The rise of mass schooling across the Global North in the nineteenth century is a well-known phenomenon. The precise ways in which local schools were funded, however, is a ripe area for historical scholarship, and Johannes Westberg's new book convincingly demonstrates why. Westberg's major contribution is his documentation of the local processes by which schools were funded in twelve rural districts in the Sundsvall region of Sweden between 1840 and 1900. Instead of macro narratives of industrialization, urbanization, or nation-building, Westberg aims for what he describes in chapter 1 as a “mundane history of school finance”—the local, everyday practicalities of building schoolhouses, heating and cleaning classrooms, and remunerating teachers (p. 1). In doing so, Westberg presents this book as a contribution to both the “history from below,” taking the vantage point of local parish members rather than national-level politicians, as well as a “materialistic turn” in the history of education: a conscious shift away from the ideologies and discourses of the cultural turn and toward “the social and economic aspects of schooling” (p. 4).
Like other European countries, Sweden underwent an agrarian and industrial revolution that increased agricultural profitability and spurred economic growth, although at the turn of the twentieth century the country as a whole remained overwhelmingly rural. Westberg's exploration of rural schooling is thus a welcome addition to a historiography still dominated by studies of urban settings. A state act in 1842 mandated that parishes—which possessed the legal right to collect local taxes—organize a school district and operate at least one school with paid teachers. Between 1839 and 1910, the number of Swedish schools grew from roughly fifteen hundred to fifteen thousand, and the average enrollment of school-age youth grew from under 20 percent to over 75 percent (p. 13). The rural region of Sundsvall, with a local economy driven predominantly by agriculture and a growing lumber industry, saw the proliferation of schools in all twelve rural districts in this period.
Westberg demonstrates the significant payoff of his “mundane” approach to the history of education particularly in chapters 4 and 5, which document the critical but neglected, role of nonmonetary payments as a source of school funding in these rural districts. If scholars relied only on local account books to determine levels of school funding, Westberg argues, their estimates would be woefully undercounted, as account books were only used to record monetary transactions. Westberg estimates that an average of 61 percent of the operational expenditure of Sundsvall's school districts in the 1850s was made up of nonmonetary sources (p. 92).
Carefully combing through parish and school board meeting minutes, Westberg uncovers remarkable details about the means used to pay for education. School districts levied in-kind taxes of grain, hay, candles, and firewood directly from the district's population to pay for heat, light, and teachers’ salaries. Teachers might also be paid in the form of allotted farmland, gifts of food, or boarding arrangements by local families. In return, teachers, parents, and schoolchildren often provided unpaid services, such as maintaining the allotted farm, cleaning the classrooms, hauling water, and splitting firewood. Westberg offers the reader richly illustrative examples, such as the schoolchildren of Värmland County who, on the occasion of their winter oral examination, carried small bags of rye to the parish clerk on strings around their necks as payment for their teacher (p. 99). By rooting the minute and varied processes of school funding in the communal practices of these rural districts, Westberg demonstrates the significance of this local story to the rise of mass schooling and exemplifies social history at its best.
Having established the significance of nonmonetary sources for school funding in the mid-nineteenth century, in chapters 5 and 6 Westberg details the transition to monetary sources by the end of the century. While in-kind payments persisted, they fell from an average of 61 percent of a school district's expenditure in the 1850s to merely 10 percent in the 1890s (p. 135). Westberg's analysis of the relative role of local and central state funding sources is illuminating. While state subsidies made up the majority of the monetary sources of school funding in the mid-nineteenth century, they were small compared to nonmonetary sources of local funding. Over the next decades, localities continued to provide the vast majority of school funding, but their expenditures were increasingly monetized. Westberg explores the significance of this monetization at the local level. While he argues that in-kind payments—adaptable to local school district needs—had allowed rural school districts to initially fund schools in the 1840s, as the number of teachers and schools expanded, problems of quality control and consistency multiplied. Ultimately, although monetization brought its own difficulties, including vulnerability to cyclical inflation, Westberg argues that this shift to monetary sources facilitated the further expansion of schooling in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
On the process of how schooling was funded, Westberg is most compelling. Westberg also tackles a second question, about why schools were funded, and here Westberg perhaps runs into certain limitations of his materialist approach. Chapter 2 explores the motivations of school spending at the local level. Rather than lofty goals of fostering citizenship or top-down forms of social control, Westberg argues that the motivations for schools were much more prosaic. However, many of the prosaic reasons presented—that school spending was motivated by overcrowded classrooms or long travel distances to school—do not fully address why schools were desirable in the first place. Westberg suggests that status competition between school districts was another factor, but he does not explore the ways in which schools bestowed this status. His analysis might have been substantiated with a discussion of the social role of schools within local districts as well as the primary social conflicts or fault lines that characterized local politics.
Chapter 3 is similarly focused on the motivations of school spending. Westberg describes the “beliefs and preferences that guided school districts’ economic decisions” through an analysis of what he terms the “economic culture” of these school districts, building on E. P. Thompson's concept of “moral economy” (p. 55–56). Rather than being motivated solely by frugality or cost-effectiveness, Westberg argues that economic decisions were guided by the multifaceted concept of billig—a term meaning “frugal” but also “fair,” “benevolent,” and “impartial” (p. 66–69). Westberg provides a compelling close reading of school board minutes to illuminate this overarching economic ideology of school funding. However, his account of economic culture might have been contextualized with attention to political divides and historical change during this period. Absent is a sense of conflict within the school board (an elected body, Westberg tells us on page 60) or within the broader community. Who or what were the local players in rural Sundsvall? What arguments were marshaled for levying taxes, or not? How did advocates argue for the importance of funding schools over other types of services? Given his own homage to Thompson, it is surprising that conflict and power are largely absent in Westberg's analysis. Chronologically flattened by the emphasis on billig, there is little attention to how or whether arguments for or against school funding shifted between 1840 and 1900. Westberg acknowledges some of these limits and rightfully suggests the need for further attention to conflict and change for a more complete understanding of local economic culture.
These limits should not detract from the contributions of Funding the Rise of Mass Schooling. Not only does Westberg illuminate essential dimensions of the process of school funding, but this book is also extremely valuable for its timely reframing of historical research on education that should serve as a useful guide for subsequent scholarship. Westberg bolsters his insights into school finance through repeated international comparisons, exemplifying the advantages of comparative historical research. Westberg has also demonstrated the enormous value of recovering the prosaic social practices and economic mechanisms at the local level, which should encourage important new work following the “materialistic” turn. By unearthing the important and neglected practices of school funding in rural Sweden, Westberg has opened up exciting new paths for further research on the rise of mass schooling.
