@young_harbinger This has been true from the very beginning of the compulsory project, if we're honest. There's an old but pretty good book on this one (Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes—this should be available on Internet Archive, but I've also got a PDF somewhere) that provides a good background, including on a lot of our own assumptions (and even if not applicable to everywhere, as the title makes evident, it still provides some good avenues of exploration for figuring out where to look for other geographical locations, especially as schooling systems are intricately connected to varying forms of colonialism and imperialism—and a lot of shifts in education reforms also are a result of additional forms of colonialism and imperialism, along with competing nationalisms).