How Dickens and other Authors Shaped Attitudes to Education—With Lasting Impacts

In Education for All? BU political scientist Cathie Jo Martin says education systems continue to be influenced by the ideas of Enlightenment- and Industrial Revolution-Era writers 

Story by Maureen Stanton and Alex Grzybowski
Video by Natalie Williams

In her new book, Education for All, Cathie Jo Martin, a Hariri Institute faculty affiliate and BU professor of political science, suggests that Enlightenment- and Industrial Revolution-era fiction writers and essayists hold the secret to their countries’ paths to national education—with enduring effects still felt today.

Martin‘s research mixes literary and computational analysis to explore the cultural roots of two distinct education systems and their impacts on low-skill youth. Collaborating with computer scientists in the Hariri Institute’s Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL), Martin was able to apply computational methods to British and Danish literature to analyze over 1,100 British and Danish literary texts from 1700 to 1920. This computational analysis allowed her to sift through 100,000 passages about education, which she then used to identify the relationship between cultural influences and public policy struggles, establish the role of novelists and their impact on eighteenth and nineteenth-century education reforms, and show how stances toward education continue to affect public policy to this day.

Read more about Professor Martin’s research in The Brink .