An even closer analogy is provided by present arrangements for children who are mistreated by their parents

Extreme cases could be handled by special provisions in much the same way as is done now for housing and automobiles. The advantage of imposing the costs on the parents is that it would tend to equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size. 1

Whether it can be justified on quite different grounds is a question that will be discussed later in this paper

Differences among families in resources and in number of children – both a reason for and a result of the different policy that has been followed – plus the imposition of a standard of education involving very sizable costs have, however, made such a policy hardly feasible. Instead, government has assumed the financial costs of providing the education. In doing so, it has paid not only for the minimum amount of education required of all but also for additional education at higher levels available to youngsters but not required of them – as for example in State and municipal colleges and universities. Both steps can be justified by the “neighborhood effect” discussed above – the payment of the costs as the only feasible means of enforcing the required minimum; and the financing of additional education, on the grounds that other people benefit from the education of those of greater ability and interest since this is a way of providing better social and political leadership.

Government subsidy of only certain kinds of education can be justified on these grounds. To anticipate, they do not justify subsidizing purely vocational education web sites which increases the economic productivity of the student but does not train him for either citizenship or leadership. It is clearly extremely difficult to draw a sharp line between these two types of education. Most general education adds to the economic value of the student – indeed it is only in modern times and in a few countries that literacy has ceased to have a marketable value. Yet it is equally clear that the distinction is a meaningful one. For example, subsidizing the training of veterinarians, beauticians, dentists, and a host of other specialized skills – as is widely done in the United States in governmentally supported educational institutions – cannot be justified on the same grounds as subsidizing elementary education or, at a higher level, liberal education.

The qualitative argument from the “neighborhood effect” does not, of course, determine the specific kids of education that should be subsidized or by how much they should be subsidized. The social gain from education is presumably greatest for the very lowest levels of education, where there is the nearest approach to unanimity about the content of the education, and declines continuously as the level of education rises. But even this statement cannot be taken completely for granted – many governments subsidized universities long before they subsidized lower education. What forms of education have the greatest social advantage and how much of the community’s limited resources should be spent on them are questions to be decided by the judgment of the community expressed through its accepted political channels. The role of an economist is not to decide these questions for the community but rather to clarify the issues to be judged by the community in making a choice, in particular, whether the choice is one that it is appropriate or necessary to make on a communal rather than individual basis.

And much vocational education broadens the student’s outlook

We have seen that both the imposition of a minimum required level of education and the financing of education by the state can be justified by the “neighborhood effects” of education. It is more difficult to justify in these terms a third step that has generally been taken, namely, the actual administration of educational institutions by the government, the “nationalization,” as it were, of the bulk of the “education industry.” The desirability of such nationalization has seldom been faced explicitly because governments have in the main financed education by paying directly the costs of running educational institutions, so that this step has seemed required by the decision to subsidize education. Yet the two steps could readily be separated. Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on “approved” educational services.