A REJOINDER
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1959.tb00103.x |
| Date | 01 February 1959 |
| Author | J. Wiseman |
| Published date | 01 February 1959 |
A REJOINDER
THIS comment is concerned with reiteration rather than with new
argument; Messrs. Horobin and Smyth seem to have misunderstood
the nature of my argument, and in doing
so
have obscured the impor-
tant issues of principle.
It is misleading
to
describe the purpose of my article as being to
argue ‘that, in Britain, at the present time, a severe curtailment of
government intervention in education is desirable.’ Rather, my aim was
to set out the implications of acceptance of the idea of parental freedom
of.choice in the provision
of
education, and to consider briefly how the
British system of education would need to be changed in order to accord
with that idea.
I
do not pretend that
I
am myself unsympathetic
to
greater parental freedom in this field, but my personal views are not
central to the issue.
The same choice postulate is common to much of our economic
analysis, and
I
have little doubt that Messrs. Horobin and Smyth use
it in their own teaching. It is possible, for example, to derive
from
the logic
of
choice broadly agreed conclusions about the effects of
price control. But
I
should be surprised if Messrs. Horobin and
Smyth believed it
to
follow that there should also be agreement about
the policy use of such control. My article tries to apply the same
set of ideas in a less usual context; that of
a
‘
social service.’ Econo-
mists generally seem unwilling to do this, for reasons that are not
entirely clear. The fact that other,
‘
special,’ considerations may also
be relevant to such services does not demonstrate that the logic
of
choice must inevitably be irrelevant. Further, these
‘
social services
’
are provided by a wide variety of means in different countries, in-
volving a great diversity in the nature and extent of the inhibition
of
personal choices that is involved. In such circumstances, it is hard
to
see why the choice concept, which economists use to good effect in
other contexts, should be discarded. Its value, here as elsewhere, is
as
a
means of setting out the relevant considerations for policy de-
cisions rather than in providing an unambiguous guide as to what policy
should be. In this regard, it must also
be
pointed out that there is
no need to concern oneself with some concept of a welfare (choice)
‘
ideal
’
or
‘
optimum
’-
a conception unnecessarily imported into the
present discussion by Messrs. Horobin and Smyth-in order to dis-
tinguish between a situation in which parents can make direct choices
about education and situations in which they can not.’
1
It is also perhaps not completely necessary, or even useful, to know the
views of Adam Smith. The quotation given by the authors from the
Wealth
of
Nations
would be more convincing were it not that almost any view of
the functions
of
the state could be supported by suitably-chosen quotations
from the same work.
In any case, Adam Smith
had
the first word on these matters.
I
see
no
reason to let him have the last-even in the
Scottish Journal
of
Political
Economy
!
75
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