Imagine ALL the People: Novels, Culture and the Development of Educational Institutions

“Imagine All the People” explores how cultural assumptions embedded in novels contribute to the institutional evolution of education systems in Britain and Denmark.  Comparable British and Danish coming-of-age novels suggest wildly different conceptions of the individual in society, relations among diverse social groups, and views about institutions (schools, courts, unions) appropriate for social change.  Even in the earliest novels, British and Danish authors promoted education for different ends.  British authors advocated regulations to protect the rights of children and sought some measure of equality of educational opportunity.  These novelists reinforced the assumption that equality of opportunity would allow enterprising youth to overcome socioeconomic disparities.  In sharp contrast, Danish novelists wished to nurture society, and social investments in youth were viewed as crucial to building a strong society.  This fundamental focus on society sheds light on why the Danish universalistic welfare regime produced an education system with considerable diversity and an inequality of educational options.

More broadly, the paper considers how literature both reveals and constructs cross-national variations in conceptions of the individual, society, class relations, and collective action.  Deep cultural predispositions are expressed and reworked in literature, as societies struggle with exogenous economic and social change.  Political governance systems have distinctive contradictions, winners and losers and coercive elements, and literature helps to reconcile the contradictions embedded in these diverse models of governance.  Novelists provide a forum for renewing cultural assumptions for shifting economic, social and political contradictions; and literature thereby provides a source of continuity within processes of institutional change.