The Origins of modern Russian education are transparently clear. Old Muscovy had only religious schools of little consequence. Peter the Great traveled to Western Europe and upon his return to Russia, imported teachers and books, opened the first modern schools, and abandoned the older traditions. The hallmark of the new Petrine educational policy was a fanatical emphasis on technical training. Reinhard Wittram, author of the finest biography of Peter the Great, contrasted the religiocentrism of Muscovite education with the practicality of the great reformer in the simple phrase, ‘Mathematick statt Katechismus,’ which suggests the radical secularization of the new schooling. James Billington merely echoed the conclusions of generations of earlier historians when he wrote that

[Peter the Great's] efforts to advance Russian learning were almost completely concentrated on scientific, technical or linguistic matters of direct military or diplomatic value. “To Peter's mind, ‘education’ and ‘vocational training’ seem to have been synonynlous concepts.” … Peter the Great was important not for introducing foreign technical ideas into Russia, but for making them the basis of a new state-sponsored type of education.

Soviet education of the 1920s has attracted much attention from both historians and educators. (1) Until 1931 Soviet educational authorities sponsored a flurry of measures many of which were initially advanced in the writings of such western educators as John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. Study of this “romantic and experimental period” (2) in the history of Soviet education is therefore understandable.

In 1962, 26% of the elementary school pupils in the Netherlands attended a public school, 74% were in private or confessional schools. This has not always been the case. At the turn of the century 69% of all elementary school students were in public schools and 31% in private or confessional schools. One of the great turning points in this confessionalizing trend was the constitutional revision of 1917 which placed confessional elementary schools on a parity with the public schools in terms of state subsidy. The parliament which carried out constitutional revision was elected in 1913 and embodied 46 deputies in the clerical bloc, 38 in the liberal concentration and 16 social democrats, in the 100 seat lower house. The measure owed its passage to the social democrats who combined with the clerical bloc and some left-liberals to legislate a new school law. In 1902 the Sociaal Democratische Arbeiderspartij (SDAP), the recognized Dutch representative of the social democratic Second International, passed a resolution calling for state subsidy to confessional schools. Within the context of Dutch politics the 1902 resolution is important for two reasons. One, it laid down the guideline which the SDAP would follow until the dissolution of the party by German occupation authorities in 1940. After the Second World War a labor party, the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA) was formed out of the ashes of the SDAP. The PvdA, acting as the logical successor of the SDAP, pursued, and continues to pursue, the policy of supporting state aid to confessional schools. In short, the labor community has aided in the confessionalizing trend by refusing to demand either a termination of aid to confessional schools or free compulsory state schools and a sharp, or total, curtailment of the existing confessional schools.