Switzerland

Abstract

The basic structures of the Swiss education system came into being in the nineteenth century. Whereas the central ideas, developed from the body of thoughts of the French Revolution, were conceptualized during the Helvetic Republic of 1798–1803, they were only marginally put into practice at that time. It was only after 1830 that these ideas began to influence significantly the development of the education systems of the cantons: education for all, admission to higher education based on performance, abolition of class or birth privileges in the education system, and the orientation of the school along the lines of the scientific canon instead of religious confessional dogma. The school systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized by great contrasts between towns and rural areas and by a strong interweaving of state and church authorities as well as by great differences based on social origin and gender of pupils, slowly became secular and were brought into a legal framework and organized at a canton level (Criblez et al. 1999; Jenzer 1999). Expansion and differentiation of the system are the basic immanent development processes, which describe the long path of the “schooling” of society, which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, does not seem to have been completed.