When the market cannot teach itself into existence

The Hill reports something unusual in the present age of political warfare: governors of opposing parties are advancing early childhood education without the customary ideological whiplash visited upon their constituents. One is tempted to call this a curiosity. I call it a belated recognition of an old principle.

In The Wealth of Nations I argued that the division of labor, while the great engine of productive power, carries a hidden cost. The man whose whole life is spent performing a small number of simple operations has no occasion to develop his judgment, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The remedy I proposed was not sentiment but institution — public support for the education of common people, so that they might participate in civic and commercial life as rational agents rather than as instruments.

The case for early childhood investment is, by inference from that same logic, even stronger. The years before a child enters formal schooling are, by all accounts that have reached me through those who study such things, among the most formative for the development of the very faculties — attention, language, the capacity for sympathy — that make a person fit to exchange, to contract, and to govern their own affairs. A market economy is downstream of a society capable of trust. Trust is learned young.

The merchants and manufacturers who lobby most vigorously against public expenditure would do well to consider that the skilled and honest workforce they depend upon does not spring fully formed from nature. It is produced — slowly, expensively, over many years — by families, communities, and, when those fall short, by public institutions. To neglect that production is to run down the capital stock of the nation in the most literal sense.

I should note what the framework of my argument does not imply. Public investment in education is not a license for the sovereign to prescribe the content of minds. The danger of any public institution is that it becomes a vehicle for the narrow interest of those who administer it rather than those it is meant to serve. The proper discipline is accountability: transparent outcomes, parental choice where it can be made real, and the same scrutiny we would apply to any public expenditure. The institutional question is always: who watches the watchers?

That governors of different parties can agree on this matter suggests that, beneath the surface of faction, there survives some recognition of a commonwealth — of goods that no private party will supply in sufficient quantity because their benefits are diffuse and their costs immediate. Defense, justice, roads, and the education of the young: these were, in my accounting, the proper business of the sovereign. The modern Shard sees no reason to revise that list. He sees every reason to insist that the framework governing public education be as honest, as competitive, and as consumer-facing as we would demand of any private market.