Popular education in England started as a social welfare as well as an educational service. Robert Raikes, who opened the first Sunday School in 1780, and the two bodies of religious and philanthropic people who provided all the day schools until 1870, were inspired to act by two motives--one was shame at the existence in a great country like England of children and many adults who could not read or write, and the other was concern at the conditions which the industrial revolution had provided for the swarms of children who inhabited the new towns.
This approach to popular education was not the same in other countries. In Prussia, Switzerland, France and in the U. S. A. , the duty to see that future citizens were educated was recognized as that of the State, and public money was allotted to it much earlier than in England. Although the churches in some of these countries were associated with the State system--since religion was recognized to have an important share in the upbringing of the young--the prime motive force was education. The doctrines of the French Revolution were mainly responsible on the Continent for a first approach to educational opportunity, but these doctrines did not meet with the approval of the governing classes in this country. No statesman here at the beginning of the nineteenth century would have echoed Thomas Jefferson’s famous saying of 1812 that "if a nation expects to be both free and ignorant it expects what never was and never can be in a state of civilization". The most our leaders achieved was the reluctant recognition, sixty years later, that "we must educate our masters". But if we were later than other nations in realizing the importance of popular education, our system has gained something from its dual (double) origin. We have, sooner than other countries, realized that education is not merely instruction, that schools are places where the very young children can be cared for, and that all children have bodies as well as minds. What was the major educational difference between Britain and the U. S. in the 19th century