Happy Pi Day 3.14! Did you attend a public school or a public university? If so, then you have Adam Smith to thank for that opportunity! To see why, let’s pick up where we last left off: Paragraph 50 of Article 2 of Part 3 of Chapter 1 of Book V of The Wealth of Nations. As we saw at the end of my previous Adam Smith post, Smith explores the dark side of the division of labor in that crucial paragraph. More specifically, he warns that specializing in simple, repetitive tasks can render workers as “stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” (WN, V.i.f.50) So, what is to be done? For Smith, the answer is compulsory public education, a bold and radical proposal at the time.

To see just how bold and radical Smith’s proposal is, we must go back in time — to 1776, the year The Wealth of Nations was published — when child labor was a far more common practice than it is today. In Smith’s day, children as young as five years old performed daily household chores, such as planting, feeding livestock, or mending fences, while many others were apprenticed or worked as servants. In short, the children of the common people were expected to work; their labor was necessary for family survival. [1]

Smith, however, wants to separate little children — boys and girls! — away from the watchful of eye of their parents during most of the day. Worse yet, not only does Smith want to “impose” education on all children (WN, V.i.f.54) and thus deprive parents of the labor of their children; Smith also wants force these already hardscrabble and impoverished parents to pick up some of the tab for their children’s compulsory education:

“The public can facilitate [compulsory education] by establishing in every parish or district a little school, where children may be taught for a reward so moderate that even a common labourer may afford it; the master being partly, but not wholly, paid by the public, because, if he was wholly, or even principally, paid by it, he would soon learn to neglect his business.” (WN, V.i.f.55; my emphasis)

Talk about the road to serfdom, to borrow F. A. Hayek’s wolf-cry! Whatever happened to natural liberty, laissez-faire, and “free” markets? Why is Smith so willing to disrupt people’s lives by exempting education from market forces?

To appreciate the logic of Smith’s bold and radical proposal we must first, as Smith himself does, compare and contrast the educational opportunities of two groups of children in 1776: those of “people of some rank and fortune” and those of “the common people.” (WN, V.i.f.52-53) Smith’s verdict: the children of parents of “some rank and fortune” have many opportunities to further their education, while the children of “the common people” have none:

“[The children of the common people] have little time to spare for education. Their parents can scarce afford to maintain them even in infancy. As soon as they are able to work they must apply to some trade by which they can earn their subsistence. That trade, too, is generally so simple and uniform as to give little exercise to the understanding, while, at the same time, their labour is both so constant and so severe, that it leaves them little leisure and less inclination to apply to, or even to think of, anything else.” (WN, V.i.f.53)

To remedy this educational asymmetry and counteract the dark side of the division of labor, Smith makes his bold and radical proposal. In Smith’s ideal world, not only would there be a “little school” in “every parish” (WN, V.i.f.55); parents would also be forced(!) to send their children to these schools during daylight hours, and furthermore, his proposed system of nation-wide education would be subsidized “partly” (ibid.) by the government.

But how does the Scottish philosopher justify this unprecedented (in Smith’s day) expansion in the role of government? What is so special about education? Simply put, as we have seen many times already, Smith is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. It looks like he has carefully weighed both the social benefits against the private costs of compulsory public education, and for Smith the benefits to society outweigh the costs to individual parents:

“A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, if possible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part of the character of human nature. Though the state was to derive no advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of people, it would still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether uninstructed. The state, however, derives no inconsiderable advantage from their instruction. The more they are instructed the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders. An instructed and intelligent people, besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. They feel themselves, each individually, more respectable and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors, and they are therefore more disposed to respect those superiors. They are more disposed to examine, and more capable of seeing through, the interested complaints of faction and sedition, and they are, upon that account, less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government. In free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favourable judgment which the people may form of its conduct, it must surely be of the highest importance that they should not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously concerning it.” (WN, V.i.f.55; my emphasis)

In other words, if we subsidize a “little school” in every parish for the common people and make education compulsory, we are not taking the road to serfdom; instead, compulsory public education is the road to freedom, for an educated people will be less likely to place their trust in dangerous demagogues like a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders. For Smith, education is one of the most important public works of all. Why? Because education is essential for liberty.

[1] See, e.g., Michael Schuman, “History of child labor in the United States—part 1: little children working”, Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (January 2017), https://doi.org/10.21916/mlr.2017.1