Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Primary and secondary education 141
Positive externalities
The citizenship model of education emphasizes the positive externalities of education—
the benefits that accrue not to the individual directly but to society as a whole. These may
take the form of economic benefits such as reduced dependence on social services and
reduced crime rates or they may take non-economic forms such as moral development,
cultural sophistication and sensitivity, capacity for interaction with members of the
community of diverse social and economic back-grounds, and informed participation in
democratic institutions and community life. Because individuals cannot internalize all of
the benefits of their education, there will be chronic and systemic under-investment in
education in a pure market environment. 10 Consequently, government intervention is
likely necessary to induce individually rational students and parents to choose to devote
resources appropriately to primary and secondary education.
Citizenship values
Any society must take seriously the task of maintaining a cohesive community based on
its core values. 11 Hence, the relationship of education to the promotion of social
solidarity. However, in liberal democratic societies, it is generally unacceptable for the
state to determine coercively how parents should raise their children. Nevertheless, the
basic values of respect for individuals, tolerance and the rule of law must be maintained
as necessary conditions for the preservation of our society. 12 Thus, parents who choose to
educate their children in intolerance and violence present a particularly pointed problem.
That is, a completely unfettered market in education may leave society without one of the
most important means—public education—by which individuals are currently introduced
to a shared culture in which tolerance of diversity is promoted as a positive value. The
potential absence of these values in an unconstrained regime of private market education
provision arguably introduces scope for some form of government intervention to ensure
that such values are introduced to children.
Modes of government intervention
The current primary and secondary education systems in many industrialized
democracies are highly heterogeneous. Despite this complexity, the system does admit of
some stylized factual assertions about the provision of educational services which, at
least, in the United States and Canada, entails a significant role for government-provided
education (typically provided by municipal levels of government with varying degrees of
financing and oversight emanating from higher levels of government), with a relatively
small but stable proportion of students attending private schools. In the United States, for
instance, between 10 and 12 percent of students have attended private schools for the past
several decades. 13 Private primary and secondary schools in the United States are
predominantly sectarian in orientation, with 84.3 percent of private school students
attending religiously-oriented schools in 1992. 14 Private primary and secondary schools
are markedly less common in Canada. In 1998–9, only 297,798 Canadian students (or