School form and reform in a free market: The development of school under the Ancien Régime

Abstract

In most of the Swiss cantons the modern public school has been errected in the first half of the 19th century. This school secures the education of the children. This homogeneity of the institutionalization of the first elementary school acts in a lot of cantons in a defined period is oppositional to the heterogeneity of the time before. Till the 1830ies schools were in a private education market. The following article focuses that process and seeks to contribute to the research in that field with the contextualization of a case study. The main thesis is that the institutionalization of the elementary school was the logical consequence of the private education market.