General Problems of the Economics of Education

Abstract

Among the factors of production there are two — labour and entrepreneurial ability — which lend themselves to improvement by education in the widest sense, including training. Education

• (a) makes people more receptive to inventions and innovations;

• (b) promotes the division of labour and the use of machinery;

• (c) permits increasingly advantageous combinations of factors of production as compared with those in which the human factors are of lesser quality;

• (d) makes it possible for any new technical discovery to be brought into operation with little or no delay;

• (e) promotes, both in the domestic economy and on an international scale, a far-reaching mobility of labour and of entrepreneurial ability;

• (f) ensures that those individuals who are responsible for making major technical, economic and political decisions possess the width of knowledge and the breadth of view, which, associated with a high moral sense, enable them to avoid potentially dangerous mistakes.