“Teaching is by common consent a profession,” begins a 1917–18 Parliamentary report on teachers' salaries. But, the report continues,

The third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century witnessed nationwide agitation for public schools. While our understanding of this movement is far from complete, it is apparent that the receptivity of American communities to this institution varied considerably. Theoretically, large cities experiencing the shift to capitalist modes of production and the accompanying social disorder should have been most receptive to the common school idea. Indeed, in some cities undergoing these dramatic socioeconomic changes, the proposal to introduce a system of uniform, publicly controlled and operated schools which would instruct children from all classes in the community was adopted with considerable public approval and a minimum of opposition. Stanley Schultz's study of Boston, for example, demonstrates that the 1818 proposal to institute a system of primary schools that would prepare all children in the city for entrance to its well-established public schools met resistance from only a few members of the town's elite, whose protests failed “because an aroused public demanded action.” Carl Kaestle's account of the New York City experience shows that the Free School Society also encountered little opposition, with the exception of its dispute with the Bethel Baptist Church, as it evolved into the Public School Society in 1825, assuming all of New York City's state funding for education and opening its schools to children of all classes in the city.

The Enunciation of the tripartite slogan of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” by Count S. S. Uvarov in December of 1832 provided a brief but ill-defined slogan for the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855). These words served as a convenient prescription for policies in all fields and affected all the peoples of the empire, but Uvarov, as Minister of Public Instruction from 1833 to 1849, possessed particular advantages in translating his own theory into educational policy. The first two terms of the motto caused little conceptual confusion; few inhabitants in the Russian Empire misunderstood the rock-hard meaning of Orthodoxy or autocracy. Nationality (narodnost’) supposedly meant the promotion of those elements which made Russia unique among nations. But what elements were to be singled out and what means should be employed to promote them? In practice, official nationality encompassed the other two terms by training the citizens of the empire to serve the church and the state, promoting Russian patriotism, and emphasizing Russian national culture. In Uvarov's scheme, the school became a tool of official nationality.

“Between the time of leaving school and entering the barracks, during those dangerous years of adolescence when the passions are aroused, when the temptations of the cabaret and the street beckon, the youth, left to his own devices, runs the risk not only of forgetting what he has learned, but of losing any sense of morality.” That call to alarm, sounded in 1904 by Gabriel Séailles, professor of philosophy in the Sorbonne, echoed throughout the French business, political, and intellectual establishment at the turn of the century. Those Frenchmen self-appointed to defend the republican order had good reason to be alarmed. In their view, young workingclass men, cut loose from secure familial moorings and only partially integrated into the world of industrial labor, were easy pickings for those socialists and syndicalists who worked to subvert order. The “social question” dominated French political life and, for many, popular education appeared to offer the best chance of coming to grips with it. For Léon Bourgeois, “the social problem” was, “in the final analysis, a problem of education.” Séailles drew attention to a relationship and to a choice in the subtitle of his pamphlet: “Education and revolution.”