Social Class Formation and Educational Participation

Abstract

By using the middle school as a link between elementary and secondary education, Scandinavian countries were able to develop ladders of opportunity much more rapidly than the other countries in this study. As we saw in the previous chapter, the considerable degree of state involvement in education in these countries certainly acted as a necessary condition for this development. However, state intervention in schooling cannot be seen as a sufficient condition, since the German states had achieved the essentials of state education systems by the mid-nineteenth century and yet did not develop integrated educational ladders. This chapter seeks to take the analysis further by investigating the nature of the class structures in the different countries to see how far they contributed to the differential development of educational ladders.