Early in the nineteenth century, members in the UK Parliament (MPs) hardly ever debated education. When they did, it was nearly always in the context of aid for the religious instruction of the poor. Indeed, even by 1850, nearly two decades after the first Great Reform Act (1832), the Prime Minister Lord John Russell made the case that a system of compulsory state schooling would be immoral and un-British. Yet, by the ‘80s, MPs debating in Westminster routinely drew connections between schooling and the most critical social issues of the day: social-class mobility and equity, child welfare, national development, emigration, and the civil service, among others. What explains the expanding, and expansive, political uses that elite policymakers put to schooling? How did schooling and education take on such an aggrandized role in society for British statesmen? To address these questions, this paper combines natural language processing techniques, semantic network, discourse, and regression analyses to read and interpret the ∼1.1 million political speeches given in the UK Houses of Parliament during the long nineteenth century (1804–1913). In contrast to explanations emphasizing the direct role that economic, social, and political development as well as conflict played in the UK state’s historic expansion, this piece demonstrates how social scientization, the sweeping international epistemic movement that institutionalized and diffused functionalist social theory, created the context that made it possible for political elites to see and promote schooling as an effective policy instrument of greater cultural rationalization supporting the development of capitalist industrial society.

十九世纪初，英国议会议员几乎从未讨论过教育问题。当他们这样做时，几乎总是在援助穷人的宗教教育的背景下。事实上，即使到了 1850 年，即第一个《大改革法案》（1832 年）颁布近二十年后，英国首相约翰·拉塞尔勋爵 (Lord John Russell) 仍指出，公立义务教育制度是不道德的、不英国的。然而，到了 80 年代，在威斯敏斯特辩论的议员们经常将学校教育与当今最关键的社会问题联系起来：社会阶层流动性和公平、儿童福利、国家发展、移民和公务员制度等。是什么解释了不断扩张、扩张、精英政策制定者对学校教育的政治用途？对于英国政治家来说，学校教育和教育如何在社会中发挥如此重要的作用？为了解决这些问题，本文结合自然语言处理技术、语义网络、话语和回归分析来阅读和解释漫长的 19 世纪（1804-1913）期间在英国议会大厦发表的约 110 万次政治演讲。与强调经济、社会和政治发展以及冲突在英国国家历史性扩张中发挥的直接作用的解释相反，本文展示了社会科学化，即使功能主义社会理论制度化和传播的席卷国际认识运动，如何