Social Scientization and the Rise of the Rationalist Schooling State in UK Parliamentary Discourse during the Long Nineteenth Century

Daniel Scott Smith, Stanford University

At the start of the nineteenth century in Britain, like in nearly all other countries, there was virtually no state involvement in education. Yet, things quickly and unambiguously changed: in the 1870s alone, there were over 30 schooling-related Acts of Parliament and over 200 schooling-related, statistics-based technical reports laid before the House of Commons. Why? Why did the British state, despite its longstanding history of lean liberalism and of private, religious, voluntary education get into the business of schooling during the middle-third of the nineteenth century? And, on a much more foundational level, in what ways did the very meaning of schooling and education change as it did? In contrast to accounts that place great emphasis on social, political, and economic determinants of the rise of state schooling, I argue and show how the widespread, sweeping cultural processes attendant to the development and professionalization of the social sciences partly drove the emergence of quantified and instrumentalized — rationalist — state schooling in British political discourse. Using LDA topic modeling, network analyses, and OLS regression to analyze the nearly 1.3 million parliamentary speeches ever given in the UK House of Lords and Commons during the long nineteenth century, I find credible evidence that, as the institutional order scientized, MPs increasingly marshalled quantitative reasoning and rhetorically linked schooling to an ever-greater host of political issues in their debates. A case study, this paper therefore seeks to provide an important contribution to the history and sociology of state schooling by historicizing it, and the very functionalist logics ordinarily used to explain its rise, as the joint outcomes of an emerging culture, once peculiar but now taken for granted.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 148. Making States and Statistics