Evolution of Social Policies and Education: From Charity to State Intervention
1. From Charity to Uncontrolled Social Policy (16th Century)
1.1. Social Policies
In Medieval society, charity prevailed over justice. Personal ethics, religious values, and eternal salvation fueled individual charity, the most common form of assistance to the poor, integrated into the community. From the sixteenth century onwards, economic and social transformations reshaped the traditional religious conception of poverty.
The continuous economic expansion, the development of European commercial capitalism, the growth of cities, and demographic changes increased social inequality. This necessitated specific measures that shaped the sixteenth-century care model: banning begging; classifying the poor; integrating them into the productive workforce; centralizing resources; and secularizing care, thus ending the Church’s exclusive control over welfare funds.
Humanist writings of the time challenged the medieval view of poverty, advocating for rational resource allocation and public authority involvement. Thomas More’s Utopia and Erasmus’s Colloquia exemplify this thinking. In De Subventione Pauperum, Luis Vives urged public authorities to intervene, proposing concrete measures for control (poverty census), prevention (children’s education), rehabilitation through work, and care (hospitals).
England pioneered social legislation by establishing the Poor Laws and legally implementing a tax for the poor. This centralized system collected resources in parishes, discouraged alms-giving, and prohibited begging. It also secularized assistance through state intervention, with local governments providing training and subsidies for the disabled.
In Spain, specific ordinances like the Tavera Law of 1540 sparked a doctrinal debate between Dominican Domingo de Soto, who condemned the new care regime, and theologian Juan de Robles, who defended individual rights against social rights.
1.2. Education and Retraining of Young People
a) Social Integration of Orphans: The Apprenticeship Contract
Children entered the labor market early by learning a trade. Few learned to read and write, except for girls destined for marriage or religious life after domestic service.
Formalizing an apprenticeship contract (with a shop worker, servant, or waiter), written and notarized, was the first step in the practice of leasing services. This also applied to abandoned children (foundlings or orphans) after their initial care in hospitals or by nurses. After signing the document, the young became the responsibility of the master until adulthood, integrating into their families as apprentices or servants. Orphans often performed household chores, providing cheap and flexible labor. Master craftsmen trained the young to become “officials” around age twenty, allowing them to work in the shop as employees but requiring an examination to practice independently.
Contracts served a dual purpose: providing professional training (and dowries for girls’ marriage or religious life) and integrating the young into a standard family, mitigating their abandoned status. The document specified the master’s obligations to feed, clothe, house, and teach the trade, often including an annual salary based on age.
b) Instruction and “Doctrine” of Orphans (Doctrinos Colleges, Schools for Orphans)
Although orphans received limited intellectual training, some learned to read and write after signing contracts with knights, clerics, or teachers who needed such skills for their craft. The Church also established parochial schools for the education and indoctrination of the masses, including basic literacy.
The Colleges of Doctrine, with healthcare and educational purposes, emerged in the second half of the 16th century. Linked to municipalities for administrative and economic support, they also received legacies, donations, and daily collections from the orphans themselves. The Houses of Mercy continued their work in the seventeenth century, followed by the Hospice in the eighteenth.
c) The Correction of Delinquent Youth: Father of Orphans
The Father of Orphans institution, created in 1337, aimed to protect and assist abandoned children by providing trade apprenticeships. It also served a repressive function, preventing and punishing vagrancy, idleness, and unlawful behavior among the poor. This institution foreshadowed later juvenile courts, exercising jurisdiction like criminal courts and imposing sanctions such as imprisonment and physical punishment (traps, torture, etc.).
2. The Confinement or Restraint of Poverty (17th and Early 18th Centuries)
2.1. Social Policies
The late sixteenth century marked the beginning of a period of economic, social, and demographic disruption that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century. Repeated economic crises and heavy taxation by absolute monarchs particularly affected farmers. Epidemics, agricultural crises, and the stagnation of wool textile manufacturing added to the economic woes. Impoverished artisans, facing higher mortality rates, migrated to cities in search of opportunities, forming an unproductive society often resorting to pillage and vagrancy. The increase in poverty and the urgent need to address basic needs accelerated new welfare policies under the “great confinement,” forcing the poor to work in institutional workshops.
The Poor Laws, consolidated in the sixteenth century, notably in England, evolved into a relief system centered around workhouses (hospices or nursing homes).
In France, General Hospitals, attending to the elderly, disabled, and orphans, formed the basis of social policy, becoming places of correction and crafts.
In Spain, Casas de Misericordia, designed by Giginta in 1576, represented the first proposal for a closed system. Shelters for the poor, designed by Perez de Herrera, provided overnight accommodation, allowing the needy to beg (with identification) and forcing the able-bodied to work after a mandatory examination.
2.2. The Education of Children and Youth
a) English Workhouses and Child Labor
In England, most social services relied on parish taxes, a significant portion of which funded education. Children, particularly those of the poor (illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned, etc.), were a primary concern during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Institutions and regulations were necessary to prohibit loitering and begging. The Workhouses aimed to promote child employment, often functioning as night shelters where children received religious education, work habits, and skills, becoming useful members of society. They housed children until placing them as apprentices (ages 8-10) within the parish, on farms, or with manufacturers.
b) Popular Education: Charity or Parish Schools
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, schools emerged as enclosed spaces, isolating children from the adult world for the first time. Charity and parochial schools initially focused on instructing and moralizing the lower classes, as the State did not provide equal education, reserving secondary and higher education for the privileged. Hospitals, hospices, and other spaces took responsibility for educating the poor.
Charity schools, targeting foundlings, abandoned children, and those in Houses of the Poor, were mandatory for these groups in exchange for the charity received. Later, children of burghers and artisans also attended, attracted by diverse learning areas and new monitorial teaching methods. Eventually, they became vocational schools combining education with work. Compulsory and free Protestant schools in the seventeenth century for homeless children differed from Catholic schools.
c) Re-education of Young Women (Prostitution, Houses of Repentance, and “Galleys” for Women)
The social crisis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries particularly affected women. During the Middle Ages, prostitution was officially tolerated in Europe. However, in the sixteenth century, health and precautionary measures were implemented to regulate it. Its definitive prohibition, on charges of promoting debauchery and causing disease, occurred during the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, leading to a new wave of social morality critical of extramarital sexuality. Policies criminalizing prostitution and vagrancy were applied in Spain in women’s Galera houses or prisons, as proposed by Perez de Herrera in the sixteenth century and later promoted by Sor Magdalena de San Jerónimo.
Dating back to the thirteenth century, repentant houses in the field of rehabilitation remained active until the eighteenth century, offering women the opportunity to embrace religious life or an internship model for confinement, rehabilitation, and social reintegration.
3. Pre-liberal Policies in the Enlightenment: Towards Greater State Intervention in Social and Educational Matters
3.1. Social Policies
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The Industrial Revolution (in England in the mid-eighteenth century) and the Democratic Revolution (in France) transformed the social and political life, beginning to regard the poor as citizens with full rights, in accordance with the principles of freedom and equality proclaimed. The Enlightenment philosophers, claimed that the origin of poverty should be sought in economic and social abuses and also claimed the right of the poor to assistance. The question is not stopped worrying since the mid-century, governments, churches, societies, … recommended greater involvement by the public.
The social policies of individual governments, however, were limited to maintain control over the lower classes and unproductive and actually assist needy and disabled. Ultimately, control and repression on one side and the care and education, another will be in the ideological paradox of eighteenth century despotism and illustration.
a) Suppression and control of labor cost.
The traditional welfare system in Britain was subject to parliamentary review (by the political class) and intellectual debate because of the high economic costs posed by the growing number of plaintiffs, which required rethinking the criteria for selecting those who could or be subject to protection. The first Elizabethan laws were considered the right of relief in cases of real need for a state obligation, which could not decline in private charity. But since the Act of Settlement 1662, only made possible who lay in the parish, allowing the expulsion of any immigrant who assumed an additional charge. But the difficulty of getting residence permits allowed the discretion of the parishes in service provision. According to the rules of the workhouses later, it was possible to deny assistance to those who do not enroll in nursing homes, forcing the poor to join the industry isolate the parish workhouses external sign contracts or special institutions controlled by those, which allowing to control the work profitable. The spread of market economy and the Industrial Revolution in 1834 brought a new legal reform to reduce the cost of poor policy, creating a central body for study and self-monitoring. He began the centralization of social action (siglo XIX) grouping of parishes under the administration of the Agency of the Guardian and the New Law not allowing anyone physically able to receive assistance unless work. His chances were the discipline of the factory or the workhouse.
The French monarchy sought to regulate and provide stable employment for the poor through laws to detain beggars and forced to work to apply, but with little success against the precariousness of the domestic industry. Workhouses were established in all provinces, designed to avoid the wandering life of beggars and vagabonds, emphasizing the repressive nature in relation to the former General Hospital, and engaged in textile manufacturing to all inmates.
Social policies in Spain is also focused on coercion and control by one side (because they could threaten public stability) and work on the other (they were a burden to the economy), having become useful to the public prosperity.The control of organized begging dividing urban cities in Barracks neighborhood, with their mayors, elected annually by the neighbors, the function of registering citizens to inspect police affairs (lighting, drainage, …) so vague as to pick up or catch criminals, enhancing home care through Neighborhood Councils and parishes and institutions that give help to laborers unemployed and dealing with the education of their children. Boards of Charity helped to sustain them.
According to the usefulness of poverty, the Spanish monarchy tried to control the cost of assisted occupancy. Through the resolution of Carlos III in 1780, which prescribed the use of the refugees in the workshops and factories Hospice (continued from the Houses of Mercy) was pursued, in addition to vocational training appropriate to each case, instill work habits, order and discipline and contribute to the maintenance itself, liberating the state from such a burden.
b) Assistance (Abandoned).
The number of children abandoned at birth in Europe was very significant in the eighteenth century, but even more by the end of the century. In Spain censuses are explicit in describing the high mortality rates, poor sanitary conditions of the Houses Cots and hospital departments (even) and the lack of nurses. In France and England doubled and tripled the number of foundlings in relation to the previous century, encountering difficulties in gaining admission because of their finances. The economic burden posed by the parents, in many cases had to part with the babies, many of which (nine out of ten) died during transport to the city or within three months of their admission to the hospital.
The humanitarian concern and philanthropy of the Enlightenment increased interest in the abandoned children, augmented by political reasons and interests of encouraging the workforce and integrate into the world of work for orphans and foundlings. The Spanish monarchy, in particular, set them equal to other subjects for labor purposes, civil and legal, and enacted one of the most important pieces of legislation, the regulation of inclusiveness, which called the church authorities to establish nurseries, dependent on the bishops, not very large populations, regulating control of delivery of children and decriminalizing public abandonment of minors, prohibiting the identification of parents or perpetrators of neglect.
3.2. Policies re-educated.
a) Popular education: proposals for compulsory education for the poor.
The Enlightenment faith in progress and called the feeling of human solidarity on a universal scale, assigned to education a fundamental role, considering the misery as the result of ignorance of the poor. In this intellectual context, include the optimism of the classical economists in the eradication of human misery and in the regeneration of economically weak classes of instruction by betting on a state-interventionist approach, rather than an aristocratic dependency approach exclusively on the charity of the rich.
Adam Smith, founder of modern economics, argued that “when the people are better educated, less is deceived by the illusions of fanaticism and superstition ….” While claiming for the less affluent, producing goods enjoyed society, a fair redistribution of these, required to acquire at least basic rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, which would only be possible if the State opened schools in each district. He settled in England a system of state education, compulsory and free for workers in the industry that would prevent anyone from accessing the working life without reading, writing and arithmetic. The education of common people in a civilized society and trade required, according to Smith, state that the greatest attention of people with wealth. Other economists tuned to these proposals (Malthus).
In theory underlying such approaches are not always explicit, of social control and assimilation of the values of the bourgeoisie. While in principle for enlightened ignorance was the cause of all evil, so called for universal social renewal instruction, the aristocratic and conservative nature of the Enlightenment put limits on what suited the masses (not beyond the rudiments of reading and writing) as their natural destiny was at work. However, one can see a willingness to provide the poor and needy the opportunity to acquire citizenship values, hard work or socializing, positive in themselves, which were defended as signs of progress. Condorcet, for example, pursued human equality, convinced of the emancipating power of education to achieve perfect independence and the development of citizenship, stating that he knows no law does not enjoy their rights just as he who knows them. For him, all men are equal by nature and only wealth or education generate different inequalities.
With the decline in the eighteenth century, the Constitution adopted in France by the Constituent Assembly in 1791, included in his first title creation and organization of a public institution common to all citizens, free of teaching in those subjects necessary for all men. The respective constitutional governments that emerged after the French Revolution in Europe were realizing compulsory education throughout the nineteenth century.
b) Education for work.
The purpose of boosting the industry popular in countries that had not reached sufficient development, urged governments to train farmers in their most rudimentary techniques. The French monarchy had urged bishops, nobles and municipal authorities to establish offices of rural poor for their technical training, financing workshops. In Spain, the proposal to create schools Patriotic Campomanes, implies also the formation of farmers in the arts of industry, especially textiles, were considered as social and charitable works, starting families in technical learning (textile) procuring at the same time, social education, civic and religious.
c) The education of orphans and abandoned in hospice.
The eighteenth-century public interventionism, especially in the second half, also involved an educational project as an instrument of social transformation aimed at promoting vocational training for marginalized groups, orphans and foundlings, but also provide an instruction to enable them to acquire the less so elementary skills like reading, writing and numeracy, and strong religious training. Once literate and educated youth in the Christian doctrine, was assigned a craft or art that exists in the hospice, according to his abilities, to commend a teacher’s chosen trade. For girls recommended the unique learning of Christian doctrine, reading, writing, rejected his instruction in the necessary numbers and highlighting their own training in sex work (work needle and available raw materials for factories).
Education, and was gradually being taken over by the welfare policies, while charitable institutions were preparing to incorporate into their regulations such purposes, creating internal schools. However, we would expect the late nineteenth century to be fully realized compulsory education in Spain with the Primary Education Act 1857.