E. G. West

While the state, to some extent, has always had its fingers in education, its role was initially minimal. Prior to the wholesale takeover of education by government, parents typically paid about half their kids' tuitions directly, while the other half was made up in local taxes. Education was mostly a private enterprise. The tireless research of historian E.G. West shows that the earliest movements at the state level to increase education funding were meant to address only the perceived need of those living far from city and village life in small pockets of rural poverty.

A home-schooled child is independent, free-thinking, questioning, and hostile to artificial constraints—exactly the kind of person who might one day begin to question the need for what education historian E.G. West called "a growing educationist bureaucracy and a protection-seeking teaching profession." ... [I]t's interesting to note that before the introduction of compulsory education laws in the United Kingdom (according to E.G. West), "there was a near-universal system of private fee-paying schools, and the majority of parents were using it."

Each issue of The Region has carried an interview with a leader from within the Federal Reserve or with someone whose work or ideas have been of interest to our policymakers. In planning this issue, we decided that Adam Smith, who many consider the father of modern economics, would make a perfect interview ...
Professor West, who received his doctorate in economics from London University, will have two special American editions of earlier works published in the near future by the Liberty Fund: Education and the State (1970) and Education and the Industrial Revolution (1975).