To Örebro University

The grand narrative of schooling in the long nineteenth century is that of victory. From being a rather marginal phenomena among common people, schooling became a normal experience in a growing number of countries as school enrolments and school attendance rose. As existing research has shown, this was a development enabled by both the population, who send their children to school, and the governments, who issued school acts, employed state school inspectors and distributed state subsidies.

While existing research has focused on the factors or structures that enabled this striking development that surely deserves to betitled an educational revolution, this paper contributes to the studies that have shed light upon the limitations and shortfalls of nineteenth century schooling. That is, instead of asking why children started to go to school, this paper will address the question of why many nineteenth century children did not attend school.

Using the first state school inspectors reports of 1861–1863, the aim of this paper is to shed further light upon the factors that in various ways hampered the development of schoolingin rural mid-nineteenth century Sweden.

The school inspectors were obliged to compile a report from the schools in each school district, consisting of a general section and one for the individual schools. The general section would, among other things, contain information about the regulation of the schools, the character of the teaching, homework and to what extent teachers made home visits. The reports concentrated on the individual school ́s should be oriented on aspects as curriculum, number of pupils, teaching methods, the teacher's professional skills, and discipline. In addition, the reports contained information about the condition of the premises, the availability of teaching materials, the interior and cleaning and tidiness. The inspectors' reports thereby constitute an important source material to the regional variations of schooling in rural Sweden, and the factors that influenced the development of schooling. By answering questions concerning the factors that state school inspectors identified asdetrimental to school attendance and enrolment, this paper provides additional input into the debate in educational history regarding the role of the state and the local community in the rise of mass schooling, while simultaneously providing further qualitative evidence to a quantitatively oriented research field in economic history on the determinants of schooling.