Michael Sanderson. Education and Economic Decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. viii + 124 pp. $19.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-58842-3; $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-58170-7.
Reviewed by David T. Mitchell (Department of Economics, University of Maryland-Baltimore County)
Published on EH.Net (December, 1999)
The education of an economy's workforce can influence its performance in diverse ways ranging from the productivity of its farm and factory workers to the ability of its scientists and engineers to develop and diffuse new technologies to the entrepreneurial and managerial capabilities of its business leadership. While the protean nature of education makes it an attractive candidate for explaining economic performance it also makes it problematic for the historian to pin down its actual role in specific situations. The problems involved can range from controlling for unobservable native ability factors at the individual level to deciding how to enter education in an aggregate production function at the macro level.
In the case of the British economy's relative fall from its Victorian zenith over the last century, deficiencies in the British educational system have often been invoked as contributing factors. From Alfred Marshall to David Landes, critics of late Victorian economic performance have noted the failure of Britain to develop a system of formal technical training on the same scale of Germany. However, defenders of British education such as Sydney Pollard and Roderick Floud have maintained that the British use of on-the-job training to develop technical skills was rational given the alternatives.
Michael Sanderson undertakes in the volume under review to survey the debates that have occurred among "those who would emphasize or deny education's contribution or culpability for Britain's diminished economic state." (p.2). The volume itself is one in the series New Studies in Social and Economic History published by Cambridge and of which Sanderson himself is the general editor. Sanderson is a prominent authority on the history of the relation between education and the economy in Britain since the industrial revolution. He has written important work on the role (or lack thereof) of literacy in textile workforce of Lancashire during the industrial revolution, on the growing involvement of British universities in industrially relevant scientific and engineering work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on the failure of Britain to develop extensive secondary level technical training in the twentieth century.
Sanderson begins with a very brief introduction surveying in just over a page the evidence for sustained British relative decline in performance over the past century while acknowledging a parallel rise in absolute levels of prosperity. At the outset, he explicitly avoids a survey of general explanations of Britain's decline, choosing instead to focus specifically on what role education may have played in decline. He then turns in the first full chapter of the book to the advent of universal mass schooling and literacy that occurred in Britain between 1870 and 1914. While this can generally be seen as a positive aspect of Britain's educational performance during this period, Sanderson notes signs of future problems in subsequent educational development with the reluctance of educational authorities to support either training in technical courses or higher grade education more generally as follow-ups to the provision of universal primary education during this period.
Of the remaining six chapters, four focus primarily on technical and vocational education, and this primarily at the secondary level. One persistent theme Sanderson notes in British educational policy, whether in the Victorian and Edwardian periods covered in chapter two, the inter-war period covered in chapter five, or the postwar period covered in chapter six, is the reluctance both of government educational policy makers to support the expansion of secondary technical training and of employers to hire technical graduates.
Sanderson's other central theme is the failure of the British educational system to provide adequately for upward mobility of abler children of working-class parents. In chapter four on Victorian and Edwardian elite education and in Chapter seven on higher and public school education in recent decades, Sanderson argues that despite increasing efforts of universities and elite schools to develop more relevance for the requirements of industry such as engineering and business education, too little was done in either period to recruit able people of humble origins. He argues that this exclusion has entailed a great waste of talent insofar as mediocre individuals of privileged background have been able to buy their way into the superior segments of the British educational system.
Another theme sounded throughout is the excessive emphasis in British education on self-evidently "useless" knowledge as "mind-trainingly liberal" at the expense of practical technical and vocational training. Thus, Sanderson clearly assigns culpability to the British educational system over the past century for contributing to economic decline. He does so in an articulate way while generally acknowledging and stating fairly and accurately the arguments of those whom defend the economic performance of Britain's educational system.
However, in a few passages, treatment is not as even handed as it could have been. In the first chapter on elementary education, Sanderson takes a negative, dismissive view of the Revised Code of 1861, which based parliamentary grants to elementary schools on student examination results. In doing so, he makes no mention of respected, mainstream educational historians such as John Hurt and David Sylvester who have argued that the Revised Code made a positive contribution by sustaining ongoing increases in parliamentary funding for education. In the penultimate sentence of the book, he cites approvingly the statement of Simon Szreter that education is "fundamental and essential for the promotion of economic growth" (p.107), giving no mention to those, such as the present reviewer, who have questioned the underlying premise of indispensability in such statements (see Mitch 1990). But these are exceptions to Sanderson's generally balanced coverage.
Some would probably question Sanderson's assessment of the importance and magnitude of education's contribution to British economic decline. A good deal of Sanderson's case is based on the virtues he espouses of technical education and implicitly of the importance for on-going economic vitality of the manufacturing sector. He provides no direct support for these views and makes no mention of opposing perspectives such as that of Philip Foster in his important piece, "The Vocational School Fallacy in Development Planning." In making his case, Sanderson relies heavily on Germany as a benchmark, noting its much more extensive provision of formal technical and vocational training, its much greater absolute numbers of scientists and engineers than Britain, and in the later twentieth century, its higher scores on internationally comparable math tests. There is an element of circularity to Sanderson's argument here. He ultimately seeks to explain how much of England's loss of economic superiority to Germany can be explained by educational deficiencies. Yet he ends up making the case for Britain's educational deficiencies based on the fact that its educational system was different from and by some measures behind Germany's. However, as Sanderson at points acknowledges (and this returns to the issue of indispensability noted above), an economy may face a wide continuum of economically viable educational strategies and the most appropriate one may vary according to a country's particular circumstances. One can note here the contrast between the emphasis on formal education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the U.S. educational system compared with Germany's emphasis on vocational training during a period when by many accounts the U.S., as well as Germany, was overtaking Britain in economic performance (see Hansen 1998).
In accounting for Britain's failure to provide a sufficient total level of education and under-investment in technical and vocational education, Sanderson assigns part of the blame to inadequate government support, noting the failure of any coherent national policy to develop. Barnett (1999) in his recent review of Sanderson's book observes a similar feature. However, one might argue that in regard to higher education, Britain has suffered from too much centralization of authority with a resultant stifling of entrepreneurial responses to emerging training opportunities. A more pluralistic institutional structure in British higher education might have produced more responsiveness to economic demands, arguably a strength of U.S. higher education.
Sanderson reserves his harshest criticism for British employers both for their apathy about developing a system of technical education and for failing to provide job openings suitable for the training received by the relatively few technical graduates who were produced. Critics will reply, as Sanderson himself acknowledges, that complaints of deficiencies in working training in the absence of employer demands for such training raise the question of what Sanderson and other advocates of providing such training know that private employers at the time did not-the McCloskey "if you're so smart" issue. Indeed, in chapter 3, Sanderson notes that those who have defended Britain's provision of technical training, have pointed to the lack of demand by employers for same. (pp. 32, 36). The problem Sanderson perceives is that employers, because of their business culture, were accustomed both to a system of on-the-job acquisition of skills via apprenticeship or related methods and to an over-emphasis on "useless mind-extending" liberal education with a resultant apathy over "useful" technical qualifications.
But the claim that employers have been making misjudgments about the educational qualifications of their workers raises the question of whether employers making bad decisions about educational qualifications are not likely to have been making further misjudgments regarding other aspects of their businesses at least as critical. In other words, the root problem here would seem to be that of entrepreneurial failure or even a more deeply rooted conservative business culture unable to adapt to changing technological circumstances.
This brings one back to Sanderson's stated intention at the outset of his book to avoid any general consideration of sources of economic decline but to focus only on the role of educational factors. A basic problem here is whether the protean nature of education fundamentally precludes Sanderson's understandable desire to delimit the scope of his study. A wide variety of explanations of economic decline can be seen as involving education in some respect. And it would seem difficult to establish the role of education in decline without specifying the more general explanations of economic decline that are to be considered. Thus both static problems of resource misallocation and more dynamic ones of developing undesirable comparative advantage patterns in an increasingly integrated world economy could be seen as stemming from under-investment in overall levels of education and from investing in inappropriate types of education. And problems of entrepreneurial failure have often been blamed on a complacency and stodginess inculcated by English Public Schools and Oxbridge.
To be fair, Sanderson touches on a number of the aspects involved in possible general explanations of decline, whether they be comparative advantage patterns or entrepreneurial drive. But at a number of points, his discussion could benefit from more reference to the relevant general explanation of decline involved. Indeed, his discussion of the Matthews et al (1982) findings on the contribution of education to British economic growth based on growth accounting analysis is misleading. Sanderson interprets the positive contribution of education to growth from 1855 onwards that Matthews et al report as supporting defenders of British education. As long as there was some expansion of British education, which no one disputes, it has to be the case that the contribution of education in a growth accounting analysis would be positive. But the issue for assessing possible educational failure is how much higher growth rates could have been if more suitable levels or direction of educational investments had been made, or to use Sanderson's phrase, if Britain had actually pursued "missed opportunities" regarding education. These missed opportunities are not examined in the Matthews et al analysis of British education.
During the 120 years covered in Sanderson's survey, the role education played in particular occupations and sectors of the economy probably changed considerably. And further changes occurred in how young people initially entered the labor market, in the role of the school in this transition, and in how careers developed. Yet the book only briefly hints at such changes, noting, for example, that an increase in educational qualifications became manifest during both the First and Second World Wars.
To a large extent, the issues raised here really lie in the literature that is being surveyed and in the complexity of the topic that Sanderson has undertaken to examine. Although he leaves much unanswered about the contribution of education to British economic decline, Sanderson has still written a very worthwhile and helpful little volume. Britain's educational system has been subject to major changes at all levels during the 120 years this work considers. The existing literature on educational developments in Britain during this period is very fragmented. Previous works have tended to focus on only one specific aspect of education and for at most a few decades. It is very useful indeed to have these developments for the educational sector as a whole surveyed so concisely and in so authoritative and lucid a fashion for the entire 120 years under consideration. Sanderson's book provides an excellent overview of educational developments as they relate to the economy in Britain between 1870 and the present.
David Mitch is the author of The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
References:
Barnett, Corelli. 1999. Review of Michael Sanderson, Education and Economic Decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s in The Times Literary Supplement August 6, 1999, pp.4-5.
Foster, Philip J. 1965. "The Vocational School Fallacy in Development Planning" in C. Arnold Anderson and Mary Jean Bowman eds., Education and Economic Development (Chicago: Aldine), pp.142-166.
Hansen, Hal E. 1998. "Caps and Gowns: Historical Reflections on the Institutions that Shaped Learning for and Work in Germany and the United States, 1800-1945." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Wisconsin.
Hurt, John S.1971. Education in Evolution. Church, State, Society and Popular Education 1800-1870. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
Matthews, R.C.O., C.H.Feinstein, and J.C. Odling-Smee. 1982. British Economic Growth 1856-1973. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mitch, David. 1990. "Education and Economic Growth: Another Axiom of Indispensability?" in Gabriel Tortella ed., Education and Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution. Valencia: Generalitat Valencia.
Sylvester, David. 1974. Robert Lowe and Education. London: Cambridge University Press.
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David T. Mitchell. Review of Sanderson, Michael, Education and Economic Decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s.
EH.Net, H-Net Reviews.
December, 1999.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3670
Copyright © 1999, EH.Net and H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission questions, please contact the EH.NET Administrator (administrator@eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2850; Fax: 513-529-3309). Published by EH.NET.