British and Danish policymakers in the long nineteenth century developed schools to support nation-building, industrialization, and democratization; yet they made different choices about the timing of public-school systems, workers’ access, variation of educational programs, pedagogical methods, and mechanisms for oversight. Beliefs about the purpose of education informed policy choices and fiction writers were important sources of ideas about education. British writers portrayed education as an essential tool for the cognitive development of the child and believed that a well-educated individual should master a prescribed curriculum to attain full selfhood. The right and left disagreed about the advisability of educating workers, yet even many on the left worried that educating the working class could “contaminate” the nation’s culture. Danish writers recognized the value of education for individual self-development, but both left and right also viewed schools for farmers and workers as essential for a strong society. Fiction writers joined political movements to put education and they fulfilled vital services in these movements. They were the spin doctors who provided cognitive frames about educational problems and solutions, and they popularized social problems with vivid, emotional language. A chorus of literary voices provided the soundtrack, inspiration, and subliminal messaging for campaigns supporting school development.

Why do successive education reforms within a country resonate with familiar assumptions about educational goals, society, class, and state, even at moments of radical change? Repeating cultural narratives sustain continuities within institutional change processes, by influencing how new ideas are interpreted, how interest groups express preferences, and how institutional norms shape political processes. Repeating narratives make it more likely for some types of reforms to be implemented and sustained than others. This chapter develops a theoretical model suggesting how cultural narratives are transmitted across time and an empirical method for assessing cross-national differences in cultural narratives. Each country has a distinctive “cultural constraint,” or a set of cultural symbols and narratives, that appears in a nation’s literary corpus. Writers collectively contribute to this body of cultural tropes; despite individual fluctuations, they largely reproduce the master narratives of their countries. Computational linguistic processes allow us to observe empirical differences between British and Danish cultural depictions of education in 1,084 works of fiction from 1700 to 1920. Cultural narratives do not determine specific outcomes, as tropes must be activated in political struggles. Yet we can show how significant cross-national differences in literary images of education resonate with British and Danish educational trajectories.

Britain developed a public education system in 1870 but eliminated alternative schools for poor children on the basis of their poor quality. In 1855, Denmark prioritized expanding access over quality standards, by supporting private evangelical schools serving rural populations. Cultural frames informed these struggles over education. For British authors, education would build character and social stability, and the left endorsed workers’ rights to schooling; yet even sympathetic Victorian social reform novelists worried about the culture of poverty and missed the social investment benefits of workforce training. Their depictions of quality problems helped to close schools and reduce access. Alternatively, Danish authors supported education as a means of producing useful citizens and did not worry about a culture of poverty. Danish authors depicted a government in benign terms and affirmed the importance of local government self-determination. British and Danish authors participated in movements to expand schooling to underserved populations. British writers Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote heart-wrenching stories that stirred charitable impulses toward the poor; Matthew Arnold directly shaped the 1870 legislation. Danish authors such as NFS Grundtvig and Bernhard Severin Ingemann inspired the free school and folk high school movement that greatly expanded education among rural peasants.

Britain’s Education Act of 1902 created a unitary secondary education system emphasizing humanistic studies, eliminated funding for vocational programs, and served only academic students. Denmark’s 1903 Grammar School Act created a system with multiple academic programs (in classics, mathematics, and modern languages) and retained ample funding for vocational, agricultural, and folk high schools. The authors contributed to the momentum for secondary education. British authors largely advocated for a classical curriculum: Rudyard Kipling linked education to nationalist imperialistic ambitions and H.G. Wells feared cultural degradation. Some, for example, Thomas Hardy, sought classical study for the working class and viewed vocational training as second-class education. Alternatively, Danish authors across the political continuum portrayed workers’ education and skills as essential to the industrial project, economic competitiveness, and the collective good. Writers joined in struggles over secondary education reform. British Fabians worked closely with Robert Morant, the architect of the 1902 secondary education act; Kipling waged a public opinion campaign linking education to the Boar War. Danish authors in the Modern Breakthrough movement formed “the Literary Left” faction to help forge the Left Party’s positions on education and fostered closer ties among evangelical farmers and workers.

Contemporary educational reformers strive to balance education for some (elite knowledge workers) with education for all. British and Danish policymakers resolve this conflict in different ways that resonate with long-term cultural frames. British politicians applaud vocational education but devote few resources to it. Efforts to equalize schooling focus on rewarding winners from the working class, but these interventions do little to develop skills for nonacademic learners. Denmark devotes more resources to vocational education, yet reformers have problems meeting the contradictory needs of high and low-skill workers, and immigrants are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the poorly educated. Cultural legacies echo in young people’s views of education in an internet survey of 2100 British and Danish young people. British respondents support national quality standards and uniform curricula more than Danish ones, who prefer individualized learning experiences. Danish students are happier with their educational experiences, support educational investments to strengthen society, and appreciate practical, real-life skills. Upper-secondary vocational education students are more likely to report obtaining useful skills than their British colleagues. Yet Danish NEETs feel shut out of the core economy and their exclusion may be more agonizing because it goes against the historical commitment to a strong society.

Despite having few natural resources and peasant serfs, Denmark developed public primary education in 1814, while Britain delayed the mass, public school system until 1870 and provided little instruction to working-class students. Later, Denmark’s secondary education system included publicly-funded vocational training programs, while Britain developed a single-track system that ignored technical skills. Fiction writers and their cultural narratives contributed to educational choices. Authors became important individual political agents in school reform movements, by using fiction to advance policy ideas and inspire emotional outrage. Writers collectively contributed to the nationally distinctive symbols and narratives about education that appeared in their country’s literature. Each generation of authors inherited these distinctive cultural tropes from their literary ancestors, reworked these for new problems, and passed these along to future generations. Studying fiction writers and their narratives offers a tangible way to evaluate how culture matters to political outcomes, as we may empirically (with computational linguistics and a close reading of texts) observe significant cross-national differences in historical literary images of education. The work suggests how cultural narratives contribute to the emergence of coordinated and liberal varieties of capitalism and reflects on how cultural narratives provide a source of continuity within long-term processes of institutional change.

In 1814, Denmark created a public primary school system, but Britain only developed private church schools. This chapter recounts the struggles over education in the decades surrounding 1800 and the role of authors in these battles. Writers’ literary tropes fostered distinctive perceptions of education in the two countries: Danish enlightenment writers portrayed education for workers as necessary for building a strong society, vibrant economy, and secure state. Many British authors worried that mass schooling would foster instability and overpopulation. But in both countries, some writers participated as activists in the campaigns for education. In Britain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1808 lecture on education was credited with launching the mass education movement. Coleridge, William Wordsworth Sarah Trimmer, Hannah More, and others resisted a national education system and promoted the Bell monitorial model (espoused by the Anglican National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor. In Denmark, Ludvig Holberg bequeathed his fortune to the Sorø Academy (which educated future political statesmen) and encouraged the school to adopt his enlightened ideas about education. Later Danish Romantic writers helped a progressive coalition supporting the crown prince to advance mass schooling and to resist challenges from reactionary estate owners.