Madeleine Bunting identifies some very important issues here regarding the role of the state and the relation between the public and the private and the commodification of childhood. The education of mothers was very fashionable at the beginning of the Twentieth Century when fears were widespread about the inadequacy of mothers living in poverty and their supposed inability to raise fit and healthy men who would go and kill foreigners. See Dyhouse, C. (1977). "Good Wives and Little Mothers: Social Anxieties and the Schoolgirl's Curriculum, 1890-1920." Oxford Review of Education 3 (3): 21-35.
Dyhouse, C. (1978). "Working-Class Mothers and Infant Mortality in England'." Journal of Social History 12 (2): 248-267.EducationGuardian.co.uk | News crumb | The myth of Billy Elliot