Education and State Formation in Europe and Asia

Abstract

The historical role of education in the process of state formation or ‘nation-building’ is now widely accepted. The development of national education systems in nineteenth-century Europe, Japan and North America, though occurring at different times, invariably overlapped with the process of nation-building, both contributing to it and as a function of it. The leading role which the state apparatus, or political state, played in this process in many countries is also widely, if not universally, accepted as a historical fact (Bendix, 1964; Boli, 1989; Curtis, 1988; Green, 1990; Melton, 1988).