The Wealth of Nations_ Books 4-5 - Adam Smith [21]
Smith’s preference was probably for the classical programme of physics, moral philosophy and logic.156
It was Smith’s contention, as we have seen, that the beneficiary of a service should be expected to pay for it. Clearly, education, whether elementary or advanced, confers a benefit upon the individual. But there is also a benefit to the state. Smith had argued in Book II that the fixed capital of any society must include
the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during this education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is capital fixed and realised, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so they do likewise of that of the society to which he belongs.157
Smith also noted, on political grounds, that
An instructed and intelligent people besides are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. They feel themselves, each individually, more respectable, and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors, and they are therefore more disposed to respect those superiors. They are more disposed to examine, and more capable of seeing through, the interested complaints of faction and sedition, and they are, upon that account, less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government. In free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favourable judgment which the people may form of its conduct, it must surely be of the highest importance that they should be not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously concerning it.158
Smith’s position as to payment was necessarily somewhat ambiguous.
The expense of the institutions of education and religious instruction is beneficial to the whole society, and may, therefore, without injustice, be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society. This expense, however, might perhaps with equal propriety, and even with some advantage, be defrayed altogether by those who received 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.159
It seems likely that Smith would have supported a combination of a modest private, and a more significant public contribution over the whole education system. This brings us once again to the issue of induced efficiency. In terms of elementary education, Smith supported the establishment of schools on the Scottish model, ‘where children may be taught for a reward so moderate, that even a common labourer can afford it’, and commented, in a characteristic passage, that the master should be ‘partly, but not wholly paid by the publick; because if he was wholly, or even principally paid by it, he would soon learn to neglect his business’.160
But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Smith’s argument is the emphasis which he gives to the performance of the university teacher, and his insistence that income should always be related to the capacity to attract and to sustain student numbers:
In some universities the salary makes but a part, and frequently but a small part of the emoluments of the teacher, of which the greater part arises from the honoraries or fees of his pupils. The necessity of application, though always more or less diminished, is not in this case entirely taken away. Reputation in his profession is still of some importance to him, and he still has some dependency upon the affection, gratitude, and favourable report of those who have attended upon his instructions; and these favourable sentiments