II. THE DIVISION OF LABOR AND ITS REQUIRED PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS

The main public institutions required to facilitate the division of labor, Smith argues, are institutions protecting “justice,” which he defines in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as the protection of each citizen’s “life and person,” each citizen’s “property and possessions,” and each citizen’s “personal rights, or what is due to him from the promises of others” (Smith [1759] Reference Smith, by and Macfie1982, p. 84).Footnote ³ When these “sacred laws of justice” (TMS, p. 84) are protected, against both foreign and domestic aggression (WN, p. 687), we have a “well-governed society” (WN, p. 22), and, Smith argues, people will then begin not only to “truck, barter, and exchange” (WN, p. 25) but also to divide the labor required for production. Thence wealth—which Smith defines as the “degree in which [citizens] can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniencies, and amusements of human life” (WN, p. 47)—will begin to increase.

Yet Smith also argues that division of labor can have deleterious consequences: “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur” (WN, p. 782). According to Smith, the division of labor can have quite negative effects indeed for such a person: “He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become” (WN, p. 782). Smith continues at some length describing the negative effects of division of labor on workers. They can become incapable “of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of life”; lose the ability “of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment”; become “altogether incapable of judging”; and become “incapable of defending [their] country in war” (WN, p. 782). Their “gross ignorance and stupidity” leads them to become “mutilated and deformed” and thus liable “to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition” (WN, p. 788), and they even come to suffer from “cowardice,” which itself leads to further “mental mutilation, deformity, and wretchedness” (WN, p. 787).Footnote ⁴

Smith claims that this is the unfortunate “state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it” (WN, p. 782; italics supplied). One remedy Smith suggests that government should consider to offset these harmful consequences is public provision of education. Smith suggests that an education in the “three most essential parts of literary education, to read, write, and account” (WN, p. 764) would combat the “mental mutilation” to which division of labor can lead, and he further suggests: “The publick can facilitate this acquisition [of reading, writing, and accounting] by establishing in every parish or district a little school, where children may be taught for a reward so moderate, that even a common labourer may afford it” (WN, p. 785).

III. A REVIEW OF THE SCHOLARLY CONSENSUS

It is on this basis that most commentators claim that Smith endorses public provision of education. Kenneth Arrow (Reference Arrow and O’Driscoll1979, p. 160), for example, claims that Smith recognizes “the need for universal primary education.” Andrew Skinner (Reference Skinner, Copley and Sutherland1995, p. 83) claims that Smith supported not only public provision of primary education but indeed “a compulsory program of higher education” (italics in the original). Samuel Fleischacker (Reference Fleischacker2004, pp. 10, 235) claims that Smith “recommends that the public should help support educational institutions for the poor” and, further, that Smith proposes “to require some level of education of all children.” Emma Rothschild (Reference Rothschild2001, p. 98) claims that, for Smith, the “circumstances of commercial society impose the need for government expenditure on education” and that thus Smith advocates “government-supported education”; indeed, Rothschild (Reference Rothschild2001, p. 112) claims that Smith offered a “plan of universal public education.”

Craig Smith (Reference Smith, Montes and Schliesser2006a, p. 308) portrays Smith as advocating “a compulsory system of education” and even a “universal system of education” (Reference Smith2006b, p. 93), while Eric Schliesser (Reference Schliesser, Montes and Schliesser2006, p. 343) suggests that Smith wanted “mandatory education of the young in philosophy.” Steven Medema and Warren Samuels (Reference Medema, Samuels and Young2009, p. 309) include subsidizing general education “to counteract what [Smith] saw as the mind-numbing effects of the division of labour” as a “duty” of the Smithian government. Dennis Rasmussen (Reference Rasmussen2008, pp. 107, 110) argues that Smith supported “compulsory and state-supported education aimed expressly at the poor” and “advocates universal public schooling in commercial societies, largely at government expense.” Jack Russell Weinstein (Reference Weinstein2013, pp. 216, 217) claims that for Smith “the sovereign has no small stake in encouraging individuals to be educated,” and that the “sovereign’s job is to ensure that all people have access to at least a minimum schooling.” Lisa Hill (Reference Hill and Hanley2016, p. 329) argues that Smith proposes “a publicly funded, compulsory education system,” a system she describes as “something a social democrat might propose” (see also Hill Reference Hill2007, p. 347; Reference Hill2020, p. 177). Jerry Evensky (Reference Evensky and Hanley2016, p. 84) suggests that Smith recommends as a state duty the “provision of a basic education for working-class citizens” because it can “ameliorate the mind-numbing effect of their work.”

Amartya Sen (Reference Sen and Hanley2016, p. 291) argues that Smith advocates “specific roles of the state to cater to the well-being and freedom of the less fortunate,” and that one of these roles is “school education,” for which Sen claims that Smith “wanted much greater use of state resources for public education.” Sen elsewhere (Reference Sen, Berry, Paganelli and Smith2013, p. 585) claims that Smith calls for “public services, such as free education.” And two recent biographers of Smith concur: Nicholas Phillipson (Reference Phillipson2010, p. 234) writes that Smith supported “a system of compulsory parochial education,” and Jesse Norman (Reference Norman2018, p. 220) discusses Smith’s “proposals for public education.”

One could cite many other sources making similar claims.Footnote ⁵ Those cited, however, perhaps suffice to indicate the scholarly consensus that Smith advocated government-funded education, at least at the lower-school level. The main reasons such scholars support this interpretation are: first, Smith identifies and describes deleterious consequences from division of labor, and it stands to reason that he would endorse state intervention in the form of compulsory education to remedy this “market failure” (Skinner Reference Skinner, Copley and Sutherland1995); second, Smith claims that these negative consequences will inevitably ensue for workers “unless government takes some pains to prevent it” (WN, p. 782); third, Smith claims that “[f]or a very small expence the publick can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education” (WN, p. 785; italics supplied); and fourth, Smith argues that education is “beneficial to the whole society” (WN, p. 815), not only to the students themselves who receive the educational instruction.

An examination of Smith’s discussion of education, however, especially in light of the larger argument he presents regarding his third duty of the state to provide “certain publick works” (WN, pp. 687–688), reveals that Smith entertained the idea of public provision of education and reviewed its potential benefits, but he offered reasons to be skeptical of its implementation and ultimately refrained from positively advocating it.

IV. EDUCATION IN THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

In TMS, most of Smith’s discussions of education involve illustrations of the effects of our environment on us, not formal education. He distinguishes between “vulgar education” and “refined education,” for example, when discussing the extent to which we care about “the happiness or misery of others” and are drawn to adopt an “impartiality between ourselves and others” to “correct the inequalities of our passive feelings” for others (TMS, p. 139). “Education” here is what our peers, upbringing, environment, and culture have brought to bear on us.

Elsewhere, Smith argues that the normally developed adult maintains a healthy respect of the “general rules” that mark out propriety or impropriety, and he claims that all of us have at least some respect for these rules (TMS, p. 160). But he explains that the normal course of “education” occurs when the “general rules of conduct” “have been fixed in our mind by habitual reflection” (TMS, p. 160). “Education” here refers to our environment and culture, not formal education (Forman-Barzilai Reference Forman-Barzilai, Montes and Schliesser2006). Instead of indulging “furious resentment,” persons possessed of proper reverence for the judgment of an impartial spectator exercise “self-command” to temper their anger and, if they have been raised properly, these more moderated sentiments are “confirmed by education” (TMS, p. 164).Footnote ⁶

The Theory of Moral Sentiments also contains a lengthy condemnation of European colonialism and the slave trade in which Smith extols the virtues of the conquered and enslaved and derides the character of the conquerors and enslavers. He writes of the “heroic” virtues of Native Americans and the “magnanimity” of Africans who have been “cruelly” conquered and enslaved by European “wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from nor of those to which they go, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished” (TMS, pp. 206–207). Smith’s description of the character of Native Americans and Africans refers to their “heroic and unconquerable firmness, which the custom and education” that their circumstances “demand of” them (TMS, p. 207). Here Smith’s use of “education” is a process by which one develops character traits in reflection of and response to one’s circumstances, which comports with his larger argument in TMS that moral sentiments, and the internalized character they inform, arise by an interactive process whereby one seeks mutual sympathy of sentiments with those in one’s community, responds to others’ behaviors and judgments, and over time hones one’s own behaviors and judgments into habits, principles, and ultimately one’s character.Footnote ⁷

Elsewhere in TMS, Smith uses “education” as a synecdoche for something like “cultivation.” He writes that the “principles of the imagination, upon which our sense of beauty depends, are of a very nice and delicate nature, and may easily be altered by habit and education” (TMS, p. 200). He also discusses the practice, common at the time among wealthy Scottish families, of sending children abroad to be educated in England, France, and elsewhere. Smith discourages the practice: “Do you wish to educate your children to be dutiful to their parents, to be kind and affectionate to their brothers and sisters? put them under the necessity of being dutiful children, of being kind and affectionate brothers and sisters: educate them in your own house” (TMS, p. 222). He goes on to explain what he sees as the advantages of domestic “education,” which amounts, for him, to cultivation of the right behaviors, sentiments, and sensibilities.

Here as elsewhere, Smith’s sense of “education” is informal. It does not consist in taking classes, sitting for examinations, writing papers, or earning degrees. It is typically unorganized and uncoordinated, consisting instead in placing oneself (or one’s children) in the company of the proper groups of others, exposing oneself to their sensibilities and judgment, and then adapting one’s behaviors and sensibilities as appropriate. Because, Smith thinks, we all naturally desire mutual sympathy of sentiments with others, we will therefore naturally be drawn to adapt our behavior to approximate the norms and conventions of those peer and other groups with which we frequently associate. So, this “education” in sentiments comprises the placing of oneself (or one’s children) in the right company and then letting nature take its course. Even if our placement among others is not intentional, we will still be “educated” by those others—though perhaps not in the directions we might, upon reflection and deliberation, have preferred.

Smith’s discussions of education in TMS reveal that Smith usually uses the term “education” to refer to informal development of one’s sensibilities and character through interactions with others in one’s community as one seeks to satisfy one’s natural desire for mutual sympathy of sentiments. All such education, Smith thinks, will affect the kinds of persons we become, and for that reason his argument’s implication is that we should select the influences, particularly the peer influences, on oneself and one’s children with care (Weinstein Reference Weinstein2013).

Nowhere in TMS does Smith discuss public provision of education or a duty of the state to provide or oversee education. The absence of such discussion seems significant. Given how consequential Smith believes our interactions with others are for shaping and forming our intellectual habits, our moral sensibilities, and our character, and how substantially he believes this “education” influences who we become and are, Smith could not but be concerned about ensuring that we get it right. His numerous and repeated discussions throughout TMS demonstrate that this is an abiding concern of his (Griswold Reference Griswold1999; Hanley Reference Hanley2009). Yet he does not advocate public provision of education.

The closest he comes in TMS to discussing an explicit role for public authority in education is when he suggests that a local “civil magistrate” may “oblige parents to maintain their children, and children to maintain their parents, and impose upon men many other duties of beneficence” (TMS, p. 81). Yet Smith suggests that the magistrate’s duty is to require parents to “maintain” their children, not that the magistrate himself should do it, or that others in the community should be required to provide for this maintenance.Footnote ⁸ In any case, Smith expresses caution regarding even this alleged duty on the part of the magistrate: “Of all the duties of a law-giver, however, this, perhaps, is that which it requires the greatest delicacy and reserve to execute with propriety and judgment” (TMS, p. 81). Because it involves interposing oneself into the private lives and households of others, and because he typically has little of the detailed, intimate knowledge of the individuals involved and their particular circumstances, the magistrate should proceed with caution and reserve. Indeed, Smith believes that the danger is that an overzealous civil magistrate might “push it too far,” which can become “destructive of all liberty, security, and justice” (TMS, p. 81).

Despite its importance, then, Smith does not believe, at least in TMS, that education is something that should be the state’s responsibility, or even the responsibility of local public authorities. Indeed, in the one place in TMS where Smith mentions “public education,” he rejects it: “Domestic education is the institution of nature; public education, the contrivance of man. It is surely unnecessary to say, which is likely to be the wisest” (TMS, p. 222).

V. THE DUTIES OF GOVERNMENT IN THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

It is in WN that Smith discusses not just the general effects of education on the development of our sensibilities, judgment, and character but the effects of various examples of governments undertaking to address education. Under the heading of “expences of the sovereign or commonwealth” (bk. V, ch. I), Smith discusses three kinds of such expenses: those related to defense, those related to justice, and those related to public works and public institutions. In the final category, Smith addresses expenses related to “institutions for the education of youth” and to “institutions for the instruction of people of all ages.”

VI. PUBLIC PROVISION OF EDUCATION

That brings us to the final species of public works Smith entertains, namely, education. It is important to see Smith’s discussion of education in light of his foregoing discussion of other putative public works (Ortmann Reference Ortmann1999). In each case, Smith suggests that proper alignment of incentives is crucial for encouraging wise and efficient use of both powers and resources, and in each case he suggests that private provision, administration, and maintenance—and, failing that, local provision, administration, and maintenance—enhance proper alignment of incentives. According to Smith, central-government involvement is to be considered a last resort, for two principal reasons. First, a country’s lawgivers can have little if any of the local knowledge required to make wise decisions about how best to expend others’ scarce resources. Second, when spending other people’s money instead of one’s own, one faces little incentive to discipline one’s decisions to spend the money well. The former leads to “innumerable delusions” (WN, p. 687) and to dangerous “folly and presumption” (WN, p. 456); the latter leads to the “negligence and profusion” of wasteful expenditure (WN, p. 741).

When Smith comes to discussing education, then, we might expect him to apply the same principles—and indeed he does. He argues against “publick endowments” of “schools and colleges,” for example, on the grounds that they “have necessarily diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers” (WN, pp. 759–760).Footnote ¹² If a teacher is paid out of endowments, instead of from “the honoraries or fees of his pupils,” he is not rewarded for working hard and not punished for idleness—so he inclines rather toward “negligence and idleness” (WN, p. 813). “It is in the interest of every man,” Smith writes,

Smith is quite insistent on this point. “In every profession, the exertion of the greater part of those who exercise it, is always in proportion to the necessity they are under of making that exertion. This necessity is greatest with those to whom the emoluments of their profession are the only source from which they expect their fortune, or even their ordinary revenue and subsistence” (WN, p. 759). In other words, if we do not have to work hard, many of us will not.

If we wish to summon from others, or from ourselves, the best they or we are capable of, how can we do it? According to Smith, two things are required. First, we must introduce competition: “where the competition is free, the rivalship of competitors, who are all endeavouring to justle one another out of employment, obliges every man to endeavor to execute his work with a certain degree of exactness” (WN, p. 759). Second, as hinted in the previous quotation, we must also face risk of loss. Guaranteed salaries either from government revenues or from endowments do not elicit the same level of concentrated effort, because those receiving such salaries receive them whether they work hard or not. Only when we face competition and risk of loss are we incentivized to apply ourselves and to summon our best efforts.

This dynamic applies, according to Smith, to human beings in all walks of life. As he goes on to argue, that includes teachers and educational institutions. The combination of tenure, faculty governance, and an endowment at Oxford University, for example, results, for Smith, in this lamentable but predictable consequence: “In the University of Oxford, the greater part of the publick professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching” (WN, p. 761).

Smith proposes to remedy this situation by introducing competition and risk of loss. He suggests that allowing students “to chuse what college they liked best” and to take their money (including their tax payments) with them would introduce competition and generate the solicitousness and attention to service from teachers that risk of loss induces (Leathers and Raines Reference Leathers and Raines2007). As it is, however, because teachers are paid either by the government or out of endowments, the “discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters” (WN, p. 764). Smith’s argument would predict that comparatively better instruction would result from competition and risk of loss, whereas comparatively poorer instruction would result from their absence. And Smith believes that is exactly what one finds: “Those parts of education, it is to be observed, for the teaching of which there are no publick institutions, are generally best taught” (WN, p. 764).Footnote ¹³

VII. THE PROBLEM EDUCATION MIGHT SOLVE

At the beginning of WN, Smith portrays the division of labor in exclusively positive terms. Indeed, its placement in the first chapter of the entire work suggests that the division of labor is, for Smith, the fundamental key for explaining why some places are wealthy and others are not—that is, it explains the “wealth of nations.” In the final part of WN, however, Smith has a very different story to tell about workers and the effects of division of labor. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same”—he may here have in mind his own earlier pin-making example, in which, as he explained, “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head,” and so on (WN, p. 15)—“has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur” (WN, p. 782).

Smith characterizes this as a result of “the progress of the division of labour” (WN, p. 781), but it may be not just progress but its theoretical limit. The unfortunate results he identifies—that the worker “becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become,” etc. (WN, p. 782)—ensue, Smith tells us, for the “man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations” (WN, p. 782; italics supplied). One might object that Smith exaggerates, since presumably most workers have at least something of a life outside work and would thus also do things other than the few simple operations required by a day job. Nevertheless, Smith describes this wretched state at length, so, even if he is exaggerating to make a point, Smith seems intent on claiming that division of labor risks serious negative consequences for workers.

In light of the potential damage to workers’ psychological states, and even to their characters and virtue, that Smith claims division of labor can precipitate, Smith’s suggested remedy seems underwhelming. Because Smith argues that these negative consequences will ensue “unless government takes some pains to prevent it” (WN, p. 782), one’s expectation would be that he would go on to describe something like the “publicly funded, compulsory education system” Lisa Hill describes (Reference Hill and Hanley2016, p. 329). Moreover, one would expect that this education would be designed to target precisely the effects Smith himself identifies as resulting from extreme division of labor. Thus, one would expect that he would advocate education that would enlarge and expand workers’ understanding, would cultivate their judgment, would wake them from their “drowsy stupidity,” and would summon, train, and augment their “knowledge, ingenuity, and invention” (WN, p. 783).

What kind of education does Smith entertain? He suggests that “the most essential parts of education” are “to read, write, and account,”Footnote ¹⁴ and he offers that the “publick can facilitate this acquisition [of these three abilities] by establishing in every parish or district a little school” (WN, p. 785). In the previous several pages Smith discussed other subjects that were commonly taught in the universities and secondary schools of his day, and he extols some of them—such as astronomy and botany, on the grounds that they “necessarily excite the wonder” and “naturally call forth the curiosity of mankind” (WN, p. 767)—but those subjects of inquiry and instruction do not find their way into what he entertains as prospective requirements for compulsory education.

But what he considers is, in fact, even less than that. He suggests that the real cost of educating a person to read, write, and account is so small “that even a common labourer may afford it” (WN, p. 785), implying that it could be paid for by the students themselves (or their parents), even among the poor, not by the public. In any case, he insists that teachers should be “partly, but not wholly paid by the publick” because if the teacher “was wholly, or even principally paid by it, he would soon learn to neglect his business” (WN, p. 785). Smith’s reasoning here is what we have encountered repeatedly: he wants to ensure that incentives are aligned properly. Teachers, like everyone else, will naturally want to conserve their resources and will thus give most of their attention to the principal source of their income.Footnote ¹⁵ If that source is public funds, then they will pay attention to the people who make such funding decisions—in other words, to those holding political offices—instead of to students. If the source is a permanent endowment, then their concern will turn to themselves, to their own “ease,” as Smith believes he observed at Oxford (WN, pp. 760–761). The only way to get teachers to pay attention primarily to students, Smith thinks, is to have the students pay them—and to have the proportion of their pay coming from students exceed what they receive from other sources.

The remedy that Smith entertains to counteract the deleterious consequences he describes as resulting from division of labor is thus to have partially subsidized primary schooling. Not college or university education, and not even secondary education: only what is required to teach students to read, write, and account, which is likely only primary schooling. And, not fully paid by the public, and not even mostly paid by the public: its expense must be paid “principally” by the student. Is this minimal account of public schooling what Smith then, finally, advocates?

Not quite. He writes: “For a very small expence, the publick can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education,” namely to read, write, and account (WN, p. 785; italics supplied). It would be only “a very small expence,” he insists, because it is only less than half what is required to teach children to read, write, and account—that is, less than half the requisite primary schooling. The italicized portion of the above quotation leads some commentators to conclude that Smith in fact endorses public provision of this compulsory education.

Smith argues that the benefits from education accrue not only to the individual but to the society: “The state, however, derives no inconsiderable advantage from their instruction. The more they are instructed, the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition” (WN, p. 788); “[a]n instructed and intelligent people besides are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one” and are, moreover, “more respectable” (WN, p. 788). When Smith concludes his discussion of education and summarizes his position on whether the public should provide or subsidize it, he reiterates this benefit to society: “The expence of the institutions for education and religious instruction, is likewise, no doubt, beneficial to the whole society, and may, therefore, without injustice, be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society” (WN, p. 815). This claim would prevent public provision of education from violating Smith’s “negative” conception of justice, which protects against harm or injury and requires extraction of resources only to compensate or indemnify victims of harm or injury. Because, as he here claims, everyone in society would benefit from widespread education, there is no zero-sum extraction involved in public provision of education: it is not students benefiting at the public’s expense, but, rather, a positive-sum transaction in which everyone benefits.Footnote ¹⁶

And yet, Smith here also makes the following claim, which he offers as a principle framing the conclusions he draws from his entire discussion of public provision of “publick works”: “It is unjust that the whole society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society” (WN, p. 815). Such government redistribution of wealth would run afoul of Smithian justice by benefiting some at the expense of others. How does Smith apply this principle to education? Immediately following the sentence claiming that the expense of education “may, therefore, without injustice, be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society,” Smith writes: “This expence, however, might perhaps with equal propriety, and even with some advantage, be defrayed altogether by those who receive the immediate benefit of such education and instruction, or by the voluntary contribution of those who think they have occasion for either the one or the other” (WN, p. 815). Three points in this sentence should be emphasized.

First, Smith claims that private provision of education enjoys “equal propriety” with public provision, but he then asserts that private provision might be recommended “even with some advantage.” Smith’s discussion of “the Expences of the Sovereign or Commonwealth” anticipates the reason for the latter claim. Public provision of education risks misaligning incentives, as Smith had suggested in his discussions of the administration of justice and of infrastructure. Requiring the expenses of education to instead be defrayed by those who benefit “immediately” from them—that is, the students themselves—disciplines educators to tailor their offerings to student needs and to look for innovations that enhance the effectiveness of their instruction, and it disciplines students to seek out the best educational return on the investment of their scarce resources.

Second, Smith refers to those “who receive the immediate benefit of such education and instruction” (italics supplied). The immediate beneficiaries of education and instruction are students. Smith has argued that they are not the only beneficiaries—society also benefits—but they are its immediate, and perhaps even its primary, beneficiaries. Smith’s use of the qualifier “immediate” seems intended to distinguish between the students and “the whole society” mentioned in his previous sentence. That distinction between the immediate beneficiaries and the secondary beneficiary might explain why Smith believes students should pay more than half the expense of education themselves: this would be appropriate if they receive more than half the benefits.

And third, the “advantage” Smith claims is involved with private provision of education is, for him, sufficiently strong to suggest its being “defrayed altogether by those who receive the immediate benefit of such education and instruction” (WN, p. 815; italics supplied). Earlier Smith had argued that any public subsidy of education should not only be local but also that it should be less than half the total expense. Here he suggests that it might, in fact, be entirely private. This represents an even more non-interventionist position than what he had earlier entertained—which itself was already strongly non-interventionist. Smith’s position would thus appear to be that, whereas earlier he had argued that partially subsidized primary education could be justified, in fact, as he here suggests, that was an upper bound.

When Smith finally arrives at discussing the “expense of the institutions for the education of youth,” he begins: “The institutions for the education of the youth may, in the same manner, furnish a revenue sufficient for defraying their own expense. The fee or honorary which the scholar pays to the master naturally constitutes a revenue of this kind” (WN, pp. 758–759). When Smith writes “in the same manner,” he is explicitly linking this discussion of the costs of education to his previous discussions of the administration of justice and infrastructure, which, as we have seen, he argued were often better accommodated by user fees, private property rights, and localized control on a model of governmental subsidiarity. All these measures helped to align the incentives correctly, Smith claimed, to encourage people to build, fund, and provide only what was truly necessary, and to use only what they truly needed; in both cases, wasteful expenditures of scarce resources would be minimized.

Thus, in Smith’s opening of his discussion of the expenses related to education, his first proposition is that the costs of education should be paid by students themselves (Drylie Reference Drylie2020b). The “fee” that the “scholar” (or student) should pay to the “master” (or teacher) “naturally constitutes a revenue” for this purpose. If we then turn to the conclusion of Smith’s discussion, we find Smith summarizing the position for which he has just argued at length as holding that the “expense of the institutions for education … might perhaps with equal propriety, and even with some advantage, be defrayed altogether by those who receive the immediate benefit of such education and instruction” (WN, p. 815). In his closing summary, Smith argues that because education is “no doubt, beneficial to the whole society,” it “may, therefore, without injustice, be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society” (WN, p. 815). Smith’s mention of justice here is technical, given his specific criterion of injustice from just two paragraphs earlier: “It is unjust that the whole society should contribute towards an expense of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society” (WN, p. 815). Thus, benefiting oneself, or one group, at the expense of another is an infraction of Smithian “justice,” which comports with the definition of justice he had given in TMS. That education might benefit not one group at the expense of another but rather benefit “the whole society” is what protects funding it out of general taxation from a charge of injustice.

And yet we see that, despite Smith’s allowance of this possibility, he immediately retreats by suggesting that private provision of education might be recommended “with equal propriety,” and indeed “even with some advantage.” The most natural interpretation of these passages would seem, then, that while Smith allows the possibility of public funding of education (because it would not offend justice and could provide general benefit), nevertheless he believes there is reason to prefer the alternative route of private provision.

VIII. CONCLUSION: A DUTY TO DONATE?

Smith presents significant worries about the effects on workers of division of labor and considers public provision of education to address those worries, and he suggests that the “publick can facilitate this acquisition [of the abilities “to read, write, and account”] by establishing in every parish or district a little school” (WN, p. 785). He also suggests that such “little schools” would benefit in particular the “inferior ranks of people,” who otherwise have little opportunity to “exert [their] understanding, or to exercise [their] invention” (WN, p. 782). Yet Smith also raises several reasons to be wary of public provision of education, he repeatedly extols private provision, and both in the opening and at the closing of his treatment he expresses an all-things-considered preference for private over public provision. Thus, his argument seems to indicate an inclination against public provision and a preference for private provision.

Smith’s apparent advocacy of private provision of education might seem inadequate, however, to address the deleterious consequences for workers, and especially for the working poor, that he himself identifies. Let me conclude with a suggestion regarding a way Smith might address this worry, by building on a brief but tantalizing remark he makes in the summation of his discussion of the expenses of education.

Smith argues that educational expenses may “even with some advantage” be paid altogether by the students themselves, but he adds, for the only time in his discussion of educational expenses, that these costs might also be defrayed “by the voluntary contribution of those who think they have occasion for the one or the other [i.e., for either education or instruction]” (WN, p. 815). Though Smith does not elaborate on what exactly he has in mind by “voluntary contribution,” he might be envisioning charitable donation. Such donation might come from the students themselves or from their parents. Perhaps after their lessons, students (or parents) could decide to “voluntarily contribute” to the teacher whatever they think the instruction was worth. One supposes some “higgling and bargaining of the market,” which Smith suggested was “sufficient for carrying on the business of common life” (WN, p. 49), might occur. Teachers who did not receive what they considered sufficient donation for their efforts could decide either to improve their efforts or to apply themselves to a different trade, and students (or parents) who did not believe a teacher’s perhaps “suggested donation” was worth the education or instruction they received could seek it elsewhere.

But could the “voluntary contribution” to offset costs of education also come from others? Could it come, perhaps, from private donors or charities?Footnote ¹⁷ The overarching purpose of WN is to explain not only wherein wealth consists but what its causes are, and an assumption it makes is that prosperity is a good thing. Its implied moral imperative is thus that if we can discover how to increase prosperity and alleviate the miseries of poverty, we should do so. Smith believes he has done so, and his recommendations of division of labor, trade, the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” the three duties of government, and so on are based on what he believes he has discovered would enable the generation of prosperity.

Yet consider a passage in Part VII of TMS, where Smith is discussing the degree to which other moral theories agree with his own. In his examination “Of those Systems which make Virtue consist in Propriety” (TMS, pp. 267–294), Smith considers different senses of justice employed by ancient writers. He discusses “commutative justice,” which he identifies as that which he himself employed as his “negative” conception of justice (TMS, p. 269). But he also identifies another conception, which he calls “distributive justice” and defines as doing for another what an impartial spectator “would be pleased” to see us do (TMS, p. 269). This conception of justice is closer to what Smith had categorized rather as “beneficence” than as “justice” (TMS, pp. 78–82), and Smith here calls it “proper beneficence,” which consists “in the becoming use of what is our own, and in the applying it to those purposes either of charity or generosity, to which it is most suitable, in our situation, that it should be applied” (TMS, p. 270).

Consider how this claim might apply to education. Smith’s primary justification for the division of labor and the increase in wealth to which it leads is that it enables ever more people “to enjoy the necessaries, conveniencies, and amusements of human life” (WN, p. 47). Yet as our wealth grows, what, exactly, should we do with it? Smith argues that we should engage in beneficence, indeed “proper beneficence,” which entails “the becoming use of what is our own, and in the applying it to those purposes of charity or generosity, to which it is most suitable, in our situation, that it should be applied” (italics supplied). Given that Smith has argued that education is “beneficial to the whole society” (WN, p. 815) and indeed that even “the safety of government depends” on the development of good judgment among its citizens (WN, p. 788), perhaps, then, one proper purpose of our “charity or generosity,” one “becoming use of what is our own,” is to contribute to our fellow citizens’ education.

Smith argues that as businesspeople increase prosperity for themselves and for those with whom they exchange, transact, and partner, they should invest and spend their newly created wealth in directions that an impartial spectator would approve—directions, that is, that contribute to the decency, orderliness, respectability, and good judgment of their fellow citizens (WN, p. 788). I suggest that, for Smith, one outstanding place to invest one’s wealth might be education.

The businessperson, on this view, should seek not only to create value for customers and employees but also to elevate the intelligence, the character, and the good judgment of his or her fellow citizens. Because such businesspeople would be allocating their own wealth, they would be disciplined to do so wisely and efficiently by exploiting their local knowledge and responding to natural incentives not to be wasteful or unproductive. Incentives, in this way, would be properly aligned. Smith’s argument indicates a preference that education be provided privately rather than publicly, but perhaps it could nevertheless address concerns that the poor would thereby be unable to procure the education they need by calling on those with means—including successful businesspeople—to voluntarily meet any shortfall.

Perhaps in this way Smith’s discussion of education and the remedies to the deleterious consequences of division of labor he considers might not be as inadequate as it seemed. When Smith in another context writes that “[h]onour makes a great part of the reward of all honourable professions” (WN, p. 117), perhaps that allows for a correlated moral obligation on the part of “honourable” businesspeople to dedicate their increasing wealth to “becoming” purposes that would be worthy of that honor—including combatting workers’ “mental mutilation” and elevating the education of their fellow citizens.Footnote ¹⁸ If so, then perhaps Smith offers a vision of business that could be beneficial not only materially but educationally as well.