Exploring the spread of mass schooling in rural Sweden after the 1842 ‘Folkskole’ reform

A wave of recent research has attempted to explain within-country variations in the rise of primary schooling by studying local political and economic conditions. There is a particular focus on the role of the spread of democratisation and local elites in the development of schooling. An important lesson coming out of these studies is that conditions varied markedly between countries and over time. This paper studies the development of primary schools in rural Sweden after the school reform of 1842 in the context of industrialisation and democratisation of Swedish society. The findings give support to an elite-control interpretation of the spread of schooling in the latter half of the 19 century, rather than a bottom-up movement related to the spread of democratisation. This can be explained by the fact that Sweden remained an elite-democracy during the period and that industrialisation was relatively late