Draft Chapters on Education and Corporate Law for the Forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism

The education chapter is written by Williamson Evers, and the corporate law chapter by Robert T. Miller.

I previously posted about my draft chapter on "Land-Use Regulation" for the forthcoming forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Classical Liberalism (edited by Richard Epstein, Liya Palagashvili, and Mario Rizzo). It is now available on SSRN. Two other draft chapters for this book are also now up on SSRN: "Education," by Williamson Evers (Director of the Center on Educational Excellence at the Independent Institute), and "Classical Liberalism and Corporate Law," by Robert T. Miller (University of Iowa).

Here's the abstract for the education chapter:

This chapter contends that classical liberal reform of K–12 and higher education would restore liberty and efficacy to all participants. It discusses the pros and cons of public and private provision of K–12 education. It describes the movement from highly local control to increased centralization. The article discusses how the organizational format of K–12 education came about historically, with particular emphasis on the influence of millennialism and its secular successor Progressivism. It shows that Progressivism in educational policy was also influenced by the example of Prussia. The chapter describes teacher-union power and discusses in particular the cases of African American education and Catholic schools. It examines the classical liberal K–12 reforms of pluralism, demonopolization, and parental choice.

Section 3 lays out higher education's array of subsidies and its poor incentive structure. The government is quite often inserted between colleges and students. As with K–12 education, the chapter discusses how the institutional organization of higher education came about historically. It relates what classical liberals have said about professorial tenure. It portrays the increasingly illiberal milieu in institutions of higher learning. The section proposes removing direct subsidies and relying mainly on student tuition payments.

The chapter offers a great overview of both libertarian/classical liberal critiques of conventional government-controlled education, and internal disagreements among libertarians over education policy (e.g.—between those who advocate total privatization and those who support state-subsidized school vouchers). If you want a relatively short but thorough summary of libertarian perspectives on education, this is the place to go.

If I have a reservation, it's that I wish the author had paid more attention to the argument that government control and/or funding of education is needed to increase voters' political knowledge. Voter knowledge of government and public policy is a public good that the market is likely to underprovide. This is an important standard rationale for state intervention in education. I offer some reservations about it in Chapter 7 of my book Democracy and Political Ignorance, and in a more recent book chapter. But the topic is, I think, due for a more extensive reconsideration.

I cannot say much about the corporate law chapter, because it is too far removed my areas of expertise. But it seems a valuable overview of its topic, as well.