Public Education as an Autocratic Project, with Agustina Paglayan

In this conversation, we talk with Dr. Agustina Paglayan, an assistant professor of political science at UC San Diego, about her project “The Dark Side of Education,” an examination of the spread of mass primary schooling around the world. Paglayan recently published an article on the topic in the American Political Science Review and has a larger book project underway expanding on this research.

In this project, Paglayan seeks to challenge a great deal of what we think we know about the spread of primary education around the world. Common understandings of the expansion of public education take a pretty benign view of its origins. Previous scholarship has tended to argue that states expanded primary schooling to invest in human capital, to redistribute to the poor, or to promote economic development. Scholars have also contended that the spread of education was largely a democratic project, as a response to popular demands following democratization.

Paglayan has quite a different story to tell about how primary schooling became broadly available around the world. Drawing on a wealth of historical evidence, she argues that it wasn’t democrats but dictators who extended primary education to the masses. Moreover, in most cases, she contends, governments expanded primary schooling not as a concession to the poor, but as a tool for silencing dissent, undermining rebellion, and reinforcing their hold on power.

In our conversation, Paglayan advances these arguments by tying together rich knowledge of the cases she studies (such as 19th-century Prussia, Chile, and the Jim Crow American South), an original comparative-historical dataset on the expansion of education around the world, and careful thinking about drawing causal inferences from cross-national, time-series data. This was a fascinating discussion that changed the way we think about the politics of education.

A figure from Paglayan's APSR article and the scholarly works discussed in this episode can be found on our website.