Will Brehm  2:11
Johannes Westberg, welcome to Fresh Ed.

Johannes Westberg  2:13
Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here with you.

Will Brehm  2:16
Congratulations on your new book. It’s a fantastic piece that I think is going to make a huge contribution to the field of education. You know, at the heart of your book is this claim that might surprise people outside the field, that the words that we use to describe schools and school systems aren’t actually neutral or always neutral. They kind of shape what we see and what we miss. When did you first realize that the terminology, the words themselves was a research problem, and that, you know, it wasn’t just a translation inconvenience, right? Like looking at the word became so hugely important as a historian of education.

Johannes Westberg  2:51
I think this is a really important observation. And as like a Swedish national, I often thought about English terms just as a kind of a technical translation issue that in somehow can be easily solved just using lexica or digital tools. But in some instances, I really realized that they are something more and they really like, they matter because they guide our interpretations of history. Like there are a few instances where I first realized that this is also a research problem. So, one of these were when I realized that children could start at age nine in a Swedish 19th century school that was described as an upper secondary school. And I kind of thought, what is that? An upper secondary school where you started at age nine. And other instances, of course, like when I started my studies on 19th century mosque schooling and realized the terms such as nation building and the state was a bit difficult to apply on Swedish 19th century when mosque schooling was run by this sparsely populated local parishes. There was such a great distance between the terms that I use in English and the realities I actually studied.

Will Brehm  4:02
So you do highlight a whole bunch of terms that I think you use, I think you call it false friends, like these terms that are seemingly similar, but actually have different meanings. Can you give us like a good example of a couple of them? Just because I think they really highlight the point you’re trying to make here about it’s not just an issue of translation.

Johannes Westberg  4:19
Yeah, one of the interesting things with European school systems, I think partly due to various transnational processes is that we use similarly sounding terms with entirely different meanings. So there are a few examples where, for example, the Swedish folk skola is something entirely different than the Danish folk skola, even though the terms are almost exactly the similar. And across Europe in the 90s and early 20th century, educationalists and educational politicians loved using the term lyceum in all kinds of spellings, but they were kind of indicated completely different institutions, for example, the German lyceum in contrast to the French lyceum.

Will Brehm  4:58
Like lyceum, how were they different in Germany versus in France?

Johannes Westberg  5:02
So for example, there was this French lyceum, which was like a Napoleonic invention for male male students only, while in some German speaking states, lyceum was a girl’s school. So entirely different in terms of like a target audience, but also then in terms of content.

Will Brehm  5:17
Can you tell me the example of the folk skola in Sweden and how that differs from that? I think it’s folk skola.

Johannes Westberg  5:23
So you know, there’s just a few letters differentiating, but like the interesting thing is both also they have the same kind of meaning. Folk skola, that is like the school for the population, for the people. But like the 19th century Swedish folk skola was just a basic education provided for the broad layers of society. So it also had this kind of connotations of dangerous masses, those who has to be socially controlled and disciplined. While today, like the Danish folk skola is a comprehensive school. So it’s a school for everyone, providing now I think 10 year educational program. So now it’s a democratic institution, while like the 19th century Swedish folk skola was for this kind of incredibly unequal.

Will Brehm  6:06
Like, how did you go about doing this research? And were you coming across terms and being like, oh my god, this is totally different and like creating a kind of a glossary.

Johannes Westberg  6:16
The starting for my book, one of the starting kind of problems I wanted to deal with is this issue of translation. So which terms should you use? And also if you use if you look at like handbooks on translations, some are really adamant that you should keep the national language terms. And there is a tendency also in educational research that we romanticize the national languages and sometimes feel like there is a specific truth kind of hidden in the national languages that English cannot capture. And while of course you see lots of problems with English language, I’m also not in favor of romanticizing national languages. So then when I started to do my analysis and see whether like, for example, the Swedish term of folk skola should be kept, then I realized that there are so many versions of this across Europe, which also will create confusion because it’s so easy to mistake the Swedish folk skola for the Danish folk skola, for example, or the Swedish Realskola with the German Realskola.

Will Brehm  7:15
So what would the solution be like it for writers in English to, like, how do you navigate that tension of not romanticizing, but also not sort of conflating multiple meanings?

Johannes Westberg  7:26
So this is like the key problematics, really, of my book, trying to avoid like a nostalgism for past terms, which is really interesting because I’m a historian of education. I, in some ways, love the past. So I would like to use terms from the past, but also that kind of romanticism that you would kind of find, like a belief that like in the national languages, there is some kind of truth. So for me, like my analysis is how really to deal with this, this problem, this tension. And for me, I would say that even though I’m not a believer in the English language or in national languages, I, through my process of writing this book, has become a true believer in translations. So the process of translating, it’s by like working with these terms, looking at different options, comparing in national language terms with English language terms. I think if we would find truth somewhere, it is in that kind of process where we understand our institutions better and also understands the terms that we can use in a better way.

Will Brehm  8:29
So I want to dig into a term that is so common in the field of education, history of education, comparative education, and that’s compulsory schooling, we often talk about, you know, modern mass schooling, when education became compulsory, and, and enshrined in, you know, laws, and everyone has to go to school. What did the term compulsory education actually mean, you know, in the beginnings of modern mass schooling, as we know it?

Johannes Westberg  8:53
Yeah, so my ideas with my book, I use this term historical therapy to kind of refer to my approach. So the point with this term historical therapy is that it indicates a way of approaching these terms. And it’s really about trying to find a way to address some obsessions that we sometimes have. So one of these obsessions that we have is with like terms such as compulsory school, we use it a lot, as you say, we use it a lot in history of education, but also education research widely. And that’s why it kind of deserves a bit of particular attention, a bit more, some kind of historical therapy. And for me, in one way, I see this term as very unproblematic, because we use it all the time in research talking about the rise of compulsory schooling during the 19th century and the 20th century. So in one way, it works, we can use it to communicate, compared to American football. So like, it’s a very weird term, because they hardly use their feet. But of course, we understand what we mean when we talk about American football. And it’s a bit similar with, I think, compulsory schooling, we kind of understand what we mean. But I would say it is very problematic to use it in the 19th century, because it assumes that there is a period of time where children attend school, and there is like a mandatory that they have to attend. And in the 19th century, that’s a problem because children didn’t, all children weren’t enrolled in school, and not all children did attend school. So in terms of practice, it doesn’t describe practice very well. But it also doesn’t describe legislation very well. These so called comprehensive schools, all children did not have to attend them. So in Europe, of course, the rich kids didn’t have to attend them. They could attend their own like private schools, or like the secondary schools from age nine. And also, there was a lot of exemptions that children living far away from school, for example, didn’t have to attend, the number of days they did have to attend could be really low. So a large share of children in Sweden in the 1860s, for example, attended school below 30 days a year. So describing that there’s compulsory attending school less than 30 days a year, that creates misunderstandings.

Will Brehm  11:08
And what about the connection between compulsory schooling and the state? You mentioned the laws that sort of compel people to go to school, and that wasn’t necessarily the case. And not only the state, but also that notion of nation building, right, or the nation state as it sometimes is written nation hyphen state. How does that connect to this notion of compulsory schooling?

Johannes Westberg  11:28
So I think in several ways. So in my book, I discussed the term state to quite length. And I think one of the challenges there, apart from the challenge we have with like the language we use, we also have a problem with time that we try when we describe historical developments, we try to create the bridge from the present to the past. And when we talk about the state, I sometimes feel that we imagine the state as it is today, with like this big staff with this kind of big budget. And like in the 19th century, the central government kind of could have this like small units of people working at the central government consisting of four or five people. And it’s quite interesting, they could also note during that time that the personality of the chair of the unit of mass education could determine the entire politics. And that’s of course true, because if they were only four, and the chair had a difficult personality, it would affect everything. So we have this kind of sometimes difficulties taking a step from our like elaborate and very powerful states that we have today to a 19th century setting where European central governments could really struggle with producing statistics and struggle almost with the practicalities of producing laws.

Will Brehm  12:45
What about this notion of nation building? Like, how does that fit into all of this, like this conversation of different notions of the state, and also different notions of what compulsory means?

Johannes Westberg  12:55
I highlight a few kind of that I at least now in like this podcast format can describe as obsessions. I think like in our historiography of mass schooling, there is, for example, an obsession with Prussia, we always mention Prussia. And I think that’s needs, that is in need of some kind of therapy, because we’re talking too much about Prussia. And I think there is also some need to talk about nation building, because we refer to it a lot. And I think for sure, during, for example, early 20th century, nation building is such a powerful ambition. You can see it like in textbooks and educational policy everywhere. So it’s such like fostering national citizens is such an important ambition that you can see also coming to materialize everywhere in the educational system. But like in mid 19th century, or even like early 19th century, it is really difficult in some contexts to talk about schooling and nation building at the same time, because schooling was about so many others. In Europe, 19th century schooling was very decentralized. Of course, there were national school acts, but the funding and organization was often made in on some kind of local level. So decisions were made on local level in cities, in municipalities and parishes. And sometimes there is a big, big leap to claim that the work that was done on this very local level was for nation building efforts. Because in rural areas in Europe, nation building was not the main priority.

Will Brehm  14:27
It reminds me of a conversation I had with Augustina Paglion last year, her book on Raised to Obey, and how she sort of looks at the history of schooling and really zooms in on the state building function of schooling and how schooling was sort of, or public schooling was, and maybe that word also needs to be under some revision as well, but was in sort of areas that were sort of causing problems to the rulers, right? And you can sort of trace where schooling was sort of started to kind of keep people under control.

Johannes Westberg  14:58
Yes, and I love that book. And I also see that her perspective, and especially with her data set, it can really shed light, not the least on the central government and their kind of ambitions and why they created a school act, hired state school inspectors, created national curricula, and provided some amount of state funding. So it really kind of provides a very powerful, I think, framework for understanding those kinds of things. But I would say in order to understand what happened in like the classrooms, and also why local governments and local school boards, and local kind of also some kind of village schools and so forth, why they invested in schooling, and then you need a broader perspective.

Will Brehm  15:39
Yeah, so what would that look like? I mean, I think this is getting into another piece in your book, you focus on kind of the differences between what we might think of as public and private schooling. And it’s such a kind of a hot topic today. And there’s a lot of normative beliefs behind either public or private, and you know, families are making all sorts of choices. But like, how does that play out in the sort of history of education and how these terms are being used, and how that might then look different from some of that sort of state schooling that maybe Augustina Paglione was looking at all of these, you know, the parish schools, the small community schools, because clearly education was happening. It just was very different from then perhaps the mental conceptions that we have today of what public and private means.

Johannes Westberg  16:22
Yes. So I think like, getting back to the question of state, I think there is the potential of using another terminology to capture like 19th and early 20th century school experiences. So instead of state compulsory universal, which is also a concept that is often used, we can use terms like regionalized, pluralist, or very heterogeneous. I think those kind of terms provide another insight into 19th century experiences alongside terms such as decentralized. So I think this is also one of like the big ambitions with my book is to also not only discuss the terms that we are using, but also raise the questions what other terms could we also use. And one of the issues I discuss is like terms concerning municipalities, but also cities. And one of my feelings that I have that I try to express in my book is that the term city is underused in the history of education. And that also concerns the 20th century. We talk so much about the state and so little about cities.

Will Brehm  17:27
What would that look like? What do you mean? Like, give me an example of what it would mean to talk about education or schooling in a city.

Johannes Westberg  17:35
So it means that like, often we are so used to talking about the state and education, and how the state pushes for this and that, which leads us to discuss national politics and central government political institutions. While if we talk more about the terms such as like cities and all the terms that follows there, we gain another perspective, another approach, highlighting the political institutions of our cities, highlighting the challenges that face our cities, and how those drove developments in both primary and secondary education and drove developments in school fundings.

Will Brehm  18:08
I love that idea of education in the city sounds like a good journal topic or something like a whole journal could be devoted to that. Let’s fast forward to sort of the post World War Two era. In that moment, there was a lot of comprehensive school reforms happening kind of across Europe. And you know, the typical story is that this is this, you know, convergence that’s happening, and we’re sort of moving towards equality. How do you see it after doing a bit of historical analysis here?

Johannes Westberg  18:33
So I think when I look at the terminology we use, I see often like a danger with those narratives. Of course, we should use simplified narratives, because that is about writing history is about simplifying history. But there is a danger with those narratives that are a bit too straightforward, like that has just one direction. So terms like systematization, convergence, like growth, they have something problematic with them. And for me, I think like convergence is really one of the concepts that I would like to discuss more, because it always depends on what period we are talking about. And of course, like World War Two, I think the period since World War Two remains a story of a push towards secondary schooling for all and the reduction of education inequality that would be kind of rather general across Europe. But I think we need to be careful. So here after World War Two, it contains so many things. Just looking at Europe, we have the detectorships of East Europe, we have Francoist Spain, and Europe includes both the UK, Italy and the Nordics. So talking about convergence in that context, that you have to have a lot of asterisks and a lot of explanations if you want to talk about convergence.

Will Brehm  19:46
So would it be better to use terms like plural and regionalistic in that sense as well?

Johannes Westberg  19:52
So sometimes there is something with like educational research and that we have an interest in the universal, the converging, those kind of perspectives. And I would like to keep openness for national differences and regional differences. I think it might be something with like our uneasiness with the national, that sometimes I feel also that we have an uneasiness talking about national differences. But since we have in the 20th century, it’s the growth of national education systems, we also have significant national differences across Europe.

Will Brehm  20:23
You know, I totally agree with you that there’s this sort of universalism about what schooling is and how we’re all sort of converging to the same sort of model. And it also seems like there’s this like assumption that this is a good thing. Like the education schooling ameliorates kind of all social problems, right? Like that’s, that’s kind of the logic or the narrative, let’s say, that becomes, I don’t know, I would use the word like hegemonic. Like it’s actually, it feels like sometimes hard to say, well, what if that’s not always true?

Johannes Westberg  20:50
Yeah. So I think there’s many things that can be discussed regarding that question. I think one of these is, of course, that like the expansion of schooling in the 20th century. So if the 19th century was expansion of mass primary schooling, the 20th century is for sure the expansion of secondary schooling for all. And the creation of this kind of educational systems with educational ladders, where you go from primary schooling to lower secondary to upper secondary schooling. And there is like this tendency towards massification of secondary school. So most children start to attend even like upper secondary school. And like in motivations, there is, of course, this is motivated by the belief that this would be good for economic growth, but also that this would be good to reduce inequality, increase equality. And for me, I of course see how this during the 20th century, this has been a positive force in terms of equality. Research indicates that, for example, introduction of comprehensive schooling has raised the wages of children of low educated parents and erased all kinds of health measurements and so forth. So I think it has been a positive thing. Although, of course, education can’t change. I think that’s what you’re highlighting, the fact that there is like this belief in education, that education can change society. But society is so much, it’s the entire world.

Will Brehm  22:08
You know, there’s a politics to it, too, because I think a lot of politicians sort of, and governments sort of point to education as being the solution, right? They have, they identified some problems like, oh, let’s just tweak education to solve this problem that we’ve identified, which kind of becomes an impossible task for school and teachers to sort of constantly be solving any of the largest problems that society faces.

Johannes Westberg  22:29
Yeah, and I think that’s like one of the interesting phenomena with this like massified school systems is immense investments, is that they will inevitably lead to some kind of discontent with education. It’s for sure the post-war era, when we see it like the crisis narratives and so forth, which has to be related to our amazing belief that education can do everything and when it can’t do everything.

Will Brehm  22:51
You know, I want to bring up a theory that is quite common for students to study sort of education studies called neo-institutionalism that sort of talks a lot about this convergence that we see. And they, you know, they use words like loose coupling. So there’s slight differences, but we’re sort of moving in this trend where systems and schools are looking more and more similar. And often it’s paired with, you know, all of the things like, you know, reduced infant mortality and GDP growth, and you see all these things getting, you know, better. And it also just so happens that more and more people are in school over that sort of long history. And this is sort of the evidence that neo-institutionalism often presents is showing that we are converging towards this sort of world society or global model. I apologize for the neo-institutionalists out there, because I know I’m making this a very crude sort of argument. But I would love to sort of like, how does your work fit within that framework or speak back to that framework in any way?

Johannes Westberg  23:47
So like discussing this kind of theoretical frameworks, I’m of course, when working within the field of education research, I see like the value of all kinds of theoretical frameworks. So I of course, see great potential in this kind of neo-institutionalist framework. It can kind of foster and it has fostered so many great studies. So like the possible critique that I highlight in my book, for example, it shouldn’t be kind of perceived as some kind of fundamental critique towards like those kind of frameworks. What I would like to highlight is that there is also possibilities of other kinds of studies that highlights more the heterogeneity of education experiences in our world. And of course, not least if you look at statistical data, there is a lot of convergence going on, partly because of this expansion of education, you will get that kind of effects from expansion. But in terms of convergence, it’s very much like what kind of time period you’re looking at and what countries you’re comparing. So for example, Germany, if you compare Germany and Sweden, the school systems were very similar in the 19th century. In some ways, the Swedish school system was kind of a Nordic copy of those of the German states. However, today, the distance between the German school system and the Sweden in many ways is such vast. So you still have a very tracked school system in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, where you have a nine year comprehensive school in Sweden. So there is no convergence in those.

Will Brehm  25:15
And actually, it sounds like perhaps more of a divergence.

Johannes Westberg  25:18
Yes. So you see kind of, if you look at secondary schooling in the post-war era, it is also another story is that the story of divergence, the introduction of comprehensive school systems in the Nordics, to some extent, also, of course, in Spain, Italy, and France, while you have this creation of a very specific track school system, Germany in West Germany, then in 1955, you have that in the Netherlands as well. And you have like this combination system in England. And for me, very difficult to see the convergence across those mentioned countries.

Will Brehm  25:49
So you talk about, you know, this approach that you’ve taken in this book, and you know, it really sounds like this journey that you went on, and you call it historical therapy. And so I feel like I have to ask, like, do you feel like after writing the book and going through this whole process, do you feel like you’re healed, like that you’ve come out and actually are like, you know, like, you don’t need to go back to therapy anymore?

Johannes Westberg  26:10
My book is very much about reflecting on the terms we use and the precision and healing, that is the terms that has the connotations of a more complete, universal development towards health. And for sure, I don’t feel healed in that sense. But I think like in terms of therapy, which can be used both in like the psychological but also in the physical therapy is about dealing with very specific problems. And I also discuss this in a Wittgensteinian sense about reducing the worries we have on certain things. And for me, it hasn’t kind of improved my overall educational research health. But it has helped me with some issues that I’ve had some problems that I haven’t really kind of understood where the problem lie. But now I know more about like the stress that I felt when people have used the term state, for example, I know more about my uneasiness with the term compulsory. So it has helped me with those kind of specific instances. And it also has me like, what term should I use for like the post-war school reforms? What do I mean when I use the term comprehensive? So it has helped me with those individual issues.

Will Brehm  27:20
As a final question, are there any terms that you see sort of circulating today that you think need to sort of be put through that same process and actually sort of unpacked historically?

Johannes Westberg  27:29
So my book deals with a wide range of terms. And I think many of them needs a continuous attention, because I think that’s also one of the main lessons of my book is there is like no end to this. We have a kind of therapeutical process that should continue to make sure we use the terms in the way we want to use and to highlight the things that we want them to do the work that they actually do. I think there is still a lot of work to be done on the public-private distinction. I think we have like maybe an unhealthy obsession with those terms that needs a bit of unpacking. So we really know what we mean. I think there is also like, because my book deals mainly with the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, it focuses on the terms we use to describe those periods. But going forward, I think terms that we use with marketization and neoliberalization, those are really important terms to use when describing what is happening in education today. But they are used in a wide range of ways, and we often mean quite different things with them. So if I would have kind of a wish for the future, it’s really like a therapeutic approach to those terms.

Will Brehm  28:40
Well, Johannes Westberg, thank you so much for joining Fresh Head. Congratulations on your new book, and I look forward to more historical therapy going forward.

Johannes Westberg  28:48
Thank you very much.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Other Works by Johannes Westberg

Funding the Rise of Mass Schooling: The Social, Economic and Cultural History of School Finance in Sweden, 1840–1900

School Acts and the Rise of Mass Schooling: Education Policy in the Long Nineteenth Century

Historical Methods in Educational Research: Sources, Contextualisation, Periodisation and Analysis

Works Mentioned in the Episode

Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education

FreshEd #407 – Agustina Paglayan

Further Reading

Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony

Rethinking the History of Education: Considerations for a New Social History of Education

Global Convergence or National Variation? Examining National Patterns of Classroom Instructional Practices

Globalization: Theory and Trends

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com