The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

by Raghuram G. Rajan

The expanding market and its demands hit at community control. Small communities had the resources to fund and staff the common school. The high school was a different matter. In order to teach the wide variety of subjects in the depth and width required, the high school needed many teachers, an administrative staff, large buildings, a library, scientific laboratories, a gymnasium, and so on. With the large minimum scale required to provide education of the requisite quality, any new high school had to draw a large number of students to be economically viable. This had a number of implications. First, communities, especially the smaller and the more remote rural ones, often had to come together to found high schools. This immediately meant a weakening in each community’s sense of ownership and responsibility for the school. Second, the greater complexity and professionalisation of high school administration created the possibility that parental control might not be adequate to the task of monitoring the school, which gave education professionals an excuse to distance parents from school governance whenever possible. Third, the greater resources needed by even rudimentary high schools, coupled with the historic emphasis on local funding, meant that high school quality depended to a much greater extent on local wealth. Students in different areas had vastly different life opportunities because the quality of high schools varied so much. Poorer and rural communities were obvi...

Schools & local community