In this “Conversation with Authors,” we spoke with APSR author Agustina S. Paglayan about her article, “Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Systems in an Era of State-Building.”

APSR: What’s the goal of this paper? Where did the idea come from? More specifically, how’d you become interested in this intersection between civil war and education?

Agustina Paglayan: The main goal of the paper is to explain the emergence and the expansion of public primary education systems. Historically, it wasn’t a country’s central government that was involved in education but the family or the Church. However, in the 19^th century, in Western Europe and the Americas, we start to see central governments taking over and heavily expanding primary education for the lower classes. I wanted to understand what motivated this process. Was it motivated by social mobility goals? Social control goals? Something else? These were the questions underlying my research.

As for how I became interested in this topic, I would point to three things. First, an empirical puzzle: In a previous APSR paper, I documented that there was a lot of provision of primary education before the spread of democracy—under non-democratic regimes. That finding sets up an empirical puzzle that this new paper addresses: Why did non-democracies provide so much primary education for the masses?

Second, when I worked at the World Bank many years ago, the key question we were concerned about was why, despite there being universal access to basic education in nearly all countries today, students are often not acquiring basic skills. The Bank’s preferred explanation is that governments, despite wanting to promote skills, don’t know how to do so. I wanted to understand the motivations of governments instead of simply assuming that they created mass education to promote skills.

And third, specifically on the role of civil wars, my interest came out of reading the book Facundo byformer Argentine President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Though Sarmiento is regarded in Argentina as the father of primary education, the book reveals that his motivation for educating the masses came from his assessment that the recurrent civil wars the country was experiencing after independence were caused by the morally flawed character of the rural masses. He was very afraid of the rural masses, whom he described as “bloodthirsty” and “undisciplined hordes,” and he was convinced that a system of centrally-controlled primary schools would mold their moral character in ways that would lead to long-term internal stability. Today we have this idea that education should enable everyone to flourish and thrive, and of course it should, but that’s not what Sarmiento had in mind—and, as I learned through my research, not what politicians in other countries generally had in mind.

APSR: What did you find most difficult in the research and writing process for this paper?

Agustina Paglayan: One challenge of this project was creating an original dataset of primary school enrollment rates that had more historical coverage than other existing datasets–especially since I did this as a graduate student with limited funding. The main challenge, though, was conveying all the qualitative and quantitative evidence I had gathered. This is something reviewers brought up: I was trying to put a book’s worth of evidence into a single article, and that’s just not doable. At first I wanted to have the theoretical contribution, four case studies, plus cross-national evidence, but the review process helped me realize it was better to focus on the theory, the cross-national evidence, and just one of the case studies. I think this resulted in a more streamlined and compelling paper. To get the full picture of my research, you’ll have to wait for the book!

APSR: What was the most exciting or surprising element of researching and writing this paper?

Agustina Paglayan:  One of the things I love about doing historical research is that it often challenges my prior beliefs about a topic. For this project I was reading directly how politicians and other elites spoke about education in the nineteenth century when governments were setting up public primary education systems. Similar to how reading Sarmiento reshaped how I viewed Argentina’s education system, reading what politicians in other countries said about mass education was mind blowing. They wrote about educating the masses in order to reduce immorality and crime and thus avoid enlarging prisons in the future. They talked about education as a form of national defense, again out of this concern that the masses’ savage predisposition posed an internal threat to state authority and the power of elites. It was fascinating to see how differently elites talked about the goals of education compared to how we talk about education today.

Another really interesting thing—and something that also sets my article apart from other education research—was learning that elites at first emphasized education as a state-building tool more so than a redistributive or even a nation-building tool. You could think that if they were concerned that the masses might rebel, they might want to provide education to improve their economic wellbeing—but this is not what guided mass education reforms. Their focus was mostly on teaching people moral values that would encourage obedience, discipline, and respect for authority, not on teaching skills. Nor was there always an interest in teaching a common national identity and language. For example, in Prussia, kids learned to respect the teacher’s authority, but the government allowed instruction in both German and Polish, and in both Protestantism and Catholicism. In the case of Argentina, they initially didn’t want to impose a national identity or language in order to make education attractive for immigrants. Sure, nation-building does appear as a goal of these education systems later on, but the original goal was about promoting moral and civic education for internal order, which I think of as a state-building objective.

APSR: Your research is typically focused on historical cases of civil war and education. Do you see any applicability of your research to current conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, or other countries?

Agustina Paglayan:  First, let me clarify that while the empirical portion of the article focuses on civil wars, the article’s theory is a broader theory of how internal conflict generally created incentives to invest in mass education for social control purposes. Obviously, as a strategy for social order, education is a long-term strategy, and not one that a government struggling for survival would prioritize, but I would expect governments in post-conflict settings to invest in mass education not just to reconstruct the schools that were destroyed but to redouble the government’s investment to prevent a recurrence of conflict.

There are many examples of recent internal conflict where my theory can apply. One example is  the situation in China, with the uprisings against Covid restrictions. My theory would predict that, once the Chinese government restores short-term stability, it will likely turn to schools for long-term stability, reforming the curriculum or other aspects of education to enhance people’s support for the state’s authority.

Another case where I see my theory in action is the United States post-Black Lives Matter protests. These protests really made conservative elites anxious about the prospect of profound institutional reforms that might undercut their privilege. I was watching the protests in Summer 2020 and thinking, “My theory would suggest that conservative elites will respond to these protests by turning to schools and pushing for education reforms to ensure kids accept the status quo, the ‘traditional’ way of teaching United States’ history, etc.” And this is indeed how Republicans reacted, starting with Trump creating the Patriotic Education Commission, which proposed that schools should not teach kids “divisive” concepts such as the concept of institutionalized racism. And we’ve been seeing Republicans pushing this educational agenda in state legislatures in the last two years. What they are reacting to is a heightened concern about the stability of the status quo, triggered by the BLM protests, and pushing for educational reforms to suppress certain messages that might legitimize the demands for institutional reform. To be clear: This isn’t a “Trump” or a Republican response alone. What my article shows is that this is one example of a general pattern whereby politicians respond by investing in education as a social control tool when their power, or the power of the institutions that sustain them, is notably contested by the masses in the streets.

Agustina S. Paglayan, University of California, San Diego