Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know why all this focus on "public schools".

Of my 13 years of K-12 education, I spent 2 years in a public school, the other 11 in three different Catholic schools. Whatever the merits of your complaints about school systems, I think many of them would apply to many private schools too

There are at least four countries/territories worldwide (Aruba, Bangladesh, Sint Maarten, and Macau) where over 90% of secondary students attend private schools, public schools enrol less than 10% of secondary students – you think none of the private school students in those countries would sympathise with any of your criticisms?

> Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants

You think Catholic majority countries don't have public education systems? In Brazil 86% of secondary students attend public school; in Portugal, 81%; in Argentina and France it is 74%; in Spain 69%; by contrast, Australia, a country in which historically Protestants have outnumbered Catholics by as much as 3:1, the percent of secondary students in public education is only 53%.

Sources:

- Public education rates worldwide: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.SEC.PRIV.ZS?most_rec... (okay, that's percent private, but subtract from 100 to get percent public)

- Australia historical religious affiliation statistics: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca2...

As an aside, although Australia's Protestant:Catholic ratio was around 3:1 in the first half of the 20th century (and I believe through the 19th century too, although I don't have hard figures handy on that), nowadays there are only slightly more Protestants in Australia than Catholics – this is because, while both branches of Christianity have lost huge numbers of followers to secularisation, Catholicism has always partly compensated for that by immigration from Catholic majority countries (most recently the Philippines), Australia's post-1950 immigration patterns have left Protestants at a comparative demographic disadvantage – which I believe is true of the rest of the Anglosphere too

I think you misunderstand my comment. When I say "public" school I don't mean in distinction from private.

I am referring to the broad modern standard of putting every child in school... which is traced back directly to protestants wanting to have the state enforce bible study to every child.

Okay, but that's not what "public school" standardly means in English.

In American English, and most other English dialects, "public school" means "school run by the government". However, in British English (and also I believe Indian, maybe Irish too), "public school" has a rather opposite meaning – "expensive private school for the children of rich". In no major dialect of English does "public school" mean "the broad modern standard of putting every child in school"

What you are really talking about is compulsory education – laws that oblige parents to send their children to a school, whether government-run or private.

Are Protestants responsible for compulsory education? It is true, that historically speaking, Luther and other Reformers did play an important role in promoting the idea in the early modern period - but they didn't invent it. It existed in ancient Sparta, for boys. Plato, in his Republic, advocated compulsory state-run education – not just for boys, but for girls too.

It is true the first few states in modern Europe were to enact it were Protestant, but Catholic Europe soon copied the idea – Protestant Prussia introduced it in 1763, but Catholic Austria followed suit only 11 years later (1774), while it took Protestant Sweden another 68 years (1842). The Ottoman Empire made education compulsory in Istanbul in 1824 (they planned to gradually roll it out empire-wide, but that took far longer to achieve than they'd initially anticipated); at that point, no US state had yet done so, the first being Massachusetts in 1852. (Although publicly funded education was established in Massachusetts over two centuries earlier, it wasn't compulsory, there was no legal obligation on parents to send their children to school until then.)

So, while certainly Protestants played an important role in promoting the idea at in the modern period, they didn't invent it, and some Catholic and Muslim jurisdictions introduced it before many Protestant jurisdictions had.

I didn't say they invented it. I said it's normalizing was due to them. Big difference.

If we imagine an alternative history in which the Reformation never happened, or in which the Catholic Church succeeded in suppressing it - I think compulsory education would still be a reality in most of the world today much as it is in our history. There are strong economic arguments for it. Given it arguably still would have happened even if Protestantism hadn’t, I don’t think Protestantism was essential to its modern prevalence-they did play a pivotal early role, but that was more a historical accident than anything else, and their biggest contribution arguably was to accelerate a development which was going to happen anyway. In a world without Protestantism we’d still have it by now, but history would record it as having started somewhat later than it did in our timeline. While that late start may plausibly mean we’d have somewhat less of it by now than we actually do, it is equally plausible that we are already so far down that path that we’d be in roughly the same place by now anyway, that even though in that other timeline we would have started later, by now we would have caught up.

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