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Compulsory education refers to a period of education that is required of persons, imposed by law. In some countries the education needs to take place at a registered school. Other countries allow the education to happen outside of school, for example via homeschooling.
Although Plato's The Republic is credited with having popularized the concept of compulsory education in Western intellectual thought, every parent in Judea since ancient times was required to teach their children at least informally. Over the centuries, as cities, towns and villages developed, a class of teachers called Rabbis evolved. According to the Talmud (tractate Bava Bathra 21a), which praises the sage Joshua ben Gamla with the institution of formal Jewish education in the 1st century AD, Ben Gamla instituted schools in every town and made formal education compulsory from the age of 6 or 7.[1]
The Aztec Triple Alliance, which ruled from 1428 to 1521 in what is now central Mexico, is considered to be the first state to implement a system of universal compulsory education.[2][3]
The Reformation prompted the establishment of compulsory education for boys and girls. Most important was Martin Luther's text 'An die Ratsherren aller Städte deutschen Landes,' (1524) with the call for establishing schools.[4] Especially the Protestant South-West of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation with cities like Strassburg became pioneers in educational questions. Under the influence of Strasbourg in 1592 the German Duchy Pfalz-Zweibrücken became the first territory of the world with compulsory education for girls and boys.[5] The South German Duchy Wuerttemberg installed a compulsory education already in 1559, but for boys only.[6]
In Scotland the Education Act of 1496 had obliged the children of noblemen and freeholders to attend school, but the School Establishment Act of 1616 commanded every parish with the means to establish a school paid for by parishioners. The Parliament of Scotland confirmed this with the Education Act of 1633 and created a local land-based tax to provide the required funding. The required majority support of parishioners, however, provided a tax evasion loophole which heralded the Education Act of 1646. The turmoil of the age meant that in 1661 there was a temporary reversion to the less compulsory 1633 position. However, in 1696 a new Act re-established the compulsory provision of a school in every parish with a system of fines, sequestration, and direct government implementation as a means of enforcement where required.
During the Reformation in 1524, Martin Luther advocated compulsory schooling so that all parishioners would be able to read the Bible themselves, and Palatinate-Zweibrücken passed accordant legislation in 1592, followed by Strasbourg—then a free city of the Holy Roman Empire— in 1598.
Prussia implemented a modern compulsory system in 1763 which was widely recognised and copied. It was introduced by the Generallandschulreglement, a decree of Frederick the Great in 1763-5.[7] The Generallandschulreglement, authored by Johann Julius Hecker, asked to educate all young citizens, girls and boys, to be educated from the fifth till at age 13 or 14 and to provide them with a basic outlook on (Christian) religion, singing, reading and writing based on a regulated, state provided curriculum of text books. The teachers, often former soldiers, were asked to cultivate silk worms to make a living besides contributions from the local citizens and municipalities.[8] Funding and training of the teachers was slowly expanded and received funding till teachers gained full academic status in the 20th century. This provided a working model for other states to copy; the clearest example of direct copying is probably Japan in the period of the Meiji Restoration.[9]
In Austria, Hungary and in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Czech lands), mandatory primary education was introduced by Empress Maria Theresa in 1774.[7]
Compulsory school attendance based on the Prussian model gradually spread to other countries. It was quickly adopted by the governments in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, Estonia and Latvia but was rejected in the Russian Empire itself.[10][11] France and the UK failed completely, till the 1880's, to introduce compulsory education, France due to conflicts between a radical secular state and the catholic church, the UK due to the upper class defending its educational privileges and turfs.[12] In the US, Prussian education system has been used e.g. in the Michigan Constitution of 1835, reached the American Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1852, and spreading to other states until, in 1918, Mississippi was the last state to enact a compulsory attendance law.[13] Massachusetts had originally enacted the first compulsory education law in the American colonies in 1647. In 1852, the Massachusetts General Court passed a law requiring every town to create and operate a grammar school. Fines were imposed on parents who did not send their children to school and the government took the power to take children away from their parents and apprentice them to others if government officials decided that the parents were "unfit to have the children educated properly".[14]
Compulsory education was not part of early American society; which relied instead on church-run private schools that mostly charged fees for tuition. The spread of compulsory attendance in the Massachusetts tradition throughout America, especially for Native Americans, has been credited to General Richard Henry Pratt.[15] Pratt used techniques developed on Native Americans in a prisoner of war camp in Fort Marion, Augustine, Florida, to force demographic minorities across America into government schools.[15] His prototype was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
One of the last areas in Europe to adopt a compulsory system was England and Wales, where the Elementary Education Act of 1870 paved the way by establishing school boards to set up schools in any places that did not have adequate provision. Attendance was made compulsory until age 10 in 1880. The Education Act of 1996 made it an obligation on parents to require children to have a full time education from the age of five to the age of sixteen. However, attendance at school itself is not compulsory; Section 7 of the Act allows for "education otherwise" than at a school i.e. home education
Some kind of education is compulsory to all people in most countries, but different localities vary in how many years or grades of education they require and in whether it needs to be in a school or can be provided at home. Due to population growth and the proliferation of compulsory education, UNESCO calculated in 2006 that over the subsequent 30 years more people would receive formal education than in all prior human history.[16] It is possible in many countries for parents to provide education for children by homeschooling, although this is often monitored for adherence to national standards.
Compulsory education has been criticized on various grounds:
United Nations, Genocide, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations General Assembly, World War II
Education, Epistemology, Homeschooling in the United States, Home School Legal Defense Association, Political Science
Lutheranism, Ten Commandments, Protestant Reformation, Johann Sebastian Bach, Lucas Cranach the Elder
Vienna, Middle Ages, Prague, Regensburg, Cologne
San Juan, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico, Ponce, Puerto Rico, Compulsory education, Bayamón
University of Malta, World War II, Compulsory education, Knights Hospitaller, English language
Estonia, Argentina, Sweden, Sri Lanka, Spain
Chinese language, Mathematics, History, Education, Science
Germany, Mathematics, United Kingdom, English language, University