Compulsory schooling
States begin educating every child, mainly because industry and armies need them literate.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 70 years
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Prussia leads, and by the late nineteenth century most industrialised states have made elementary education compulsory and free. Motives are mixed — economic need, military conscription, nation-building and social control alongside genuine reform. Literacy rates in Europe rise from a minority to near-universal within two generations, which is the precondition for mass newspapers, mass politics and mass propaganda alike.