According to Boli, Meyer and Ramirez (1985) mass education can be characterized as universal, standardized and rationalized and the reason why you can speak of education as a mass institution is that it incorporates every individual without making differences in ethnicity,religion,class and gender. This elements are often seen as self-evident because in many countries you can think of elementary schools as being similar in cultural aspects, purposes, structure, support and general control. For some states secondary schooling can be described similarly but with the exception of prominent schools because these schools which children from people with a higher status attend differ from the mass education in the sense that they have direct access to more resources. So you can not speak of a difference in general goals or curricula which they aspire. That fact leads us to the purpose of mass education because if there is no variation in institutional goals or curricula not even in schools of higher privileged individuals then the question is why mass education arosed anyway.
In the analysis of John W. Meyer,Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli (1985) the formation of education in the sense of a mass institution was aimed with the need of a general system which imparts principles of broad meaning and regularity. This system established from comprehensive religious structures just as from national regulations and laws over a wide area. Another purpose they found can be understand in relation to the socialization of children because if there is a possibility to control the environmental experience of an individual in a rational and suitable nature then the formless child could be sculptured in preferred ways. From another point of view the author of the book making sense of mass education (2015) sees a different function in the rise of mass education. He explains such new school designs as a method of placing people under constant surveillance. The intention behind it was to gain more effective governance and a closer conduct what means that a dislocation took place from governance to self-governance.
A linkage from this perspective to the other three authors can be made because of the fact that they regard a connection
between mass education and some other modern institutions. They (1985) understand this institutions as methods of structuring society as a meaningful project and extending its limits with the purpose of reaching control of behavior and
worldview of the individuals. In my opinion l think the argument of surveillance is the most plausible one but related to the need of a general system because if a state wants to control the action and thinking of its individuals it can't send every troublemaker to prison so the state creates a special system including rules of religious, political and economic aspects which permits it to reach influence without using violence. Another function of the rise and expansion of mass schooling can be found if you take a look at the historical origin of mass education because the history of this kind of education has its origin in the mid 17th century in America. To be more exact that was when the first colony Massachusetts has the charge to turn children into good Puritans. As a result of this the children in Massachusetts and other colonies got the chance to learn how to read. But what role has the occurrence of mass schooling for different sides of the system of power? On the one hand there are the colonies and dependencies which had the need for adaption so they don't loose the connection to the world models. They also needed to adapt the dimension to
which they were organized as candidate nation-states.
In this aspect Meyer, Ramirez and Soysal (1992) explain that from a different view you can say that it seems that the colonies were forced to bring forward their educational development because of the pressure from the environment to follow the model of nation-state of political organization. On the other hand there are the social systems and their functional conditions which wanted to better fulfill the terms for a tanslocal cultural project. This perspective was also urged by the three authors (1992) and they go on with saying that this project was developed by the various elites who essentially advocate this enterprise and it included an conception of a new society with an ideological character which integrates all individuals in a unified and forward totality that would function in a real world with success as a nation-state. So if you analyse the changes of the understanding of a state at this time then these two perspectives seem plausible. Because in the 19th century nation building started with willfully constructing a national identity by forming one nation out of various groups. That strategy was originally used by young nation states especially the former African ones to fought against the aim of the colonial force which was to redesign and to stick together the unformed colonial territories. As a result of this the side with the colonies and dependencies can be connected with the young nations which wanted to fight together against the colonial force and the other side can be related to the nation states which have its origin in the 19th century.
The next important step is to explain the correlation between mass education and modern education. A linkage can be made with looking at the letter explanation of the function of mass education because according to the three authors (1992) this kind of education became a core component of the nation-state model and hence you can explain mass educational expansion from functionalist lines of analyses as the reflection of the socialization conditions of a differentiated and industrialized society and because it is closely linked to the goals of national development and other societal parts. Consequently you can say that a possible reason for the connection between mass education and modern education is that education as a mass institution is structured in accord with the objectives of a nation-state. At least it is necessary to talk about the difference between mass education and mass schooling. You can be sure that the letter has arisen earlier in the history. More precisely by Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli (1987) mass schooling came up in the late eighteenth century when national states started to construct mass schooling systems that were maybe created to include their entire populations of children. There are many perspectives from which you can look at this concept and under the terms of Ramirez (2012) two of them are the social order and class reproduction perspectives which saw mass schooling as a problemsolving strategy for a socialization issue that has arisen from rapid social change.
So maybe you can say that one possible reason for the occurrence of mass schooling was the need for workers in the production or the concession to the functional conditions of a social order which was increasingly industrialized and urbanized and that the reasons for the rise of mass schooling and mass education have similarities in one sense.