Landed society, farm size and support for public schooling in 19th-century England

"Historical accounts of the determinants of funding for education have emphasized the role of redistributive motives. This has featured prominently in the literature based on the Engerman Sokoloff thesis on how resource endowments affect income and wealth inequality which in turn affects support for public education. A number of studies both internationally and based on regional analysis within countries have found that rising inequality is associated with declining support for public education. However, leaders of public education movements have generally emphasized the public good or external benefits of popular education rather than its redistributive dimensions. And studies for the mid-nineteenth century United States have found public externality as well as redistributive motives present as explanatory factors behind regional variation in support for public education (Beadie 2010; Stoddard 2009, 2011). The paper considers various measures of inequality in land holding as measured by the percentage of acreage in a given geographical area owned by various groups according to size of individual holdings. This paper also employs farm size as measured by the ratio of labourers to farmers as a measure of inequality or alternatively of wealth at the registration district level. In contrast to some previous studies, this paper finds a positive relationship between farm size according to this measure and various measures of support for public schooling. The suggestion will be made that that farm size is a measure of district level wealth and that the positive association between farm size and support for public schooling reflects a positive wealth effect on demanding and funding the external benefits of public schooling. One puzzling finding is that while the relationship between farm size and literacy was positive for females it was negative for males. This could be interpreted as reflecting a much stronger perceived external benefit to female education than male education however interactions with other factors were likely at work and require further examination. The paper then considers how the relationship between farm size and public schooling changed over the last half of the nineteenth century. Findings at this point suggest no marked change in the relationship between farm size and male or female literacy once results are standardized for changing means. That farm size had a positive cross sectional relationship with female literacy and negative with male literacy appears to persist between 1840 and 1885. These relationships thus don’t appear to have been reversed by an increasing importance of centralized policies in determining the variation in funding for public schooling."