Compulsory education is intrinsic to the modern, liberal nation-state, one in which a diversity of beliefs or ideologies can coexist. Compulsion, in this sense, is understood as a necessary evil for maintaining a free, tolerant, and egalitarian society.
But what if I told you that it is not liberal to force others to be liberal?
Ironically, compulsory education turns the modern state into something strikingly similar to the Christian religion it claims to have replaced. To see this, allow me a brief history lesson — with voluntary attendance, of course.
1. Literacy came before, not after schooling
If you ask people why school must be compulsory, they will quickly answer: “Because children must learn to read and write.” The assumption runs so deep that it hardly registers as an assumption at all. Yet history refuses to cooperate with it.
In reality, literacy did not come from schools; schools came from literacy. Long before any European state forced children into classrooms, large numbers of people were already reading, debating, publishing pamphlets, forming clubs, and engaging in public discussion. The printing press had been invented in the mid-15th century, and texts became available to the masses rather than remaining confined to a narrow clerical and aristocratic elite.
This was the condition that made the Enlightenment and the great modern revolutions possible. Where texts and reading circulated freely, political freedom emerged. This is why the French and American Revolutions happened — not because Rousseau or Paine went to school, but because Rousseau read Montaigne and Paine read Locke.
By contrast, where reading was institutionalised, revolution did not occur. This was the case in Lutheran regions such as Germany, Sweden, and Finland, where children were forced to learn to read the Bible because salvation was believed to depend on it. Parents were required to teach catechisms, and pastors examined literacy through confirmation. These practices did not yet constitute schooling, but they laid its moral and institutional foundations.
Which brings us to the second irony.
2. School was invented to stop liberalism
Many imagine that schooling was born out of the French Revolution, as a natural consequence of liberty, equality, and secular citizenship. This is historically false.
France did not make primary schooling compulsory until the 1880s, almost a century after the Revolution. The first modern system of compulsory education emerged in Prussia in 1717, and it was explicitly designed to consolidate and defend the nation against the threat of French liberalism.
Prussian elites realised that a literate population could no longer be trusted. Their solution was simple: force children to read the right things. Compulsory schooling drew on Lutheran discipline, now systematically organised by the state. God, King, and Nation were for the first time fused into a single state educational programme.
Thus the second irony is this: the institution modern democracies now use to teach liberal values was originally created to suppress them.
Which brings us to the third and final irony.
3. Liberal about what?
Today, the “liberal state” appears to have succeeded. Modern societies tolerate an extraordinary diversity of beliefs and lifestyles. Everyone is encouraged to think and choose for themselves. Homeschooling is increasingly accepted in places like the United States, Finland, and Argentina.
But this liberalism collapses at one precise point — a point the liberal, secular state seems to share with the religious orders that preceded it: sexual education.
Suddenly, we see an anxiety to give children an education in these matters long before they are sexually mature individuals. Even the people who choose to homeschool often do so on the basis that their children are being taught the wrong idea about gender.
Here, the liberal, tolerant state becomes very intolerant, and this logic appears even in the actions of those who challenge it.
But none of this is new, at bottom. It is the same logic that once forced children to read Scripture before reading could dissolve the traditional authority that set men and women in specific familial roles. It is the same logic Prussia applied when the first schools were born, and it is the same unconscious logic that drives schooling and politics today.