Educational slowdown and public intervention in 19th-century England: A study in the economics of bureaucracy

Abstract

This paper1 presents analysis and statistical measurement of the effect of government intervention upon nineteenth-century British educational growth. By net effect is meant the stimulus to the public system minus the damage to private schools. The first part applies hypotheses from the modern economics of bureaucracy for an explanation of the strategy of the growing Victorian Education Department. It documents the way in which its discretionary behaviour led to the crowding out of private schools. The second part presents a simple economic model that illustrates the full potentialities of the crowding out effect, and the consequences for total (public and private) educational expenditure. The third and final section estimates the share of primary education in the national income 12 years after the major intervention: the Forster Act of 1870. It then compares this proportion with estimates for 1833 and 1858 and with estimates for other European countries and America. The total evidence is finally brought to bear on two questions: first, how did Britain's education effort in the industrial revolution year of 1833 compare with other European countries at similar income levels? Second, did education grow slower or faster in the remaining part of the century after the 1870 Act?2