From Rebellion to Indoctrination: The Violent Rise of Primary Education Systems

Why do modern states regulate and provide mass education? This article proposes a theory of education as a state-building tool that is deployed when mass violence threatens the state’s viability. Experiencing mass violence can increase national elites’ concern about the masses’ moral character and/or the efficacy of repression or concessions alone to maintain social order. Under such circumstances, a mass education system designed to teach obedience can become an attractive policy tool to prevent future rebellion and promote long-term social order. Consistent with the theory, I detect a cross-national pattern of primary education expansion following civil wars in Europe and Latin America. In a complementary study of the 1859 Chilean civil war, I show that the central government responded by expanding primary schooling in rebel provinces not as a concession but to teach obedience and respect for authority. The theory helps explain why non-democracies often expanded mass education. This repository contains the code and datasets needed to reproduce the figures and tables contained in the main text and Online Supplementary Materials of this article.