Public Education Movement: How Compulsory Schooling Took Hold

In 1861, at the first census of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy, 74.68% of the population aged six and over was recorded as illiterate. It wasn’t a new problem, and it wasn’t confined to the South: already in 1848, before unification, Piedmont proper counted 65.3 illiterate people per 100 residents, and in the Duchy of Parma in 1857 the share reached 84.2%. The country that had just become politically unified remained, for the most part, a country of people who couldn’t read or write.

The first response came even before Italy was fully unified. The Casati Law, issued on 13 November 1859 for the Kingdom of Sardinia and newly annexed Lombardy, put three principles for primary education into writing: compulsory schooling, free access, and equal access for both sexes. Once extended to the rest of Italy after unification, that legal framework stayed in force, with amendments, for over sixty years, until the 1923 Gentile reform. The obligation it introduced, though, covered only the first of the two two-year blocks that made up elementary school — children aged 6 to 9 — with no penalty for families who ignored it.

Worked example: picture a farming family in 1860, in any Italian region. The Casati Law said their children had both the right and the duty to attend school up to age 9. But if the family needed those children’s hands in the fields, and nobody checked or penalized those who stayed home, that duty remained on paper only.

It took another eighteen years for the obligation to become real. The law of 15 July 1877, known as the Coppino Law after education minister Michele Coppino, made it punishable for the first time to keep a child out of the classroom. The law was part of the broader reform program of Agostino Depretis’s Historical Left, in which Coppino had served as education minister since March 1876, and it passed the Chamber of Deputies 208 votes to 20. Another effect of the Coppino Law touched religious instruction: catechism, previously compulsory, became optional and taught only at parents’ request, replaced as a standard subject by lessons on “the duties of man and citizen.”

The same arc, on its own timeline, had already played out elsewhere. In the United States, Horace Mann became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, giving up a promising career in law and politics for the post. He held it for twelve years, until 1848, filing an annual report to the Massachusetts legislature and personally inspecting more than a thousand schools on horseback over six years. Mann called education the “great equalizer” of social conditions. Before he took office, in the 1830s, a contemporary survey had estimated that only a third of Massachusetts children of school age actually attended. In 1852, Massachusetts became the first American state to make school attendance compulsory by law for every child.

England’s path was slower. The Elementary Education Act of 1870, known as the Forster Act, required local authorities to survey how many children lived in their area and how many schools already existed; section 74 then left it to individual school boards to decide whether to make attendance compulsory, with exemptions for illness, a distance of more than three miles, or a child already judged sufficiently educated. By 1873, only 40% of the English population lived in districts that had made that choice. Between 1870 and 1880, school boards opened or took over somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 schools, before the Elementary Education Act of 1880, the Mundella Act, made attendance compulsory up to age 10 across England and Wales, with a few remaining exemptions. Free schooling followed even later, in 1891, in both board schools and voluntary religious schools.

Back in Italy, the obligation and its penalties didn’t close the regional gap on their own. Illiteracy fell from 68.8% in 1871 to 62.8% in 1881, to 48.5% in 1901, 43.1% in 1911 and 31% in 1921, with the North by then nearly fully literate: 2% in Venezia Tridentina, 7% in Piedmont, 9% in Lombardy, 10% in Liguria. In the South, illiteracy was still at 49% or higher in Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia, Sicily and Sardinia. More than sixty years after the Casati Law, and over forty after the Coppino Law, the public school movement had shrunk the problem, not solved it.

The right to education is recognized as a universal principle, and its roots reach back to ancient education systems and to 17th-century educational thinkers writing two centuries before the Casati and Coppino laws.