Every year on 24 January, International Education Day reminds us that education is not only about schools and universities, but about access to knowledge, participation in public life, and the ability to orient oneself in an increasingly complex world.
At first glance, this may sound like a thoroughly modern concern. Yet historically, it is anything but new.
Long before smartphones and online platforms, Europe experienced its first major “media revolution”: the spread of printing. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, printed books, newspapers, pamphlets and broadsheets profoundly altered how knowledge was produced, circulated and consumed. As Elizabeth Eisenstein argued in her seminal study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, printing did not merely accelerate communication; it stabilised texts, multiplied audiences and reshaped the social conditions of learning itself. Education gradually moved beyond monasteries, courts and universities into marketplaces, workshops, bookshops and private households. Reading became more common, teaching materials more standardised, and knowledge more portable.
Scholars of the public sphere, most famously Jürgen Habermas, have shown how these developments transformed education into a social process closely tied to new forms of public communication and debate. Later historians of media and the book, such as Adrian Johns and Andrew Pettegree, have added important nuance by demonstrating that print culture was neither uniform nor automatically progressive, but shaped by local practices, commercial interests, censorship and material constraints. Learning was no longer confined to elite institutions but increasingly embedded in everyday practices: reading aloud in taverns, studying devotional manuals at home, or following political debates in early newspapers. In this sense, early modern education was inseparable from the emergence of new publics.
This is precisely where the COST Action “Print Culture and Public Spheres in Central Europe 1500–1800” (PCPSce) situates its work. Our network of researchers, educators, librarians and cultural heritage professionals investigates how print culture shaped education and public communication in Central Europe, a multilingual and culturally diverse region whose historical experience is still often marginal in dominant Western European narratives. By tracing how books, school texts, translations and periodicals travelled across linguistic and political borders, the Action highlights how knowledge was negotiated, adapted and taught in complex, interconnected societies.
Historical research has repeatedly demonstrated that printing did far more than multiply books. It contributed to rising literacy, fostered new pedagogical genres such as textbooks and catechisms, connected distant regions through shared curricula and intellectual debates, and enabled broader segments of society to engage with questions of religion, law, science and governance. As Benedict Anderson later suggested in his reflections on “print capitalism,” shared reading practices also helped people imagine themselves as part of wider communities. Education increasingly became a collective enterprise, shaped by media infrastructures as much as by institutions.
Today, we find ourselves in the midst of another profound transformation. Digital technologies are reshaping how education is organised, who can access it, and how authority and expertise are established. Concerns about misinformation, unequal access, linguistic exclusion or the overwhelming volume of available content echo, in striking ways, early modern anxieties about censorship, unreliable news, or the moral dangers of cheap print. Media historians have long noted that periods of technological change tend to provoke both hopes of enlightenment and fears of disorder.
PCPSce contributes to International Education Day by bringing this long historical perspective into contemporary debates. Through open-access databases, digital tools, training schools for young researchers and public outreach activities, the Action connects past and present, showing that education systems and media systems have always evolved together. Understanding how earlier societies coped with new technologies, expanding audiences and information overload does not provide ready-made solutions, but it does sharpen our sense of what is at stake.
On this International Education Day, we therefore celebrate not only classrooms and teachers, but also the centuries-long struggle to make knowledge shareable, reliable and meaningful. Modern education is built on this deep history of mediated learning – one printed page, and now one digital screen, at a time.
Literature
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, J. (1989 [1962]). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johns, A. (1998). The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pettegree, A. (2010). The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.