British aristocrat Robert Lowe, the first Viscount Sherbrooke, supported state intervention in education throughout the 1860s for a novel reason: Democracy demanded it - an argument he advanced with his mischievous assertion that the aristocracy needed "to educate its masters." But he never imagined that state-supported education would be either universal or compulsory - or, most absurd of all, free. He proposed that state subsidies be offered to schools that demonstrated excellence in teaching the "three r's."
As it happened, Britain's landmark Education Act of 1870 went further - but not by much. It divided the country into 2,500 school districts and established 2,500 public boards to govern them. It authorized these boards to assess the need for more schools and to use state funds to fill the gaps. Whether public or private, though, schools would still be financed primarily by parents' fees. In either school system, the state would pay the tuition only of the poor.
As it turned out, the reform bill's most enduring consequence was the establishment of an obdurate bureaucracy - and the inadvertent nationalization of education. Within seven years, the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, in his day job as a school inspector, could lament the calamitous increase in costs. It was absurd, he wrote, that the cost of educating a single elementary school student in London should have risen to three times the cost in Paris. "It cannot," he protested, "be right." He denounced school board bureaucrats as "scientific educationists in Utopia." He chastised them for "pitching too high" for "salaries and administration."
We now live with the exhausted legacy of profligate state spending on education - most dramatically, at the moment, in the rebellion of state legislators against education monopolies, closed-shop unions and pension-privileged teachers in the United States.
Wisconsin's rebellion will inspire further resistance - or should. (In one particularly ludicrous example of excess, New York City now pays 4,000 union-protected teachers, all deemed incompetent, full-time salaries not to teach.) In Canada, the provinces have kept the peace only through the expediency of public debt: We prefer to let our children grow up and pay retroactively. Prohibited from running deficits, most states do not have this "pay later" privilege.
The irony is that education never needed to be bureaucratic or monopolistic, not in the 19th century, not in the 21st - an assertion proved by the meticulous research of a remarkable academic: Edwin West, the English economist and historian who spent much of his teaching career at Carleton University. Driven from English universities by left-wing ideologists in the 1960s, he fled to Carleton in 1970. He died 10 years ago, at 79, internationally honoured as a distinguished scholar.
In a memorial, a friend once described the totalitarian tendencies of the decade when Prof. West published (in 1965) his classic Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy. Radical students at the University of Kent routinely shouted Prof. West down, beating their desks with their shoes, Khrushchev-style - a state education at its most ridiculous.
His heresy was his assertion that the government takeover of education in Britain merely expropriated the progress that had been made without state intervention. "When the government made its debut in education, it jumped on the saddle of a galloping horse." By 1833, 85 per cent of Britain's children could read and 53 per cent could write - an elementary-school literacy rate, Prof. West noted, not far off the U.S. rate in the 1970s. (As for the poor, think of Charlotte Brontë's little orphan, Jane Eyre, at Lowood Institution.)
Indeed, the percentage of Britain's GDP spent on education was the same in 1833 as it was in 1965, the difference being that parents stopped paying when the state started. For all practical purposes, the great education reform act simply displaced private schools and parochial schools with government schools: The only way to "fill gaps" was first to create them.
Prof. West's study of 19th-century education showed that, by 1858, more than 2.5 million British children (from a population of 19.5 million) attended school voluntarily - essentially the same ratio as in Prussia, where education was compulsory, free and state-directed. Now, a century and a half later, public school bureaucracy thrives only by compelling parents who prefer private schools to pay twice for the privilege. This, as Matthew Arnold said, is not right.