Education systems and human capital accumulation

The German Empire never established a national education system, and each of the twenty-six states managed its educational affairs. Unification in 1871 coincided with an ongoing process of centralising educational systems within the German states. The early reformers of primary education envisioned curricula with a broad general education but failed with the local reality of schooling, especially in the countryside. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the typical curriculum focused exclusively on reciting the catechism, reading, writing, and singing. Unification fell into a period of substantial structural change in Germany. Across Germany, secondary schooling was typically devoted to teaching classical and humanistic content and abstract mathematics in line with cultural values prevailing among the urban bourgeoisie. The idea that the education system can play a crucial role in nation-building is old. From 1886, the process of teachers’ recruitment started to change.