Government Takeover Of Education

Date: 2014-07-13

Trigger

Just wrote a blog post on private versus public education in Western countries and had to excuse myself that I was not very knowledgeable about the history of public education in this part of the world. In this post I had to resort to some educated guesses and speculation.

Meanwhile, I did some quick research thanks to the Internet. With the help of the Internet, the truth is now much easier to discover than before.

Thanks to James Tooley (author of the book that triggered my above post), I became aware of Eddie (Edwin George) West (1922 - 2001).

Selected Sources

1. Government Failure: E. G. West on Education
2. E.G. West: Champion of the Market for Education
3. Education Without The State by James Tooley (unfortunately this source PDF file was scanned as an image, thus quoting from it is a pain)
4. The Spread of Education Before Compulsion: Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century Government Education Increased Bureaucracy and Reduced Liberty (by Edwin West)
5. Classical Libertarian Compromises on State Education Paine, Smith, and Mill Failed to Foresee the Consequences of Government Schools (by Edwin West)

Compendium

Selected quotes from Source 1 (emphasis added):

1. “that compulsory public schooling is an outrageously costly exercise in rent seeking, a negative-sum game that has enriched some and impoverished many. More important, for all this cost, it has delivered a low-quality product. To put it plainly, we are not rich and acute because of compulsory public schooling; we are poorer and more obtuse than we would have been without it.” (Source 1)
2. “.... history reveals that education in Great Britain and the United States (specifically, in New York, which West considered representative) was almost universal before schooling was either “free” or compulsory.”
3. “This essay contains plenty of data, such as the arresting statistic that by 1840, well before compulsory school attendance, the literacy rate in the northern United States was 97 percent. ”
4. “.... he [West] notes that in a period of rapidly rising incomes, parents would and did voluntarily demand more schooling.”

Selected quotes from Source 2 (emphasis added):

1. “... his [West] seminal book Education and the State had been published in 1965 by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). Prior to this book, the conventional view of nineteenth- and midtwentieth- century education in Britain was that of the Hammonds, the Webbs, and the Coles, to the effect that democracy and education were inescapable partners. A free society could not be orderly unless it was literate. A self-governing society could not progress unless it was educated. Private schooling could not provide the quantity and quality of education required by these goals. Therefore, universal, compulsory and “free” state-provided education was necessary. The Forster [Education] Act of 1870 [first British law to impose public schooling in the UK], which purported to initiate such an education system, and the English Education Act of 1944, which consolidated it, therefore, were both entirely justified.”
2. “He [West] chronicled the significant growth of literacy in Britain during the first third of the nineteenth century and the hostile reactions of successive governments that obstructed the development of the free press by fiscal and legal sanctions. By 1838, 87 percent of children could read and 53 percent could write at least to some extent. ”
3. “Prior to 1870 education in England and Wales was provided primarily through private and parochial church schools financed by fee-paying parents and by church philanthropy. This education was supplemented by the Sunday schools and by a wide range of private institutes and literary and philosophic societies. The principle of state subsidies to schools had been accepted only in 1833, by which time the above-mentioned high levels of literacy had already been achieved.”
4. “There is no evidence that the [british] Forster [Education] Act [of 1870] accelerated the rate of growth of education services, as measured in terms of school attendance or literacy, although it effectively initiated the displacement of private and parochial schools by state alternatives. ”
5. “The left-wing intelligentsia was agitated by West’s challenge to the historical record. It was infuriated by his willingness to countenance the complete dismantling of compulsory, “free” and state-provided schooling in Britain and to allow parents a free choice, in terms of willingness to pay, whether or not, and how to educate their children. ”
6. “Together with West’s companion volume, Education and the Industrial Revolution, 5 it provides a devastating refutation of all preceding scholarship from the late nineteenth century onwards that attempted to rationalize public education provision as a necessary condition for economic progress. ”

Selected quotes from Source 4 (emphasis added):

1. “The evidence also shows that working parents were purchasing increasing amounts of education for their children as their incomes were rising from 1818 onwards, and this, to repeat, at a time before education was “free” and compulsory by statute. Compulsion came in 1880, and state schooling did not become free until 1891.”
2. “The author of the famous [british Elementary Education] 1870 Act, W. E. Forster, explained that the intention of introducing fee-based government-run establishments for the first time was not to replace the vast system of private schools but simply to “fill up the gaps” where they could be found. ” [The usual disingenuity or naivete of politicians!]
3. “The pre-1870 record of educational outputs such as literacy was even more impressive than the numbers of children in school, and this presents an even more serious problem to typical authors of social histories. … in Britain in the late 1830s:
4. …. between two-thirds and three-quarters of the working classes as literate, a group which included most of the respectable poor who were the great political potential in English life.6
5. There was, moreover, an appreciable rate of growth in literacy. This is reflected in the fact that young persons were more and more accomplished than their elders. Thus an examination of educational attainments of males in the Navy and Marines in 1865 showed that 99 percent of the boys could read compared with their seniors: seamen (89 percent), marines (80 percent), and petty officers (94 percent).7”
6. “Sheldon Richman quotes data showing that from 1650 to 1795, American male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 percent. Between 1800 and 1840 literacy in the North rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. In the South the rate grew from about 55 percent to 81 percent. Richman also quotes evidence indicating that literacy in Massachusetts was 98 percent on the eve of legislated compulsion”

Selected quotes from Source 5 (emphasis added):

1. “There seems to be a consensus that the typical intellectual today is more comfortable than most with the government supply of education. But what of the intellectuals who were also advocates of laissez faire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? They would surely not approve of today’s extensive intervention. I shall argue, nevertheless, that their tendency to compromise seriously weakened the defenses against an all-encompassing state.”
2. “Of their [classical liberal economists] main recommendations that distinguish them from current practice in education, the most striking is their insistence that school fees should not be abolished and should always cover a significant part of the cost of education. The main reason for this requirement has either been subsequently forgotten or carefully avoided. Fee-paying is the one instrument with which parents can keep desirable competition alive between teachers and schools. Adam Smith was the most insistent on this point. ”
3. “In his famous book The Rights of Man, first published in 1791/92, Paine agreed that the quantity of education was insufficient but the shortfall was due not to the unwillingness of parents to educate their children adequately, but to the simple fact of poverty. But poverty, in turn, Paine emphasized, was due almost entirely to excessive taxes on the poor. General taxation, and especially the excise, had been increasing substantially in the late eighteenth century. The land tax, paid by the aristocrats, in contrast had been falling. Just over one half of the total revenue went for servicing the huge national debt. The remainder went for current government expenses that Paine believed to be extravagant. ”
4. “The Scottish [elementary education] Act of 1696, which impressed [Adam] Smith, laid down that a school should be erected in every parish and that teachers’ salaries be met by a tax on local heritors and tenants. This schooling, however, was not made compulsory by law; and neither was it made free. The parental fees made up a big part of the teachers’ salaries and were paid by every social class. Indeed, the Scots did not have free and compulsory schooling until about the same time the English did in the 1880s”
5. “With regard to education, [John Stuart] Mill scores many points with modern libertarians with his famous remark in his essay that A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another . . . in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.[13]
   It is usually forgotten, however, that Mill was equally critical of the alternative scenario: the free market in education. His reason was that the uncultivated cannot be competent judges of cultivation.”
6. “As to the empirical evidence of what the real world education market was like, Mill seems to have been as misinformed as Adam Smith. Mill protested that . . . even in quantity it is [in 1848] and is likely to remain, altogether insufficient, while in quality, though with some slight tendency to improvement, it is never good except by some rare accident, and generally so bad as to be little more than nominal.”
7. “Despite Mill’s dislike of general government provision of education (i.e., in government schools) he, like Paine and Smith, was willing to compromise. The first part of the compromise was his reconciliation to some government schooling. Though a government, therefore, may, and in many cases ought to, establish schools and colleges, it must neither compel nor bribe any person to come to them. A state school should exist: if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence.[18] It is interesting that without any evidence, Mill presumed that the state schools would always be the superior pacesetters.”
8. “The second part of Mill’s compromise was his insistence that education should be made compulsory. Notice that he demanded compulsory education and not compulsory schooling. Furthermore, he proposed to support it with a system of enforcement of public examinations to which children from an early age were to be submitted … Mill advocated Bentham’s system of examinations as the price to be paid for the right to vote. ”
9. “We have here, it seems, not so much the libertarian as the intellectual paternalist with noble intentions.”
10. “Where education is concerned, Tom Paine, Adam Smith, and J.S. Mill were not full-blown libertarians. Rather they were liberators. Ultimately, they wanted to liberate the masses into a world of culture (their conception of culture) and into a realm of reason (their reason). In so doing they were all willing to make significant compromises that, for them, legitimized the intervention of government. ”

For the sake of brevity, I will stop here for now.

Conclusion

Private education would have developed probably faster and much better without extensive government intervention in Western countries.

I am quite dismayed to find out that such classical liberals as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, or Tom Paine would have government be involved in the education of children instead of free market solutions.