The formation of national education systems during the 19^th century marks the beginning of modern schooling in Europe (Green 1990) and school has been established as a public institution (Herrlitz, Hopf, and Titze 1984). Originally, education was part of the churches domain for centuries (Davie 2000) but became a fundamental feature of the modern state and replaced the churches in terms of their responsibility eventually (Mann und Schinkele 2005; Lehmann 2004). Because “the religious and the secular are inextricably linked throughout modern European history” (José Casanova 2009, 227), educational institutionalization must be considered part of a general secularisation process: religious institutions lose their social significance and their grasp on the agencies of social control and withdraw from their classical sphere of influence (Wilson 1982; Berger 1973).

However, because the state was, among others, strongly aided by the church’s example of both administrative structure and claims to original sovereignty (Ramirez and Boli 1987), churches still remain influential in the educational field (Davie 2000). Hence, this paper will analyse the religious influence on modern schooling from a comparative-historical perspective and will therefore inquire to what extent the religious impact differs within the European school systems. Finally, this analysis offers a typology of Western European school systems based on their degree of secularisation.

Secularisation is defined as a multi-dimensional concept (Jose Casanova 1994) and will be used only in an institutional perspective, i.e. secularisation refers to a decrease of religious authority (Chaves 1994). I argue that – taken together – the three dimensions’ administration (supervision and funding), religious education (organization, conduction, teachers), and private schools (organization, amount) are capable of capturing the change of religious authority in the educational field.

Historically, the main dimension administration dominates the other two because the state replaced the churches from their responsibility eventually. Therefore, the secondary dimensions’, religious education and private schools, determine the differences of each secularisation path.

This leaves us with five potential types illustrating the different degrees of educational secularisation and forming a continuum from a confessional school system to a secular one. The former means that the churches dominate all three dimensions, while in the latter system the churches only play a minor or no role at all. Between those two poles, three types are possible which are a combination of the two secondary dimensions. In the traditional school system, no or hardly any private confessional schools are part of the national system and there is a confessional religious instruction in every public school. The dual system describes a school system consisting of state schools and private schools, whereby with the latter is normally being a church school. And Finally, the traditional dual system that is basically a combination of the former two.

The study argues that the three intermediate types display different paths of educational institutionalisation differentiated by their degree of secularisation. 

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