Government Failure: E. G. West on Education.

• Author: Egger, John B.
• Position: Book Review

Government Failure: E. G. West on Education

Edited by James Tooley and James Stanfield London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 2003. Pp. 198. 12.50 £, paperback.

This attractive little book provides an excellent means of introducing any reasonably independent thinker concerned about education to the work of Edwin West. The modern realities of compulsory public schooling are becoming too obvious for all but its blindest adherents to ignore, and marginal alternatives such as charter schools, vouchers, and home schooling are chipping away at the monolith. Parents and other genuinely concerned adults have been driven, often against their strongest beliefs, to skepticism about public schooling. Still, they properly want to know, What is the alternative?

That is where this high-quality paperback comes in. Readers often find facts more convincing than theory, and West skillfully uses history to illustrate not only that education was widespread before compulsory public schooling, but also that even families of modest means achieved it. The very idea of a distinction between education and compulsory public schooling is immensely powerful and revolutionary, and it is probably enough for the concerned parent to assimilate, but West goes further, arguing-with data, where feasible--that compulsory public schooling is an outrageously costly exercise in rent seeking, a negative-sum game that has enriched some and impoverished many. More important, for all this cost, it has delivered a low-quality product. To put it plainly, we are not rich and acute because of compulsory public schooling; we are poorer and more obtuse than we would have been without it.

Government Failure is a collection of trine of West's essays, spanning 1965 to 2000 (the year before he died), with a brief foreword by Sir Antony Jay, a useful introduction by coeditor James Tooley, and, as an epilogue, the script of an amusing episode of the BBC series Yes Prime Minister rifled "The National Education Service." Readers of this review almost surely "already know more about West than the typical frustrated parent mentioned earlier, but in his introduction Tooley explains why this book should appeal to both groups: its essays were either unpublished previously or, for other reasons difficult to obtain, are relatively nontechnical (lacking the statistics and mathematics found in West's academic works), and consciously avoid duplication of the specific material in West's best-known books...