Tomas Cvrcek，Miroslav Zajicek. 2013. School, what is it good for? Useful human capital and the history of public education in central Europe. Working Paper 19690 . National Bureau of Economic Research
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19690
Abstract: The rise of education has featured prominently in the debate on the sources of modern long-term economic growth. Existing accounts stress the positive role of public education and the importance of political support for its provision. We argue that such an explanation for the spread schooling is probably a poor fit for many nations’ schooling histories and provide an example, using detailed data on schooling supply from the Habsburg Empire. We show that while economic development made schooling more affordable and widespread, the politics of demand for schools was not motivated by expectations of economic development but by the ongoing conflict between nationalities within the Empire. We find that public schools offered practically zero return education on the margin, yet they did enjoy significant political and financial support from local political elites, if they taught in the “right” language of instruction. Our results suggest that, for some countries at least, the main link, historically, went from economic development to public schooling, not the other way round.
摘要：教育的兴起主要集中于对现代经济长期增长源泉的讨论。现有账户强调公共教育的积极作用以及政府支持对于维持其运行的重要性。我们认为这样的解释对于很多国家学校教育扩张的历史都不是一个很合适的说辞，例如，运用哈布斯堡王朝在学校供给上的详细数据，我们说明了尽管经济增长使学校教育更便宜更普遍，学校的政治需求却并非是由经济增长的预期带来的，而是由王朝内部各民族间持续的冲突所推动。我们发现公共学校提供的边际教育回报率实际上为零，但如果它们使用正确的教学语言教授，就能从当地政府精英那里享受重大的政治和金融支持。我们的结果表明，从历史的角度来看，至少对于某些国家来说，主要的联系是从经济发展到学校教育，而不是相反。
数据来源：The Habsburg Empire
研究方法：计量回归（空间不连续回归）
Conclusions:The evidence reveals two important features of the Habsburg educational system. First, we find stronger support for the claim that economic development enabled a more extensive supply of educational facilities, perhaps through broadening of the tax base, than for the notion that economic development generated a strong individual demand for public education,，such as through raising returns to primary education. Not that the Habsburg schools failed in imparting literacy across the board–the correlations in Figure 2 are too strong for such a claim. But the curriculum also included a lot of extra material that did not generate useful human capital. Apparently, the Viennese government designed a flawed product, decreed that it be oversupplied and burdened local communities with paying for it. We have no estimate of how much dead weight loss this policy generated but we cannot find any positive effect of this policy on economic development.
Second –and closely related, the reason why economic considerations were sidelined is to be found in the politics of schooling. Political voice seems to have played a role Acco unts of Austrian political history show unequivocally that education, its extent,availability and language of instruction were highly politicized matters. We find evidence that this nationalist politics impacted educational choices made on the ground, even at the local level.
Overall, his adds up to a different picture to that painted regarding the modern rise of public education. While all the elements of the usual story – the industrialization, the public provision of schools, the political voice of important pressure groups– are present in the Austrian case, they combine in a way very different from how, for example, Go and Lindert (2007,2010) have described the rise of American public schooling. Rather than education and human capital accumulation being among the drivers of economic growth, we see how economic development provides the resources for the Habsburg Empire’s own version of “culture wars” whereby the school district elites – far from withholding public resources from education – actively subsidize that kind of schooling which corresponds to their ethnic preferences. For those who lacked political voice–in our case, the non German nationalities–the road ahead did not pass first through enfranchisement to public education and eventually to economic development but exactly the other way: economic growth allowed them to catch up (at least in some respects) in matters educational which–a generation later (and outside the scope of our paper)–led to their political self‐assertion. And while this order of causation does not in anyway refute the more traditional account, at least as it applies to the United States,for example,it highlights that the interplay of education, politics and development can be much more varied.
结论：证据揭示了哈布斯堡王朝教育体制的两大重要特征。首先，我们发现了对本文观点的更有力的支持，即经济发展能够使教育设施的供给更大量，也许是通过税基的扩大，但并不是通过一般见解中的经济发展所产生的对公共教育的强烈个人需求，比如通过提高初等教育的回报率。这并不是说哈布斯堡王朝在全面传授知识上失败了，图2中的相关性已经有力的说明了这一点，但是其课程设置还是包含了许多不产生有用人力资本的多余物。显然，维也纳政府设计了一个有缺陷的产品、判定其过度供给并让当地社区来负担此代价。我们并未估计这一政策产生了多少无谓损失但我们也没发现它给经济发展带来了任何积极影响。
其次，而且是密切相关的一点，经济考虑被边缘化的原因在于学校教育的政治性，政治声音似乎扮演着一定角色。奥地利政治历史明确显示，教育的程度、可用性和教学语言都是高度政治化的问题。我们发现的证据表明，这种民族主义政治很现实地影响着教育选择，甚至在地方层面上也是如此。
总之，这在现代公共教育的兴起上添加了一幅不同的画卷。虽然通常故事中的所有元素—工业化、学校的公共供给、重要的施压集团在奥地利案例中都存在，它们却以一种非常不同于Go and Lindert(2007,2010)在美国公立学校的兴起中所描绘的方式结合。我们看到并不是教育和人力资本积累推动经济增长，而是经济增长为凭借学区精英进行“文化战争” 的哈布斯堡王朝提供资源—非但没有从教育中减少公共资源，反而积极资助符合他们民族偏好的学校教育。对于那些缺乏政治声音—在我们的例子中，也就是非德国国籍的民族—前方的道路并没有首先通过公共教育的解放再通过经济发展而是恰恰相反，经济增长使他们（至少在某些方面）追赶上教育问题，这导致他们在政治上的自我主张。虽然这一顺序的因果关系并不反驳传统观点，但至少，比如将其应用于美国时，它突出了教育、政治和经济增长之间的相互影响是可以更加多样化的。
（By 杨帆） |
