestic demand. However, this paper puts forward that the absence of land reforms also affected the development of local institutions. In some regions, municipalities did not promote the adoption of mass education – mainly as a result of economic backwardness and of the administrative and electoral system in place. (Show less)

Based on my study of elementary school funding among Swedish ironworking communities, I will discuss the relevance of the iron works contributions to the school system.
During the heyday of the Swedish iron industry, distinctive communities typically developed near the ore mining and processing centres. The early entrepreneurs focused their knowledge and capital on production in order to exploit local opportunities for the global market. This early modern entrepreneurship, which strove to control every aspect of the process, transformed social relations at the ironworks and the companies often subsidized schools in the vicinity of the workers’ housing.
In order to answer questions about the expressions, extensions, and proportions of private contributions to elementary schools, the study is based on information from selected iron companies’ private archives, selected parishes’ archives, statistics produced by the Ecclesiastical Office, and testimonials.
What kind of support did the school organization receive from the iron works? What proportion of the total elementary school funding was obtained from the iron works? How did these proportions change over time? In addressing such issues, this paper will be able to answer questions about the character, scope, and significance of the iron works school funding.
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As systems of mass education expanded during the nineteenth century, the elementary schoolhouse gained national and international importance, both in discourse and sheer numbers. In France, the number of elementary schools increased from 52,900 (1837) to 81,400 (1891), and at the turn of the century there were 212,000 single-teacher schools in the United States (1913), 39,000 rural schools in European Russia (1894), 32,500 primary schools in Imperial Germany (1911) and 8,900 elementary schools in Sweden (1900).
Using the expanding Swedish nineteenth century elementary school system as a point of departure, this paper deals with the funding of school building projects, which is a fundamental issue both in respect to the history of schoolhouses, and the history of the expanding systems of mass education during the nineteenth century. Despite the attention that has been devoted to the social- and architectural history of schoolhouses, the funding of school building has only been treated in passing.
Through an extensive study of 66 school building project in the Sundsvall region 1840-1900, this paper aims to show how the funding of school building changed over time as a result of development within the school system as such, and the wider societal developments of the agrarian- and industrial revolution. From being primarily funded by in kind and monetary taxes, schoolhouses were to a large extent funded using loans from the expanding credit market. Special attention will be devoted to the relation between these sources of funding and the donations (land plots, building materials and money) that the building projects received from wealthy farmers and industrialists. Despite that these donations were relatively small, this study shows that they could play a disproportionately large role when a schoolhouse was to be erected.
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