What do you think?
Rate this book
Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy
Education and the State first appeared in 1965 and was immediately hailed as one of the century’s most important works on education. In the thirty years that followed, the questions this book raised concerning state-run education have grown immeasurably in urgency and intensity. Education and the State re-examines the role of government in education and challenges the fundamental statist assumption that the state is best able to provide an education for the general population. West explores the views on education of the nineteenth-century British reformers and classical economists who argued the necessity of state education. He demonstrates that by the Foster Act of 1870 the state system of education was superimposed upon successful private efforts, thereby suppressing an emerging and increasingly robust structure of private, voluntary, and competitive education funded by families, churches, and philanthropies. This new and expanded edition of Education and the State addresses the American situation in education, applying the lessons learned from the study of British institutions. It also broadens their application from education to the conduct of democracy as a political system. Edwin G. West was Professor Emeritus of Economics at Carleton University, Ottawa.
364 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 1971
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 24, 2014
Interesting Quotes:
"Protection of a child against starvation or malnutrition is presumably just as important as protection against ignorance. It is difficult to envisage, however, that any government, in its anxiety to see that children have minimum standards of food and clothing, would pass laws for compulsory and universal eating, or that it should entertain measures which lead to increased taxes and rates in order to provide children's food 'free' at local authority kitchens or shops. It is still more difficult to imagine that most people would unquestioningly accept this system, especially where it had developed to the stage that for 'administrative reasons' parents were allocated those shops which happened to be nearest their homes; or that any complaint or special desire to change their pre-selected shops should be dealt with by special and quasi-judicial enquiry after a formal appointment with the local 'Child Food Officer' or, failing this, by pressure upon their respective representatives on the local 'Child Food Committee' or upon their local M.P. Yet strange as such hypothetical measures may appear when applied to the provision of food and clothing, they are typical of English state education as it has evolved by historical accident or administrative expediency."
"Presumably, it is recognized that the ability in a free market to change one's food shop when it threatens to become, or has become, inefficient is an effective instrument whereby parents can protect their children from inferior services in a prompt and effective manner. If this is so, then one should expect that the same arguments of protection would in this respect point in the direction not of a free school system where it is normally difficult to change one's 'supplier' but in the direction of fee-paying where it is easier."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"This 'zoning system' [in which overcrowded good schools have enrollments limited by allocating 'catchment areas' to each school so as not to empty other schools] seems to be the gravest of all denials of parental wishes . . . Imagine the case of a retail shop which had become so relatively inefficient that customers were beginning to crowd into the premises of a rival establishment. To argue that the crowding was the inefficiency would be to confuse the 'symptom' with the 'disease.' To establish 'catchment areas' to prevent the 'crowding' would be to remove the very pressure which was working to put things right. Under such pressure the favored shop would meet the 'crowding' with extemporary measures pending plans for extension, whilst the unfavoured shops would be spurred into copying the superior service of its rival. Staff who were frustrated by their treatment by unimaginative managers in the first shop would begin to find tempting vacancies occurring in the more successful and therefore 'crowded' second shop.
"'Zoning,' on the other hand, simply freezes the system and insulates the authorities from the necessity to improve educational provision in accordance with popular wishes. In other words it is a device which, intentionally or unintentionally, prevents the wishes of parents being properly respected and as such it seems to be thoroughly opposed to the spirit of Section 76 of the 1944 Education Act."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"As long ago as the first few years of the nineteenth century it was a subject for government *complaint* that the ordinary people *had become literate.* For the government feared that too many people were developing the 'wrong' uses of literacy by belonging to secret 'corresponding societies' and by reading seditious pamphlets . . . Far from subsidising literacy, the early nineteenth-century English governments placed severe taxes on paper in order to discourage the exercise of the public's reading and writing abilities. Yet despite this obstacle, by the time government came around to subsidising on a tiny scale in the 1830s, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the people . . . were already literate. Even then the subsidies were financed from a taxation system which burdened the poor more than the rich.[7]
"Here then we have a paradox of a public managing to educate itself into literary competence from personal motives and private resources, despite the obstacle of an institution called government which eventually begins to claim most of the credit for the educational success.
[Footnote 7]: "Moreover, the effects of the subsidies to schools were probably more than offset, in the early years at least, by the continuation of the 'taxes on knowledge,' i.e. the enormous taxes on paper, newspapers and pamphlets which were not removed until the 1850s and 1860s . . . If it was seeking the *positive* neighborhood effects of education it would have been more practical for the government first to have seen to the *negative* neighborhood effects for which it was responsible; that is, it should have abolished the 'taxes on knowledge' before considering the pursuit of it. To subsidise and tax the same activity was illogical and costly."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"The rationing of school places on a geographical basis is, as the 'zoning' system implies, the most obvious and easiest criterion which presents itself to local administrators. Yet such methods are likely to secure much less social mobility that would probably occur without a system of nationalised schools. Emotional references to 'education apartheid' or 'case division' which are attributed to the persistence of a mixed system of public and private education are quite out of perspective if an adequate solution is not first offered for these present contradictions in our state system - a system which, while it is supposed to be able to put such things right, seems, indeed, to provide the most potent source of inequality."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"There is one episode in English history which more than any other seems to have impressed historians in respect to the importance of the contribution of formal education to economic growth. There is a widely held impression that from about 1867 technical progress was more sluggish in Britain than in America and Germany. In particular the efficiency of the British iron and steel plants was thought to compare unfavourably with those of Germany . . . Lyon Playfair, one of the Enlgish jurors at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 . . . drew parliamentary attention to the fact that at this exhibition the Germans and other continentals had run away with most of the industrial prizes, a result markedly different from the 1851 Great Exhibition when Britain had apparently been supreme in these respects. Playfair, a professor of chemistry, expressed his firm conviction that it was the efficient German state schools with their scientific curricula which were largely responsible for Germany's improved position. By comparison, he thought, Britain was manifestly negligent in adapting itself to the complex needs of the new scientific age. As a conspicuous example of this deficiency, Playfair cited the case of a building erected at Glasgow with iron girders imported from Belgium. There girders, he explained, were cheaper because the Belgians had applied chemical analysis to the limestone and ore used in pig iron production. Playfair's kind of testimony had perceptible influence on Parliament, and state support for higher technological and scientific education soon followed and coincided with the general intervention in education was was already gathering force after 1870.
"Despite its long-standing influence with historians, Playfair's diagnosis was, in retrospect, unsatisfactory . . . [I]nnovation suffered from defective institutions where were the responsibility not of entrepreneurs but of the state. Thus subsequent investigation showed that it was *the patent laws* which accounted fro the use of Belgian girders in Glasgow which Playfair referred. The Belgian chemical process was common knowledge among English Entrepreneurs but they were prevented from using it because although the patent was in the hands of only one English producer the law did not compel a patentee to exploit his patent.
"As for scientific advances in steel, it was an Englishman, not a German, whose invention was of most consequence. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, who discovered how to make steel out of phosphoric ore in 1875, was an English police court clerk and had conducted his experiments in the backyard of a small suburban house. As a matter of fact this invention redounded to the advantage not of the English but of the Germans for it created a gigantic German steel industry which would not have been possible without it. The Germans were able to use the invention not because they were more fore-sighted or had impressive state schools but simply because the invention enable them at last to exploit their own ores, which were phosphoric . . . Gilchrist Thomas's invention . . . was the product neither of formal state nor full-time education, nor even of a government research department. His invention was developed by ordinary firms before company taxation was increased to help pay for new and centrally directed services that successive governments have felt themselves obliged to finance."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"As for scientific advances in steel, it was an Englishman, not a German, whose invention was of most consequence. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, who discovered how to make steel out of phosphoric ore in 1875, was an English police court clerk and had conducted his experiments in the backyard of a small suburban house. As a matter of fact this invention redounded to the advantage not of the English but of the Germans for it created a gigantic German steel industry which would not have been possible without it. The Germans were able to use the invention not because they were more fore-sighted or had impressive state schools but simply because the invention enable
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"The innovation of steam printing in the 1830s caused revolutionary cost reductions in the production of newspapers, which then began steadily to increase their sales despite the restrictive taxes. The most rapid increase in newspaper sales, therefore, did not come until after the removal of the taxes; the advertising duties were removed in 1853, the stamp taxes in 1855 and the excise taxes on paper in 1861. That a mass newspaper-reading public was already in existence well before 1870 is now firmly acknowledged by specialist writers."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"The evidence of Mr Coode showed how, in his district, ordinary parents were ready to use the goods schools and to withdraw their custom from the bad. But similar reports came from other Districts and the Newcastle Commission in its overall reference to parents declared:
"'they prefer paying a comparatively high fee to an efficient school to paying a low fee to an inefficient one. . . . There can be little doubt that a school which combined high fees with a reputation for inefficiency would soon lose its pupils.'
"On this evidence it follows that there was a built-in mechanism ensuring that inefficient schools were already being weeded out. Parents were their own inspectors and, compared with official ones, they were not only much more numerous but exercised continuous rather than periodic check. Moreover the sanction exercised by the parents was of much more financial significance to a school than was an unfavourable inspector's report. For if parents withdrew their children, the school lost not only the government capitation grants but the parents' fee payments as well."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"It is difficult not to conclude from such a serious verdict that, in some ironic and tortuous way, the need for compulsion in the fixing of a statutory school-leaving age is designed to meet not the negligence of typical parents but the tardiness of local authorities to keep up with parental enthusiasm."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"On the quantity of education the [New York Superintendent's] Report of 1836 asserted:
'Under any view of the subject, it is reasonable to believe, that in the common schools, private schools and academies, the number of children actually receiving instruction is equal to the whole number between five and sixteen years of age.'
"The fact that education could continue to be universal without being free and without compulsion seems to have been readily acknowledged."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"The campaign for free schools [in New York] seems to have originated in the teachers' institutes. These were first held in 1843, and they received legislative recognition in 1847 . . . For the year ending 1866, the year before their abolition, the rate bills were still yielding the significant sum of $790,025. Parents of ordinary means, therefore, were still directly buying education for their children in New York State a century ago, an education which, to repeat, although almost universal, was not yet compulsory.
"Whatever the attitudes of a minority of negligent or poor families, there is no systematic evidence to show that average parents, as distinct from public-school teachers and administrators, preferred the method of paying for schooling through increased taxes to that of the rate bill system . . . With the passing of the Free Schools Act of 1867 the rate bills (fees) were finally abolished . . .
"It must be remembered that there remained one area of discretion for customers of education; they still possessed the freedom to restrict their consumption. This meant, for instance, that in those areas where the public supply was inferior, and where the new public monopoly removed any hopes of quick improvement, it was likely that some parents would want to exercise their remaining freedom by removing their children from school at an earlier age than in those areas where better-quality teaching existed. Still bearing in mind our economic theory of politics, it is interesting retrospectively to 'predict' the responses of school suppliers in such circumstances. Especially since public money was distributed to the schools and their staffs in proportion to the numbers in attendance, we should expect that the kind of agitation that would next have been undertaken by the income-maximising teachers, managers, and other officials, especially those of average or less-than-average ability, would have been a campaign for an education that was compulsory by statute. The historical evidence is fact compatible with such 'prediction.' Serious agitation for compulsory attendance built up very soon after the success of the free school campaign of 1867 . . .
"Thus, while before 1867 the prevailing argument had been that the main reason for lack of attendance had been the rate bills, after 1867, when these had been abolished, and when was was considered to be bad attendance persisted, the new contention was the parental indifference was the main trouble . . . The Compulsory Education Act was in fact passed in 1874. And interestingly enough, after several years of operation this Act was declared ineffective. The Superintendent of 1890, asking for yet more legislation, complained that the existing laws were still not reaching the hard core of truant cases, those associated with dissolute families . . . But whatever the fate of the children of the 'hard-case' families, the final link in the process of monopolising had now been firmly secured in the education of all the other children. Compulsory payment and compulsory consumption had become mutually strengthening monopoly bonds and the pattern of schooling for the next century had been firmly set."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
---------------------------------------
"Protection of a child against starvation or malnutrition is presumably just as important as protection against ignorance. It is difficult to envisage, however, that any government, in its anxiety to see that children have minimum standards of food and clothing, would pass laws for compulsory and universal eating, or that it should entertain measures which lead to increased taxes and rates in order to provide children's food 'free' at local authority kitchens or shops. It is still more difficult to imagine that most people would unquestioningly accept this system, especially where it had developed to the stage that for 'administrative reasons' parents were allocated those shops which happened to be nearest their homes; or that any complaint or special desire to change their pre-selected shops should be dealt with by special and quasi-judicial enquiry after a formal appointment with the local 'Child Food Officer' or, failing this, by pressure upon their respective representatives on the local 'Child Food Committee' or upon their local M.P. Yet strange as such hypothetical measures may appear when applied to the provision of food and clothing, they are typical of English state education as it has evolved by historical accident or administrative expediency."
"Presumably, it is recognized that the ability in a free market to change one's food shop when it threatens to become, or has become, inefficient is an effective instrument whereby parents can protect their children from inferior services in a prompt and effective manner. If this is so, then one should expect that the same arguments of protection would in this respect point in the direction not of a free school system where it is normally difficult to change one's 'supplier' but in the direction of fee-paying where it is easier."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"This 'zoning system' [in which overcrowded good schools have enrollments limited by allocating 'catchment areas' to each school so as not to empty other schools] seems to be the gravest of all denials of parental wishes . . . Imagine the case of a retail shop which had become so relatively inefficient that customers were beginning to crowd into the premises of a rival establishment. To argue that the crowding was the inefficiency would be to confuse the 'symptom' with the 'disease.' To establish 'catchment areas' to prevent the 'crowding' would be to remove the very pressure which was working to put things right. Under such pressure the favored shop would meet the 'crowding' with extemporary measures pending plans for extension, whilst the unfavoured shops would be spurred into copying the superior service of its rival. Staff who were frustrated by their treatment by unimaginative managers in the first shop would begin to find tempting vacancies occurring in the more successful and therefore 'crowded' second shop.
"'Zoning,' on the other hand, simply freezes the system and insulates the authorities from the necessity to improve educational provision in accordance with popular wishes. In other words it is a device which, intentionally or unintentionally, prevents the wishes of parents being properly respected and as such it seems to be thoroughly opposed to the spirit of Section 76 of the 1944 Education Act."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"As long ago as the first few years of the nineteenth century it was a subject for government *complaint* that the ordinary people *had become literate.* For the government feared that too many people were developing the 'wrong' uses of literacy by belonging to secret 'corresponding societies' and by reading seditious pamphlets . . . Far from subsidising literacy, the early nineteenth-century English governments placed severe taxes on paper in order to discourage the exercise of the public's reading and writing abilities. Yet despite this obstacle, by the time government came around to subsidising on a tiny scale in the 1830s, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the people . . . were already literate. Even then the subsidies were financed from a taxation system which burdened the poor more than the rich.[7]
"Here then we have a paradox of a public managing to educate itself into literary competence from personal motives and private resources, despite the obstacle of an institution called government which eventually begins to claim most of the credit for the educational success.
[Footnote 7]: "Moreover, the effects of the subsidies to schools were probably more than offset, in the early years at least, by the continuation of the 'taxes on knowledge,' i.e. the enormous taxes on paper, newspapers and pamphlets which were not removed until the 1850s and 1860s . . . If it was seeking the *positive* neighborhood effects of education it would have been more practical for the government first to have seen to the *negative* neighborhood effects for which it was responsible; that is, it should have abolished the 'taxes on knowledge' before considering the pursuit of it. To subsidise and tax the same activity was illogical and costly."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"The rationing of school places on a geographical basis is, as the 'zoning' system implies, the most obvious and easiest criterion which presents itself to local administrators. Yet such methods are likely to secure much less social mobility that would probably occur without a system of nationalised schools. Emotional references to 'education apartheid' or 'case division' which are attributed to the persistence of a mixed system of public and private education are quite out of perspective if an adequate solution is not first offered for these present contradictions in our state system - a system which, while it is supposed to be able to put such things right, seems, indeed, to provide the most potent source of inequality."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"There is one episode in English history which more than any other seems to have impressed historians in respect to the importance of the contribution of formal education to economic growth. There is a widely held impression that from about 1867 technical progress was more sluggish in Britain than in America and Germany. In particular the efficiency of the British iron and steel plants was thought to compare unfavourably with those of Germany . . . Lyon Playfair, one of the Enlgish jurors at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 . . . drew parliamentary attention to the fact that at this exhibition the Germans and other continentals had run away with most of the industrial prizes, a result markedly different from the 1851 Great Exhibition when Britain had apparently been supreme in these respects. Playfair, a professor of chemistry, expressed his firm conviction that it was the efficient German state schools with their scientific curricula which were largely responsible for Germany's improved position. By comparison, he thought, Britain was manifestly negligent in adapting itself to the complex needs of the new scientific age. As a conspicuous example of this deficiency, Playfair cited the case of a building erected at Glasgow with iron girders imported from Belgium. There girders, he explained, were cheaper because the Belgians had applied chemical analysis to the limestone and ore used in pig iron production. Playfair's kind of testimony had perceptible influence on Parliament, and state support for higher technological and scientific education soon followed and coincided with the general intervention in education was was already gathering force after 1870.
"Despite its long-standing influence with historians, Playfair's diagnosis was, in retrospect, unsatisfactory . . . [I]nnovation suffered from defective institutions where were the responsibility not of entrepreneurs but of the state. Thus subsequent investigation showed that it was *the patent laws* which accounted fro the use of Belgian girders in Glasgow which Playfair referred. The Belgian chemical process was common knowledge among English Entrepreneurs but they were prevented from using it because although the patent was in the hands of only one English producer the law did not compel a patentee to exploit his patent.
"As for scientific advances in steel, it was an Englishman, not a German, whose invention was of most consequence. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, who discovered how to make steel out of phosphoric ore in 1875, was an English police court clerk and had conducted his experiments in the backyard of a small suburban house. As a matter of fact this invention redounded to the advantage not of the English but of the Germans for it created a gigantic German steel industry which would not have been possible without it. The Germans were able to use the invention not because they were more fore-sighted or had impressive state schools but simply because the invention enable them at last to exploit their own ores, which were phosphoric . . . Gilchrist Thomas's invention . . . was the product neither of formal state nor full-time education, nor even of a government research department. His invention was developed by ordinary firms before company taxation was increased to help pay for new and centrally directed services that successive governments have felt themselves obliged to finance."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"As for scientific advances in steel, it was an Englishman, not a German, whose invention was of most consequence. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, who discovered how to make steel out of phosphoric ore in 1875, was an English police court clerk and had conducted his experiments in the backyard of a small suburban house. As a matter of fact this invention redounded to the advantage not of the English but of the Germans for it created a gigantic German steel industry which would not have been possible without it. The Germans were able to use the invention not because they were more fore-sighted or had impressive state schools but simply because the invention enable
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"The innovation of steam printing in the 1830s caused revolutionary cost reductions in the production of newspapers, which then began steadily to increase their sales despite the restrictive taxes. The most rapid increase in newspaper sales, therefore, did not come until after the removal of the taxes; the advertising duties were removed in 1853, the stamp taxes in 1855 and the excise taxes on paper in 1861. That a mass newspaper-reading public was already in existence well before 1870 is now firmly acknowledged by specialist writers."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"The evidence of Mr Coode showed how, in his district, ordinary parents were ready to use the goods schools and to withdraw their custom from the bad. But similar reports came from other Districts and the Newcastle Commission in its overall reference to parents declared:
"'they prefer paying a comparatively high fee to an efficient school to paying a low fee to an inefficient one. . . . There can be little doubt that a school which combined high fees with a reputation for inefficiency would soon lose its pupils.'
"On this evidence it follows that there was a built-in mechanism ensuring that inefficient schools were already being weeded out. Parents were their own inspectors and, compared with official ones, they were not only much more numerous but exercised continuous rather than periodic check. Moreover the sanction exercised by the parents was of much more financial significance to a school than was an unfavourable inspector's report. For if parents withdrew their children, the school lost not only the government capitation grants but the parents' fee payments as well."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"It is difficult not to conclude from such a serious verdict that, in some ironic and tortuous way, the need for compulsion in the fixing of a statutory school-leaving age is designed to meet not the negligence of typical parents but the tardiness of local authorities to keep up with parental enthusiasm."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"On the quantity of education the [New York Superintendent's] Report of 1836 asserted:
'Under any view of the subject, it is reasonable to believe, that in the common schools, private schools and academies, the number of children actually receiving instruction is equal to the whole number between five and sixteen years of age.'
"The fact that education could continue to be universal without being free and without compulsion seems to have been readily acknowledged."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
----------------------------------------
"The campaign for free schools [in New York] seems to have originated in the teachers' institutes. These were first held in 1843, and they received legislative recognition in 1847 . . . For the year ending 1866, the year before their abolition, the rate bills were still yielding the significant sum of $790,025. Parents of ordinary means, therefore, were still directly buying education for their children in New York State a century ago, an education which, to repeat, although almost universal, was not yet compulsory.
"Whatever the attitudes of a minority of negligent or poor families, there is no systematic evidence to show that average parents, as distinct from public-school teachers and administrators, preferred the method of paying for schooling through increased taxes to that of the rate bill system . . . With the passing of the Free Schools Act of 1867 the rate bills (fees) were finally abolished . . .
"It must be remembered that there remained one area of discretion for customers of education; they still possessed the freedom to restrict their consumption. This meant, for instance, that in those areas where the public supply was inferior, and where the new public monopoly removed any hopes of quick improvement, it was likely that some parents would want to exercise their remaining freedom by removing their children from school at an earlier age than in those areas where better-quality teaching existed. Still bearing in mind our economic theory of politics, it is interesting retrospectively to 'predict' the responses of school suppliers in such circumstances. Especially since public money was distributed to the schools and their staffs in proportion to the numbers in attendance, we should expect that the kind of agitation that would next have been undertaken by the income-maximising teachers, managers, and other officials, especially those of average or less-than-average ability, would have been a campaign for an education that was compulsory by statute. The historical evidence is fact compatible with such 'prediction.' Serious agitation for compulsory attendance built up very soon after the success of the free school campaign of 1867 . . .
"Thus, while before 1867 the prevailing argument had been that the main reason for lack of attendance had been the rate bills, after 1867, when these had been abolished, and when was was considered to be bad attendance persisted, the new contention was the parental indifference was the main trouble . . . The Compulsory Education Act was in fact passed in 1874. And interestingly enough, after several years of operation this Act was declared ineffective. The Superintendent of 1890, asking for yet more legislation, complained that the existing laws were still not reaching the hard core of truant cases, those associated with dissolute families . . . But whatever the fate of the children of the 'hard-case' families, the final link in the process of monopolising had now been firmly secured in the education of all the other children. Compulsory payment and compulsory consumption had become mutually strengthening monopoly bonds and the pattern of schooling for the next century had been firmly set."
-E.G. West, Education and the State
---------------------------------------
June 22, 2019
Refund everyone their tax and let parents decide how we educate our children. We would get a better outcome.
November 14, 2020
Why is the government role in the education industry any more intricate than the government role in the kitchen utensil industry or the lawn maintenance industry: an original assignment of title and a stable system of contract law? This "Why?" question has three interpretations:
1. The Historical "Why?" What motivated government actors initially to extend government control into the education industry?
2. The welfare-economic "Why?" What do children, parents, potential providers of education services, and taxpayers get from a State (i.e., government, generally) operation of schools that they would not get from a voucher-subsidized competitive market in education services or from an unsubsidized, minimally-regulated competitive market in education services?
3. The Political Science "Why?" What motivated today's political decision makers to maintain this system?
Edwin West's _Education and the State_ considers all of these questions, with the Historical "Why?" receiving most attention. West's research indicates that most children of factory laborers learned to read before the State subsidized attendance at school or implemented direct State operation of schools.
Elsewhere ("Education Vouchers in Principle and Practice: A Survey", the World Bank _Research Observer_ , Feb.-1997) West suggests that the "public goods" argument justifies subsidy and regulation, at most, not direct State operation of schools.
Perhaps West decided that an assessment of variations on school choice (e.g. open enrollment, charter schools, tuition vouchers, education tax credits, education savings accounts, subsidized homeschooling, Parent Performance Contracting) would have distracted readers from his historical thesis. For another day.
West alludes to considerations (which today go by the name "public choice") that motivate action by government actors to maintain the system. John Lott finds that, while some market-oriented industrial democracies (e.g., Belgium, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmank, England, Ireland, the Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Taiwan) subsidize schools outside the system of government-operated schools, totalitarian countries (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Cuba, China) uniformly compel attendance at a State-monopoly school system.
Milton Friedman, known for voucher support, said that West persuaded him that State attrntion devoted to the education was a waste of resources. Friedman came to see vouchers as a stepping stone toward a complete retreat from the education industry.
Interested readers will find a more extended consideration (i.e., rebuttal of standard arguments) of the welfare-economic "Why?" in Sheldon Richman, _Separating School and State_, and Andrew Coulson, _Market Education: The Unknown History_.
1. The Historical "Why?" What motivated government actors initially to extend government control into the education industry?
2. The welfare-economic "Why?" What do children, parents, potential providers of education services, and taxpayers get from a State (i.e., government, generally) operation of schools that they would not get from a voucher-subsidized competitive market in education services or from an unsubsidized, minimally-regulated competitive market in education services?
3. The Political Science "Why?" What motivated today's political decision makers to maintain this system?
Edwin West's _Education and the State_ considers all of these questions, with the Historical "Why?" receiving most attention. West's research indicates that most children of factory laborers learned to read before the State subsidized attendance at school or implemented direct State operation of schools.
Elsewhere ("Education Vouchers in Principle and Practice: A Survey", the World Bank _Research Observer_ , Feb.-1997) West suggests that the "public goods" argument justifies subsidy and regulation, at most, not direct State operation of schools.
Perhaps West decided that an assessment of variations on school choice (e.g. open enrollment, charter schools, tuition vouchers, education tax credits, education savings accounts, subsidized homeschooling, Parent Performance Contracting) would have distracted readers from his historical thesis. For another day.
West alludes to considerations (which today go by the name "public choice") that motivate action by government actors to maintain the system. John Lott finds that, while some market-oriented industrial democracies (e.g., Belgium, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmank, England, Ireland, the Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Taiwan) subsidize schools outside the system of government-operated schools, totalitarian countries (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Cuba, China) uniformly compel attendance at a State-monopoly school system.
Milton Friedman, known for voucher support, said that West persuaded him that State attrntion devoted to the education was a waste of resources. Friedman came to see vouchers as a stepping stone toward a complete retreat from the education industry.
Interested readers will find a more extended consideration (i.e., rebuttal of standard arguments) of the welfare-economic "Why?" in Sheldon Richman, _Separating School and State_, and Andrew Coulson, _Market Education: The Unknown History_.
April 14, 2019
I requested National Library to copy that book's Contents.(because I can't find any shop in Japan)
October 12, 2021
People acting together to organize the provision of education for their children until the state stepped in and outlawed it.
June 28, 2025
The best on the subject.
Read
September 23, 2010Education and the state: a study in political economy by E. G. West (1970)
April 4, 2017
16/20
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews