Introduction

In this chapter we focus on those two stalwarts of the modern democratic European welfare state: education and social services. The theme of our approach will be, as in all the chapters in this part of the book, the changing relationship between the individual and society, the citizen and the state. Education was provided in increasing breadth and depth throughout the nineteenth century, but it was also the vehicle for a degree of national integration, and for the formation of ideological interest groups (or pillars) across the nation, like the orthodox Calvinists and the Roman Catholics. The embryonic welfare state, on the other hand, was a developing prototype of the situation current today, where one of the prime characteristics of the state is that it should provide services and protection for all, especially those who cannot do so fully for themselves.

Education

Education was a vehicle through which the state sought to expand its competences and reform the country, while at the same time it was a tool with which individuals and groups sought to defend their own way of life or ideology. Education was one of the great issues of the second half of the nineteenth century, especially for those with an overtly religious point of view. Nowhere was this more so than in the Netherlands, where the Schoolkwestie or Education Question was quite as important as the Social Question as a political divider.