In light of their nineteenth-century political economies, why did poor, agricultural Denmark become a leader in public, mass primary education (1814) and a multiple-track education system that included vocational training, while rich, industrial Britain did not create public, mass schooling until 1870, and embrace a one-track, academic secondary-education system? The author argues that literary narratives shed light on these cross-national differences. Danish narratives imagined education as social investment for a strong society; diverse educational tracks were necessary to meet the varied skills needs of the economy. British narratives portrayed schooling as essential to self-development and to cultivating the ideal individual. The author uses a close reading of texts and computational linguistics analyses of 521 Danish and 562 British works of fiction from 1700 to 1920 to document the different portrayal of education in the two countries. Case studies show that writers are crucial political actors in important reforms and understudied political agents in policy development stories. The method allows the author to evaluate empirically the complex relationship between culture and political outcomes, to falsify cultural claims, and to improve on thin, vague, national cultural arguments. The article shows how literature helps to reconcile the contradictions embedded in diverse models of governance. Literature provides a site for reworking cultural symbols in response to societal struggles over exogenous change, and provides a source of continuity at moments of institutional change.

中文翻译：

---

想象一下所有的人

鉴于其 19 世纪的政治经济，为什么贫穷的农业丹麦成为公共、大众初等教育（1814 年）和包括职业培训在内的多轨教育体系的领导者，而富裕、工业化的英国却没有创造公共、直到 1870 年的大规模学校教育，并采用单轨、学术型中等教育体系？作者认为文学叙事揭示了这些跨国差异。丹麦的叙事将教育想象为对强大社会的社会投资；多样化的教育途径对于满足经济的不同技能需求是必要的。英国的叙述将学校教育描述为自我发展和培养理想个体的必要条件。作者通过对 1700 年至 1920 年间 521 部丹麦小说和 562 部英国小说的文本阅读和计算语言学分析，记录了两国教育的不同写照。案例研究表明，作家是重要改革中的重要政治参与者，也是政策发展故事中未被充分研究的政治代理人。该方法使作者能够凭经验评估文化与政治结果之间的复杂关系，证伪文化主张，并改进单薄、模糊的民族文化论点。这篇文章展示了文学如何帮助调和嵌入在不同治理模式中的矛盾。文学提供了一个重新加工文化符号的场所，以响应社会对外部变化的斗争，