A Public Goods and Agency Approach

By anachronistically attributing the origin and growth of popular education entirely to state intervention, standard histories of state education have failed to delimit sufficiently the state's role in educational development. This paper offers a theoretically based examination of the British state's intervention in the emerging market for popular education in England during the nineteenth century. It complements conventional neoclassical analysis with recent developments from the fields of methodological individualism and " new institutional " economics to identify the specific reasons the state first became involved in mass education. The eventual national system of state-provided, free elementary schools, managed by local representative bodies and funded in part through local rates is re-conceptualized as an imperfect solution to problems inherent in achieving an optimal level of schooling in the emerging mass market for education. 1 1. Introduction: re-conceptualizing the history of state education Why did the British state intervene in the provision and consumption of primary education in the nineteenth century? 1 This study returns to the familiar issue of the state's role in education. Based in the economics of education, the theoretical model it develops examines the underlying problems that the creation of a state-mandated system of free elementary schools was intended to solve. Acknowledging the extensive market for popular education that developed prior to state involvement, it presents the establishment of a compulsory and state-mandated school system as the end result of a series of efforts to address deficiencies in market outcomes. This new perspective serves as a necessary corrective to standard narrative accounts which privilege the British state's role in educational expansion, as well as to more recent neo-liberal critiques of that view. Its conclusions are also relevant to the larger question of why modern governments have universally been so salient in the provision and governance of education. It is thus hoped that the economic model that is applied here to the particular historical case of nineteenth-century England will ultimately prove useful as an analytic tool for understanding and evaluating the role of the state in education more generally.