Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Economics of Education in British Perspective- A Review Article

1974; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/144694

1548-8004

Jesse Burkhead, Jerry Miner, Mark Blaug, John Vaizey, Keith Norris, John Sheehan, Patrick Lynch, Manuela Ferreira Leite,

Education Systems and Policy

The rediscovery of the agent is now about 15 years old, and while American economists might like to think that the Renascence occurred on this side of the Atlantic, in fact the British economists were in the field as early and have probably made as many contributions to the conglomerate study of human resources-human capital-economics of education-educational planning-educational finance as have Americans-at least on a per capita basis. Since a great many of the problems to which the British economists have addressed themselves have been identical to those that have captured the concern of American economists, it might be hoped that these two volumes coming from major representatives of opposing viewpoints would, together, provide a definitive perspective on the of the British art. Disappointingly, this is not quite the case. The Blaug volume comes close in that it is a personalized interpretation of the neoclassical approach to the economics of education. It is, however, limited in scope. Blaug's primary focus is on educational planning and his coverage, while not as elementary as the phrase in the title, An Introduction... , would suggest, does not extend to the fringes of the subject. The Vaizey treatise is even less of a state of the art since it is largely a compendium of other research studies and data, presented almost exactly as found in the original sources, with relatively little critique except where Blaug or other neoclassicists are criticized. As a result, despite an unmistakable anti-neoclassical tenor, the volume fails to provide a clearcut presentation of the conceptual content and policy implications of an approach to the economics of education, associated with Vaizey, which rejects the usefulness of the notion of human capital. Both volumes are international in flavor, with almost painstaking reference to American, British, and continental writing, and, it might be added, with no slighting of the authors' own works. Although the two volumes obviously have much in common in terms of