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.

 

Comments

[Brett Bellmore]

"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."

It's unclear to me why exactly people running the government would actually WANT voters to have increased knowledge. How does this benefit them? Possibly it instead harms them, if it leads to the voters realizing that the government should actually be doing less, to understand how they're actively being harmed by government.

Government educating future voters. This seems to be the very definition of a conflict of interest. Indeed, this has long been the primary argument for privatizing education: That government run schools inevitably become indoctrination camps for statist ideology, because what other ideology would you expect the state to teach?

[Dr. Ed 2]

Brett, the term "liberal education" is supposed to mean "how to live a life of liberty" -- to train people to be good voters and good jurors.

At various times, there have been (largely populist) "good government" movements in this country where there was a shared common interest in having an educated populace. It's kinda like the "go to the church of your choice -- but chose to come to mine."

The latter was policed by none of the clergy wanting to step over the line lest the others do likewise, and their collective mutual interest in encouraging people to go to church. When there was a high school graduation prayer, it was a carefully rotated schedule of the clergy in town, each knowing they would have to sit through the prayers of the other clerics in future years so the prayers were pretty much nondenominational.

[Dr. Ed 2]

"The section proposes removing direct subsidies and relying mainly on student tuition payments."

That is EXACTLY how we got into the mess we currently are in.

ED Secretary Bill Bennett warned us forty years ago that the direct subsidy of tuition payments would only serve to inflate education expenses and it has. Subsidizing student tuition payments enables the institutions to charge whatever they damn well please without worrying about pricing themselves out of the market because they know that the government will step in to subsidize their inflated costs.

When you look at the glory days if American education, be it Horace Mann and the Normal School movement, or the Land Grant College Acts (there were 3), or even "colleges to beat the commies" in the post-Sputnik era, it was direct subsidies.