Adam Smith Lives!

Education -- The debate in visual terms

At the ceremony following my son's (championship) baseball season, his coach commented that my son was "coachable".  This puzzled me somewhat -- he never seems to listen to me -- but it gave me great hope:  he's apparently teachable.  His middle name is "Casey", to reflect our Irish roots.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, political economists and other social commentators debated this:  if people are poor but teachable, education will enable them to improve their condition in life as long as the right incentives are in place.  If they were not, the problem was how to transform these people so that they might become self sustaining human beings?  The economists lined up on the side of education and incentives, while others favoured transformation.

One picture (from Punch) that illustrates the latter argument is "The English labourer's burden". Here, an ordinary-looking Englishman struggles to carry an Irishman.  The question is, might the Irishman become a self-sustaining human being if he were educated, or is he naturally unable to do so (in which case he's inherently "uncoachable".)  The physical features of the Irishman in the picture suggest the latter -- this is a man who is naturally inferior to the person who carries him. 

I object to this visual claim, and I hope I do so for more than the reason that my grandmother was a Casey.

Marshall on education

I'm not a Marshall specialist and I've recently come to disagree with him on the issue of race and hierarchy in economics (in an article with David Levy in the Journal of the History of Economic Thought).  Here's a good starting point on Marshall from the New School HET site.  But -- I'm (still) at the conference for the 2005-6 class of American Council on Education Fellows -- I can't resist posting another much-loved "education" passage.  In his Principles of Economics, Marshall wrote:

"Education must be made more thorough. The schoolmaster must learn that his main duty is not to impart knowledge, for a few shillings will buy more printed knowledge than a man's brain can hold. It is to educate character, faculties and activities; so that the children even of those parents who are not thoughtful themselves, may have a better chance of being trained up to become thoughtful parents of the next generation."

The full passage, along with the conclusion: "Towards this end, public money must flow freely" -- which he extends as well to "fresh air and space for wholesome play for the children in all working class quarters" -- are available at the Library of Economics and Liberty.  I'm not sure how far I'd go along with Marshall's conclusion but his take on our attempts to impart knowledge is humbling, and compelling!

"Cram"

For many of us, classes begin today.  I'm not teaching -- I'm doing a fellowship with the American Council on Education (ACE)-- and I miss it.  I spent much of the day reading about higher education in the US for the first ACE seminar.  But this passage from William Stanley Jevons' 1877 essay in Mind, "Cram," may be as good as anything I read today:

"It is not merely that which goes into the eyes and ears of a student which educates him; it is that which comes out.  A student may sit on the lecture-room benches and hear every word the teacher utters; but he may carry away as much useful effect as the drowsy auditor of a curate's sermon.  To instruct a youth in gymnastics, you do not merely explain orally that he is to climb up one pole, and come down another, and leap over a third.  You make him do these motions over and over again, and the education is in the exertion.  So intellectual education is measured, not by words heard, or read, but by thoughts excited." 

I have a hard copy of Jevons' Methods of Social Reform but I'm glad to see that it's online at the Online Library of Liberty.  (Is everything there?!) You can read the rest of Cram, as well as a bunch of other interesting pieces by Jevons, there.