strategies provision of mass education
Many governments in Europe after 1880 laid out strategies provision of mass education. Stated funded schools were built, and salaried teachers were employed. The primary education was made free and mandatory (Gildea, pg.352).
The main reason for mass education was national integration leading to national unity facilitated by governments through their funding. The church came in education to provide religious morality. Apart from funding, the government started controlling syllabuses, started teacher training, an inspection of schools, and provided the examination. The conflict with the church started due to those reasons because they had earlier controlled education docket. The government was liberal and wanted the stability of education and wanted education to be secular while the church insisted on education on state schools to be religious (Gildea, pg.352).
In 1882 in France, teaching congregations discontinued catechism in state primary schools, which contributed to conflicts with the Catholic Church. As a solution to the excluded catechism teaching, a private sector started the teaching of catechism through the employment of new teachers. In Italy, anticlerical heads made discouraged catechism and made it optional in state schools. This pushed Giovanni Giolitti to propose a bill that stated that communes who were against religious education to provide catechism to children only if their parents accepted (Gildea, pg.352).
Works Cited
Gildea, Robert. Barricade and Borders: Europe 1800-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003