At the beginning of the 19th century, the “Society for Public Welfare” (Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen) applied its Enlightenment ideas to further the public good through educational and other means in both the Northern and Southern Netherlands. It challenged the traditional idea that education, and the basic instruction provided in Sunday schools and parochial village schools, was mainly a form of pastoral care for the young. However, attempts to secularize public primary education, imposed as they were under French rule, had failed completely, and following Napoleon’s Concordat with the Holy See (1801), education had reverted to its pre-1795 situation, with little involvement from the central government.

Popular education was, however, a central concern of William I, king of the United Netherlands from 1815 on. Apart from their religious purpose, schools – which were increasingly intended to serve the mass of the population – were also given an educational and moral task: to train disciplined, hard-working citizens, who knew their place in the social order. Docility and labour ethics – long-standing educational goals – received a new function in the construction of the nation-state. Primary education underwent a metamorphosis in this process. The often unhygienic teaching-rooms in private houses were replaced by public school buildings; and the old schoolmasters were replaced by professionally trained teachers (initially male). In 1817 the Public Teacher Training College in Lier – the first institution providing a professional training for future teachers in primary education – was established, as were a series of public institutions for secondary and higher education: public grammar schools, municipal secondary schools, and three state universities (in Louvain, Liège, and Gent). Vocational schools for science, trade, and industry soon followed. State subsidy for education was many times higher than in France, which is probably illustrative for the more prominent role the state played in education.

Besides a quantitative increase, there was also a change in the curriculum, which until then had been almost exclusively oriented towards reading, writing, basic mathematics, and religion; new subjects with a more social relevance were introduced, and organized in a tafel van werkzaamheden (“work table”). Under the “old” system, pupils in the classroom were called upon individually to recite their lessons to the schoolmaster, while the rest of the children in the classroom were unheeded; the new system of frontal or simultaneous instruction was introduced, after, in some cases a transition phase of mutual instruction as per the Bell-Lancaster method. Frontal instruction was accompanied by the introduction of new teaching aids: uniform textbooks, specially designed school desks (neatly positioned in rows), blackboards in front of the classroom, didactic wallcharts, reading aids, geographical maps, weights and measures.

This system was further developed throughout the century; the network of state-subsidized schools was further expanded, and the goal of “moral” instruction in popular education was pursued until the passing of the Fifth Organic Law on Primary Education in 1914. But there were difficulties.

A first conflict surfaced immediately after the independence of Belgium in 1830. The principle of the freedom of education, included in the Belgian constitution (of 1831), not only facilitated the development of private education at the expense of public schools, but was also invoked to revert to older school types. Still, from 1842 onwards, when the First Organic Law on Primary Education was passed, municipal education developed in the relative stability afforded by a compromise between Catholics and Liberals. Under this law, schools (preferably a state municipal school) had to be established in every municipality. Private schools (which in practice usually meant: Catholic schools) could be declared “adoptable” by the local authorities for that purpose, thereby receiving a substantial level of state funding without loss of autonomy. This arrangement favoured the Catholic hold on education, especially in the countryside. The First Organic Law also gave the clergy access to municipal primary education, not just to provide religious instruction during school hours, but also to control moral standards in schools.

The Liberal-Catholic compromise was riven apart by polarization in both camps. As Ultramontanists recognized only episcopal authority, progressive Liberals increasingly favoured centralized and secularized public education, and clamoured for more natural sciences and a rational or positivistic teaching approach. The Second Organic Law, passed in 1879 following a Liberal election victory, resulted in a School War. The law ended the “adoptability” policy, ended state funding for private schools, allowed only graduates of a state Teacher Training College to teach in official municipal schools, and ruled that religious instruction could only be organized outside normal school hours and at the explicit request of parents. The Catholic response was to forbid Catholic teachers to work in official state schools. The clergy mobilized the population in what became a “battle for the child’s pure soul”. This resulted in a boycott of official municipal schools, as Catholics sent their children to Catholic schools. Liberal countermeasures, including a breaking off of relations with the Holy See, proved fruitless.

After the Liberal electoral defeat in 1884, the Catholic majority restored its position in education by passing the Third and Fourth Organic Laws on Primary Education (1884; 1895). Religion was again included as a subject in the curriculum of state municipal schools, and private (Catholic) education could once again draw on public funding. This was continued under the Fifth Organic Law, which introduced compulsory education until the age of fourteen. For this precise reason, Socialists – who, at the end of the 19th century, had been the advocates of compulsory education and the abolition of child labour – left parliament when the law was approved.

The “School War” and its aftermath resulted in the confessionalization of Belgium’s (primary) education landscape, which was divided between two ideological blocs until deep in the 20th century. However, beyond the religious strife, these developments concurred in the basic belief in an educational-didactical public-oriented school, divided into grades. The ascendancy of frontal instruction, with the teacher posing questions that were meant to elicit the “right” answers, was unchallenged. The same held true for such principles as “learning by observation”, building upon what had already been learnt before, the concentric planning of the curriculum, and the strict separation of the sexes that prepared boys and girls for their specific future roles in society.

Although in primary education French was the language of instruction in certain boarding schools and in the preparatory sections of secondary education, and there was a tendency to Frenchify city schools in cities such as Brussels or Gent, most primary schools followed the tradition of providing education in the area’s vernacular language.

Things were more complicated in secondary education, where French was the successor language to Latin as a medium of instruction. Moreover, the existing legislation for public schools did not apply to private, non-state-subsidized institutions. These could issue their own rules, particular to their specific diocese or teaching congregation. In curricular programming, even Catholic, private education was bound by the provisions in the linguistic law of 1883-86 that some subjects be taught in Netherlandic; but this still left them free to teach those same subjects in French as well – the end result of which did little to assuage Flemish grievances. This state of affairs in turn explained the emergence of a type of Flamingantism in certain Catholic grammar schools usually associated with the name of Albrecht Rodenbach. It was propagated by priest-teachers opposing their Francophone superiors, and became a popular mobilizing platform among pupils and students, also involving the formation of associations and writing of songs and verse. It should be added that the teaching of history or the development of a Flemish historical awareness was largely unaffected by these developments. Insofar as Flemish identity was discussed in national history classes, it was clearly – at least until the eve of the First World War – as an integral part of a Belgian-patriotic programme. The emergence of a Flemish-national historicism was wholly extracurricular.