Nineteenth-century secondary schooling rationed years of study according to social class
Until the mid-1800s, European secondary schools were designed around class: labourers' sons got about four years, merchants' sons five, and the elite seven. The idea that every teenager has a right to secondary schooling was only codified after 1945, and a UN convention of 1989 says it should be available to every child.
Secondary education today spans two international levels: lower secondary, which completes basic schooling and usually begins around age 12, and upper secondary, entered at 14 to 16, which leads to university, vocational training or work. The key shift at the start is from one class teacher covering everything to a rotation of subject specialists. Names vary enormously, from gymnasium and lyceum to high school and sixth-form college.
Its roots lie in Greek and Roman schools of rhetoric, which taught the seven liberal arts as a stepping stone to theology, law and medicine; girls were taught only at home. When Augustine of Canterbury brought Christianity to England in 597, there were no schools at all, so he founded grammar schools for Latin and song schools for choirboys. Canterbury's and Rochester's, from 604, still exist. Bede recorded in 732 that Canterbury also taught verse metre, astronomy and the calculation of church dates, even as clergy worried that Latin would open pagan books to pupils.
Printing and translation loosened the church's grip. After Gutenberg mastered movable metal type around 1455 and Tyndale's English Bible appeared in 1525, Latin became a skill mainly for Catholic clergy and conservative nobles, while merchants wanted navigation, measurement and languages for their sons; Boston Latin Grammar School opened in 1635. Comenius, the Moravian reformer, sketched a ladder from kindergarten through university in his Great Didactic, and John Locke's 1693 treatise stressed moral and physical training alongside intellect.
Industrialisation made mass basic education an economic need. In France, Condorcet proposed colleges for universal lower secondary schooling and Napoleon created the regulated lycée. England's Factory Act of 1802 required employers to teach apprentices reading, writing and arithmetic for at least four of their seven years. A Privy Council committee on education followed on 10 April 1839, yet the Great Exhibition of 1851 exposed how far English schooling still lagged behind.
Source: Secondary education
