Education for All? By Cathie Jo Martin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024

Martin’s book Education for All? is the most recent of several valuable volumes published in the Cambridge series in Comparative Politics of Education, including those of Susanne Wiborg, Julian Garritzmann and Katharina Sass. In line with both a traditional interest in the politics of education and a more recent interest in the discursive construction of education, Martin focuses on the role of culture in education policy. In focus of this book – superbly written in a striking Anglo-Saxon university press style - are the fiction writers: ‘agents of change whose narratives served as rallying cries for the education campaigns of the long nineteenth century’ (p. 1). According to Martin, it is the stories of fiction writers from 1700–1920 that may explain the difference in educational systems between England and Denmark. While Danish writers predominantly saw education as key to social and economic development, British authors stressed the negative impact of mass education on the social order and national culture.