Educational Expansion in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts: Human Capital Formation or Structural Reinforcement?

Abstract

Economists and educational historians have put forward two major kinds of explanations for the coincidence between the industrial revolution and the development of mass public schooling in the United States. Industrial change, some maintain, created a demand for technicians, managers, skilled workers, and highly trained professionals; the rise of public education, then, involved a relatively automatic and decentralized response to a changing market for labor. Others argue that social disorganization wrought by the manufacturing system led members of elite groups to establish and support public education as a means to ensure the stability of the social arrangements from which they profited. This article uses a wide range of data from nineteenth century Massachusetts to assess the relative merits of the two schools of thought. While both explanations are accurate in some degree, in Massachusetts at least, the actions of economic elites in the political arena did more to establish mass public education than did the demands of individuals in the educational marketplace.

Keywords: Economics of Education, Human Capital, Socialization, Skills, Industrialization, Massachusetts

JEL Classification: I21, I22, I24, J24, N61, O15