Social Mobility and Schooling in History: Recent Methods and Conclusions

Social mobility and schooling is an ideologically-loaded subject around which has revolved over the past two decades a sometimes acrimonious debate: About whether there can be any equality of opportunity without prior equality of condition, and about the proper means to compensate for prior inequality. In part this is because social mobility is central to such issues as the formation and transformation of classes, the impact of industrialization, modernization theory, and, as well, to explanations of the structure of the institutionalization of schooling in modern society. The impact of industrialization on mobility patterns in schools has been thoroughly surveyed by Kaelble and need not occupy us here.1 Our concern will be how models of social mobility and schooling developed, how historical research has related to them, and what relevance they have for future study. Schools have long borne an enormous burden in the West. As public establishments, they, at least theoretically, can be manipulated to implement social purpose. The American Founding Fathers considered an educated citizenry essential to the survival of the Republic. French philosophes, notably Condorcet, claimed that education would expand human consciousness, promote freedom, compensate for inequalities of birth, moralize the barbaric working classes, and create a vaguely-defined "modern" society.