The sovereign's oldest obligation

The Hill reports that early childhood education has become one of the rare areas where governors of different parties are working together rather than pulling their constituents in opposite directions. A political philosopher of my disposition reads that sentence and feels, if not quite hope, then at least recognition. The question of public instruction has always been the clearest test of whether those who govern understand the difference between a short-term interest and a durable one.

In the Wealth of Nations I made an argument that has been too often overlooked by those who borrow my name for other purposes: the division of labour, great engine of prosperity though it is, tends to confine a working person's understanding to the narrow repetition of a single task. A man who spends his entire life driving eighteen nails into the same spot on the same board becomes, in time, very skilled at driving nails — and very little else. He loses the habit of reflection, the capacity for civic judgment, the very qualities that make him not merely an instrument of production but a citizen. The remedy I proposed was public education, funded by the state, universal in reach. Not because I distrusted the market in general, but because this was precisely the case where the market, left alone, would undersupply what the nation required.

Early childhood education is the most powerful form that investment can take. The evidence accumulated since my time — and here I speak by inference, not recollection — suggests overwhelmingly that the years before formal schooling are when the intellectual and moral foundations are laid most firmly. A sovereign who waits until a child is ten to invest in her mind has already conceded much of the ground. The governors who are acting earlier are, whether they know my argument or not, acting consistently with it.

What strikes me about The Hill's account is the bipartisan character of this movement. I was never a partisan creature. My interest was always in the institution — what framework produces the honest outcome? When the institutional question is asked correctly, it often turns out that the answer does not depend on which faction holds office. Early childhood investment is a public good in the precise sense: its benefits are diffuse, they accrue over decades, they fall partly on people not yet born, and no private merchant can capture enough of the return to make the investment profitable on his own account. That is the definition of a matter the sovereign must address.

I would caution, however, against self-congratulation. The agreement of governors is encouraging; the durability of the funding is what matters. Public investment in education has a long history of being the first casualty when a revenue shortfall demands easy cuts. The moral case — that a child denied early education is denied the foundation of her liberty as surely as if she were denied bread — must be made continuously, because the counter-pressure of narrow fiscal interest never rests. The invisible hand, I remind those who invoke me carelessly, operates only within a framework of institutions that must themselves be built and maintained. Education is among the most load-bearing of those institutions. The governors are doing their duty. The question is whether their successors will remember why.